Career Pathways Research Brief No. 1
Published April 2025
This section features research that sheds light on how graduate students navigate career choices and the barriers they may face. By connecting recent research findings with students’ real experiences, each piece invites readers to reflect, take ownership of their career paths, and make informed decisions about their futures.
Pluralistic Ignorance and the Pathways We Don’t Talk About
“I want to pursue a non-academic career, but everyone else seems set on staying in academia.”
If you’ve ever had this thought, you’re not alone, and research suggests you might be misjudging your peers.
Leong, Hegarty, and Sherman (2024) examined a persistent social dynamic in graduate education: pluralistic ignorance, where individuals privately hold a belief but incorrectly assume their peers do not share it. In their study, this meant graduate students who privately valued non-academic careers assumed most of their peers still idealized academic careers.
The researchers surveyed over 300 graduate students across disciplines. While a majority privately valued non-academic careers and expressed interest in exploring diverse pathways, they also underestimated the extent to which their peers felt the same way. Most students thought others placed significantly more importance on academic careers than they themselves did.
This misperception had real consequences. Students who assumed their peers were more academically committed reported:
- Feeling more isolated in their career interests
- Less confidence in their own preferences
- A greater sense of conflict between their personal goals and perceived norms in their department
The researchers designed a simple but powerful intervention to test how these perceptions could be shifted: sharing actual peer norm data. Students were shown anonymized statistics about what other graduate students in their program valued. When students learned that many of their peers also valued careers outside academia, their own attitudes shifted—they felt less alone, more validated, and more open to exploring non-academic paths.
In their conclusion, the authors note that these findings underscore the importance of norm-clarifying interventions. Institutions and programs can help reduce misperceptions and support more informed, confident career decision-making among graduate students by making actual peer attitudes more visible. The authors suggest that even simple efforts to increase transparency about students’ career goals and values could help address the psychological barriers created by pluralistic ignorance.
Have a study or article you'd like to see featured? Let us know by sending an email to rg835@grad.rutgers.edu.
Curated by Ramazan Güngör, PhD.
Assistant Dean for Professional Development,
Outcomes Assessment and Alumni Engagement
Citation
Leong, S., Hegarty, M., & Sherman, D. K. (2024). Pluralistic ignorance and occupational choice: The impact of communicating norms on graduate students' career aspirations. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 54, 258–277. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.13028