The Prevalence of Preference Falsification

The title of this post is a nod to Timur Kuran’s book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. This book examines the disconnect between what people say they believe publicly and what they believe privately. As Kuran puts it,

The preference that our individual ends up conveying to others is what I will call his public preference. It is distinct from his private preference, which is what he would express in the absence of social pressures. By definition, preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one’s private preference.

This turns out to be an issue of some significance. Political scientists or policymakers may collect data on expressed public opinion to try to inform their own decisions, but expressed public opinion can be very different from the actual opinions of the members of the public. Something can hold broad support according to “public opinion,” yet actually be opposed by the vast majority of individual members of the public, when circumstances that create pressure for preference falsification are in place. When this happens, unpopular ideas and policies can be perpetuated by an illusory popular demand.

Recently, researchers at Northwestern University tried to get a sense of how common this phenomenon is among college students. They conducted confidential interviews with 1,452 students at Northwestern and the University of Michigan. They found that preference falsification is shockingly common:

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

They also touch on how many students engage in preference falsification on specific issues:

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors…

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud.

It’s easy to underestimate just how powerful a force the fear of social ostracism can be. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt describes an experience he had horseback riding:

There was, however, one difficult moment. We were riding along a path to a steep hillside, two by two, and my horse was on the outside, walking about three feet from the edge. Then the path turned sharply to the left, and my horse was heading straight for the edge. I froze. I knew I had to steer left, but there was another horse to my left and I didn’t want to crash into it. I might have called out for help, or screamed “Look out!”; but some part of me preferred the risk of going over the edge to the certainty of looking stupid. So I just froze.

Haidt was faced with a situation where, on the one hand, he faced the risk of almost certain death if he did nothing, and on the other hand, if he did something, people might laugh at him, and in a moment ruled by his deepest and most primal instincts, he decided the second of those two was the bigger concern. While this seems absurd in a detached perspective, it makes a certain degree of sense when examined in light of the world in which we live. We are social primates, and historically our survival has depended critically on getting along with our tribe and being held in good standing.

For the vast majority of our time as a species, social exclusion was a death sentence — and we evolved powerful social instincts that make us fear rejection and exclusion. Even when a point of view is privately held by the majority of people, this fact can remain hidden if people even worry that expressing that view will lead to them being ostracized by the community.

This is one reason why free speech is important as more than just a legal framework (though that is critical). In order to gain the benefits of free speech, open inquiry, and truth-seeking debate, the legal structures of free speech are a necessary but not sufficient condition. A culture of free speech, where it’s recognized that someone can be tragically wrong on issues of great importance while still being a good person (and that you might be such a person yourself!), and that mistaken views should be debated without shunning those who hold them, is also needed. In his book The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek was clear about how disastrous he believed central economic planning would be. But he also made clear he believed the ideas he criticized were advocated by “authors whose sincerity and disinterestedness are above suspicion.”

This isn’t to say that a culture of free speech is entirely without downside — but then again, nothing is. However, both a legal framework and a culture of free speech are the only tools that can enable a social order to break free from a socially damaging equilibrium brought on by preference falsification.

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