Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification

The more complex the environment, the less adequate is the individual’s relevant knowledge and, hence, the less he can trust signs that his routine is obsolete. This argument has a far-reaching implication: the more complex the environment, the less sensitive individual behavior is to actual environmental shocks.

Where differences fascinate, says Stephen Jay Gould, generalities instruct.

According to one rough estimate, however, the cumulative costs of the quotas established under the rubric of affirmative action, including the indirect costs, have depressed the gross national product by about four percentage points.

The link between intentional deception and cognitive limitations was made five centuries ago by Machiavelli. “Men are so simple and so ready to follow the needs of the moment,” he wrote, “that the deceiver will always find someone to deceive.”

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.

The principle of tolerance amounts, then, to a recognition that it has become prohibitively costly to control public opinion in every possible context. This interpretation is consistent with the common observation that cities, whose residents remain unknown to most other residents, exhibit greater tolerance than small towns, where everyone knows ev

A phrase that captures the meaning of preference falsification exactly is “living a lie.”

To influence a society’s actual decisions, activists must do more than satisfy their expressive urges. Working in common with like-minded activists, they must somehow win the support of sufficient numbers of nonactivists. The resulting collectivity, composed of activists and nonactivists professing support for a particular cause, is called a pressu

In the days following the fall of Czechoslovak communism, a banner in Prague read: “Poland—10 years, Hungary—10 months, East Germany—10 weeks, Czechoslovakia—10 days.”44 Underlying the implied acceleration is the fact that each successful challenge to communism lowered the perceived risk of dissent in the countries still under communist rule. This