Had you merely kept quiet during the discussion about the decor, that would have been self-censorship. In pretending to like it, you went beyond self-censorship. You deliberately projected a contrived opinion.

A century after the Civil War, Jim Crow was finally overthrown through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which marked a new turning point in American race relations. Around that time, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson took the first official steps in regard to affirmative action. The term was initially used to connote special efforts to ensure equal

The measure of collective conservatism that I have just presented runs from 0 to 100 percent. For any established public opinion, the higher the degree of collective conservatism, the more it owes its persistence to history.

The conformism of man manifests itself in preference falsification; that of reason, in a pervasive reliance on social proof.

Precisely because people who express different opinions do get treated differently, individuals normally tailor their expressions to the prevailing social pressures.

Fear-induced preference falsification explains the paucity of public black opposition.

Because the imperfect observability of private variables is a universal feature, we can expect to be surprised again and again.

But what would catalyze the process of revolutionary mobilization? With hindsight, the push came from the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s festering economic problems, until then officially denied, convinced the top Soviet leadership to call for perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (public openness).

When a revolution challenges many established beliefs, the ones to succumb first may thus be those that had enjoyed the greatest protection from public challenges.