Preference falsification
Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting a preference under perceived public pressure. It involves publicly expressing a preference that differs from one's underlying privately held preference. People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity. Techniques such as list experiments can be used to uncover preference falsification.
The term was coined by economist and political scientist Timur Kuran in a 1987 article, "Chameleon voters and public choice." On controversial matters that induce preference falsification, he showed there, widely disliked policies may appear popular. The distribution of public preferences, which Kuran defines as public opinion, may differ greatly from private opinion, which is the distribution of private preferences known only to individuals themselves.
Kuran developed the implications in a 1995 book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. He argues that preference falsification is not only ubiquitous but has major social and political consequences. He provides a theory of how preference falsification shapes collective illusions, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Collective illusion is an occurrence when most people in a group go along with an idea or a preference that they don't agree with, because they incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it.
Specific form of lying
Preference falsification aims specifically at molding the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations. As such, not all forms of lying entail preference falsification. To withhold bad medical news from a terminally ill person is a charitable lie. But it is not preference falsification, because the motivation is not to conceal a wish.Preference falsification is not synonymous with self-censorship, which is simply the withholding of information. Whereas self-censorship is a passive act, preference falsification is performative. It entails actions meant to project a contrived preference.
Strategic voting occurs when, in the privacy of an election booth, one votes for candidate B because A, one’s favorite, cannot win. This entails preference manipulation but not preference falsification, which is a response to social pressures. In a private polling booth, there are no social pressures to accommodate and no social reactions to control.
Private opinion vs. public opinion
The term public opinion is commonly used in two senses. The first is the distribution of people’s genuine preferences, often measured through surveys that provide anonymity. The second meaning is the distribution of preferences that people convey in public settings, which is measured through survey techniques that allow the pairing of responses with specific respondents. Kuran distinguishes between the two meanings for analytic clarity, reserving public opinion only for the latter. He uses the term private opinion to describe the distribution of a society’s private preferences, known only to individuals themselves.On socially controversial issues, preference falsification is often pervasive, and ordinarily public opinion differs from private opinion.
Private knowledge vs. public knowledge
Private preferences over a set of options rest on private knowledge, which consists of the understandings that individuals carry in their own minds. A person who privately favors reforming the educational system does so in the belief that, say, schools are failing students, and a new curriculum would serve them better. But this person need not convey to others his sympathy towards a new curriculum. To avoid alienating powerful political groups, she could pretend to consider the prevailing curriculum optimal. In other words, her public knowledge could be a distorted, if not completely fabricated, version of what she really perceives and understands.Knowledge falsification causes public knowledge to differ from private knowledge.
Three main claims of Kuran's theory
Private Truths, Public Lies identifies three basic social consequences of preference falsification: distortion of social decisions, distortion of private knowledge, and unanticipated social discontinuities.Distortion of social decisions
Among the social consequences of preference falsification is the distortion of social decisions. In misrepresenting public opinion, it corrupts a society’s collective policy choices. One manifestation is collective conservatism, which Kuran defines as the retention of policies that would be rejected in a vote taken by secret ballot and the implicit rejection of alternative policies that, if voted on, would command stable support.For an illustration, suppose that a vocal minority within this society takes to shaming the supporters of a certain reform. Simply to protect their personal reputations, people privately favoring the reform might start pretending to be satisfied with the status quo. In falsifying their preferences, they would make the perceived share of the reform opponents discourage other reform sympathizers from publicizing their own desires for change. With enough reform sympathizers opting for comfort through preference falsification, a clear majority privately favoring reform could co-exist with an equally clear majority publicly opposing the same reform. In other words, private opinion could support reform even as public opinion opposes it.
A democracy has a built-in mechanism for correcting distortions in public opinion: periodic elections by secret ballot. On issues where preference falsification is rampant, elections allow hidden majorities to make themselves heard and exert influence through the ballot box. The privacy afforded by secret balloting allows voters to cast ballots aligned with their private preferences. As private opinion gets revealed through the ballot box, preference falsifiers may discover, to their delight, that they form a majority. They may infer that they have little to fear from vocalizing honestly what they want. That is the expectation underlying secret balloting.
In practice, however, secret-ballot elections serve their intended corrective function imperfectly. For one thing, on issues that induce rampant preference falsification, elections may offer little choice. All serious contestants will often take the same position, partly to avoid being shamed and partly to position themselves optimally in policy spaces to maximise their appeal to the electorate. For another, in periodic elections citizens of a democracy vote for representatives or political parties that stand for policy packages. They do not vote on individual policies directly. Therefore, the messages that a democratic citizenry conveys through secret balloting are necessarily subject to interpretation. A party opposed to a particular reform may win because of its stands on other issues. Yet, its vote may be interpreted as a rejection of reform.
Nevertheless, periodic secret balloting limits the harms of preference falsification. It keeps public opinion from straying too far from private opinion on matters critical to citizens. By contrast, in nondemocratic political regimes no legal mechanism exists for uncovering hidden sentiments. Therefore, serious distortions of public opinion are correctable only through extra-legal means, such as rioting, a coup, or a revolution.
Distortion of private knowledge
Private preferences may change through learning. We learn from our personal experiences, and we can think for ourselves. Yet, because our cognitive powers are bounded, we can reflect comprehensively on only a small fraction of the issues on which we decide, or are forced to, express a preference. However much we might want to think independently on every issue, our private knowledge unavoidably rests partly on the public knowledge that enters public discourse—the corpus of suppositions, observations, assertions, arguments, theories, and opinions in the public domain. For example, most people’s private preferences concerning international trade are based, to one degree or another, on the public communications of others, whether through publications, TV, social media, gatherings of friends, or some other medium.Preference falsification shapes or reshapes private knowledge by distorting the substance of public discourse. The reason is that, to conceal our private preferences successfully, we must control the impressions we convey. Effective control requires careful management of our body language but also of the knowledge that we convey publicly. In other words, credible preference falsification requires engaging in appropriately tailored knowledge falsification as well. To convince an audience that we favor trade quotas, facts and arguments supportive of quotas must accompany our pro-quota public preference.
Knowledge falsification corrupts and impoverishes the knowledge in the public domain, Kuran argues. It exposes others to facts that knowledge falsifiers know to be false. It reinforces the credibility of falsehoods. And it conceals information that the knowledge falsifier considers true.
Preference falsification is thus a source of avoidable misperceptions, even ignorance, about the range of policy options and about their relative merits. This generally harmful effect of preference falsification works largely through the knowledge falsification that accompanies it. The disadvantages of a particular policy, custom, or regime might have been appreciated widely in the past. However, insofar as public discourse excludes criticism of the publicly fashionable options, the objections will tend to be forgotten. Among the mechanisms producing such collective amnesia is population replacement through births and deaths. New generations are exposed not to the unfiltered knowledge in their elders’ heads but, rather, to the reconstructed knowledge that their elders feel safe to communicate. Suppose that an aging generation had disliked a particular institution but refrained from challenging it. Absent experiences that make the young dislike that institution, they will preserve it to avoid social sanctions but also, perhaps mainly, because the impoverishment of public discourse has blinded them to the flaws of the status quo and blunted their capacity to imagine better alternatives. The preference and knowledge falsification of their parents will have left them intellectually handicapped.
Over the long run, then, preference falsification brings intellectual narrowness and ossification. Insofar as it leaves people unequipped to criticize inherited social structures, current preference falsification ceases to be a source of political stability. People support the status quo genuinely, because past preference falsification has removed their inclinations to want something different.
The possibility of such socially induced intellectual incapacitation is highest in contexts where private knowledge is drawn largely from others. It is low, though not nil, on matters where the primary source of private knowledge is personal experience. Two other factors influence the level of ignorance generated by preference falsification. Individuals are more likely to lose touch with alternatives to the status quo if public opinion reaches an equilibrium devoid of dissent than if some dissenters keep publicizing the advantages of change. Likewise, widespread ignorance is more likely in a closed society than in one open to outside influences.