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

Preference falsification influences public discourse. This is because to conceal our private preferences successfully we must hide the knowledge on which they rest. That is, we must reinforce our preference falsification through knowledge falsification. In so doing, we distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain. We conceal

Dogs that do not bark—untaught courses, unavailable survey data—may yield as much useful information as dogs that do.

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.

There are two additional lessons here. First, a generation may continue to influence public opinion long after its days are over. Second, an established public opinion may get carried into the future by generations that bear no responsibility for its inception.

The democratic cities of ancient Greece required their citizens to give so much of themselves to politics that little time was left for the production of wealth.

Preference falsification is thus a prime reason why accounts of revolution, whether journalistic or scholarly, typically give revolutions the appearance of inevitability, even when they seemed anything but inevitable until they occurred. Preference falsification contributes, in other words, to making our hindsight better than our foresight.

One consequence of postrevolutionary preference falsification is thus to make it even less comprehensible why the revolution was unforeseen.

The human tendency to underemphasize the external determinants of human choices and overemphasize the internal determinants is known as the fundamental attribution error.

Talk being cheap, anyone can claim to be against this lifestyle or that political platform. An effective way of making such a claim credible is to participate in efforts to punish those from whom one is seeking dissociation. A closeted homosexual may become a gay basher to allay suspicions about his own private life. As the argument unfolds, we sha