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

A basic reason for the rarity of compensatory transfers is preference falsification. The conformist pressures of public opinion induce the harmed individuals to refrain from pressing for compensation, lest they damage their reputations.

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.

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 treat

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.

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.

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

Indeed, it took just a few decades of concerted agitation to outlaw an institution that had been part of human civilization for millennia.

Among the lessons of this chapter is that in interpreting social change we need to be on guard against the biases caused by the availability and representativeness heuristics. We need to recognize that transformations of public opinion generate information that would not have been available in advance. And we need to realize that where individual d

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