People frequently convey to each other preferences that differ from what they would communicate privately under credible cover of anonymity (such as in opinion surveys to researchers or pollsters).
He provides a theory of how preference falsification shapes collective illusions, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.
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.
[15] On issues where preference falsification is rampant, elections allow hidden majorities to make themselves heard and exert influence through the ballot box.
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.
For a while, its effect may simply be to accentuate preference falsification[28] (for the underlying logic, see also works by Mark Granovetter, Thomas Schelling, Chien-Chun Yin, and Jared Rubin).
In Kuran’s basic theory, preference falsification imposes a cost on the falsifier in the form of resentment, anger, and humiliation for compromising his individuality.
[32] Unless the established policy happens to coincide with an individual’s private ideal, he thus faces a tradeoff between the internal benefits of expressing himself truthfully and the external advantages of being known as an establishmentarian.
Indeed, the revolution creates incentives for people who were long satisfied genuinely with the status quo to pretend that, at heart, they were always reformists waiting for a prudent time to speak out.
They involve the trajectory of East European communism, India’s caste system, and racial inequality and related policies in the United States.
For many decades, the communist regimes of the Eastern Europe, all established during or after World War II as “people’s democracies,” drew public support from millions of dissatisfied citizens.
In concealing their grievances to avoid being punished as an “enemy of the people,” victims had to refrain from communicating their observations about communism’s failures; they also had to pay lip service to Marxist principles.
[47] Well before the fall of communism, during the heyday of Soviet power and apparent invincibility, the dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed to this phenomenon of intellectual enfeeblement.
Likewise, the instigators of Hungary’s crushed revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 were all wedded to “scientific socialism” as a doctrine of emancipation and shared prosperity.
Practically everyone was stunned by the communist collapse, including scholars, statesmen, futurologists, the CIA, the KGB, and other intelligence organizations, dissidents with great insight into their societies (such as Havel and Solzhenitsyn), and even Gorbachev, whose actions unintentionally triggered this momentous transformation.
Glasnost allowed Soviet citizens to participate in debates about the system, to propose changes, to speak the previously unspeakable, to admit that they had been thinking what had been considered unthinkable.
As public opposition grew, East Europeans relatively satisfied with the status quo jumped on the public-preference cascade to secure a place in the emerging new order.
In line with Kuran’s theory of unanticipated revolutions, abundant information now points to the existence, all along, of massive hidden opposition to the region’s parties.
First, the preference falsifiers would stay devoted, in their hearts, to Shii tenets; and second, they would intend, as soon as the danger passed, to return to practicing Shiism openly.
Having the regime’s morality police enforce a conservative dress code for women (hijab) resulted in rampant religious preference falsification of a new kind.
Against their will, millions of Iranian women started covering their hair and abiding by the regime’s modesty standards in myriad ways, simply to avoid punishment.
These headscarves are known pejoratively as “bad hijab” or “slutty hijab.”[77] They represent attempts by Iranian women to minimize the extent of their religious preference falsification.
For example, the Jaucourt family, a noble crypto-Protestant house, discreetly fulfilled its religious commitments at the Protestant chapels of Scandinavian embassies.
[82][83] Public performance of Catholic rites gave crypto-Protestants access to civil status deeds as well as official registrations of births, baptisms, and marriages.
The Portuguese Inquisition functioned as a persecutory organization against covert practices of other religions, but also against heresies and deviations from sexual mores considered un-Christian, such as bigamy and sodomy.
Blood purity statutes regulated access to Portugal’s public posts and honorific distinctions (also called limpeza de sangue), denying a broad range of privileges to New Christians on account of their heredity.
Diverse entities, including the Inquisition, were used to help New Christians whitewash their heritage through “blood purity” certificates, invariably in return for fees.
Many Portuguese families with New Christian roots progressed upwards in social status by creating availability cascades of positive blood purity certifications.
[95][96] According to a 2020 study, by Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra González, and David Yanagizawa-Drott, the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia express private beliefs in support of women working outside the home.
Preference falsification increased the intensity of the Yugoslav Civil War, he suggests; also, it accelerated Yugoslavia’s break-up into ethnically based independent republics.