In a 1987 paper titled 'Chameleon voters and public choice,' Timur Kuran introduced the idea of preference falsification. This idea was further developed in subsequent papers and in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. The underlying premise is that people are dishonest about personal preferences when these conflict with perceived social norms. According to Wikipedia, preference falsification has three main implications:
It distorts social decisions by polluting public discourse with untrue information.
It distorts private knowledge, because this relies on the polluted public discourse.
It produces abrupt political surprises from cascade effects wherein large groups of people who have previously falsified their preferences suddenly begin to accurately express these preferences.
Virtue signaling demonstrates conformity to perceived social norms. If this demonstration doesn't accurately reflect personal beliefs, it could be considered preference falsification. But most forms of preference falsification are less active and more passive. When enough people are pressured by social realities to publicly falsify their preferences, it sets the stage for major upheaval.
Culturally, in the wake of 9/11, patriotism became mandatory in the US. Plenty of people who didn't give two hoots about nationalism fastened flag pins to their lapels. Their tepid patriotism partly set the stage for the country's disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, by creating the appearance of public support for the invasion that probably didn't exist.
At that time, demonstrating insufficient patriotism could get you fired from jobs in government or certain industries. It could get you shunned at family gatherings, depending on the family. The question of patriotism started countless bar fights. These serious social consequences surely motivated widespread preference falsification.
The harshest consequence of demonstrating insufficient support for the status quo today is cancellation. This consequence involves permanent reputational and financial ruin. That's strong motivation for people to falsify their preferences. And when you add in the recently normalized censorship of available media by government and big business, what we end up with is a status quo that compels people to be publicly dishonest.
I've started thinking of this new normal as covid culture. Woke is folded into this culture, as is medical fascism and whatever the hell is happening militarily, plus the compromised climate change movement and the formerly-alt right. All of these things are covid culture. It's the new world order that came out of the pandemic. And it sucks.
And yet, when it comes to preference falsification, dissenting voices can make a big difference. Any opinion that challenges the dominant narrative proves that the narrative is not unassailable. Solomon Asch famously found that having even one dissenter in your group sharply decreased conformity to that group's norms. In Asch's experiments, the groups involved made visibly incorrect statements and then pressured the subject to support the nonsense. I feel like covid culture does the same thing.
If large numbers of people are secretly harboring dissent, the right combination of factors could trigger a cascade, resulting in many people suddenly signaling their preferences more honestly. That's a bumpy road. But it might be wise to go there.
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