Political correctness: We may feel pressure to publicly espouse views on a set of sensitive socio-political topics that we may not privately hold & such misrepresentations may render public discourse less vibrant & informative

Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission. Luca Braghieri, January 9, 2021. https://drive.google.com/file/d/15GyR5ploSF9LtDmKw4tu4xtr_ojEGYcr/view

Abstract: A prominent argument in the debate about political correctness is that people may feel pressure to publicly espouse views on a set of sensitive socio-political topics that they may not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations may render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper provides a formalization of the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses, where the debate about political correctness has been particularly heated. The results of the experiment show that: i) social image concerns indeed drive a wedge between the sensitive socio-political attitudes that college students report in private and in public; ii) public utterances are less informative than private utterances according to a host of measures of informativeness suggested by the theoretical model; iii) information loss is exacerbated by the fact that the natural audience in the environment, namely other college students, are partially naive about the ways in which social image concerns distort their peers’ public statements.