Roughly 40% of Americans state that they do not feel comfortable disclosing their views publicly, a roughly three-fold increase since the 1950's

Preference Falsification: How Social Conformity as an Interdependent, Recursive, and Multilevel Process Corrupts Public Knowledge. Jacob Elder, Yrian Derreumaux, Brent Hughes. Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, April 2021. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/b2xkp

Description: Throughout life, people often misrepresent their preferences to maintain social harmony, yet the cumulative effects of individual acts of conformity on society are largely underexplored. This phenomenon is captured by the economic theoretical framework of Preference Falsification, which describes why people misrepresent their preferences in the face of social pressures, and how misrepresentation accumulates to broader misunderstandings that can fuel political polarization. We first describe why the current political climate may foster motivations to misrepresent preferences, as individuals are increasingly strongly identified with their political groups and siloed into like-minded communities with strong pressures to conform to group norms. Next, we adopt a psychological lens to understand Preference Falsification at different levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level, to examine how failures in cognitive empathy and statistical learning facilitate social conformity that gives rise to falsification, and (2) at the collective level, to examine how misrepresented preferences propagate across social relationships and structures. Our goal is to advance theory by demonstrating that Preference Falsification provides a generative framework that describes how various micro-level phenomena related to social influence can propagate across social structures and corrupt public knowledge. Ultimately, we argue that PF limits access to accurate and truthful information, which fuels misinformation and poses a barrier to social change.

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If polarization-induced social pressures motivate people to self-censor or conform (Bar-Tal, 2017), this may contribute to collective misunderstandings and dissatisfaction with the status quo. In fact, people have more shared private preferences than what they perceive to be shared with others, producing an inflated impression of disagreement over specific issues (Ahler & Sood, 2018; Fiorina & Abrams, 2008; Waytz et al., 2019). Individual acts of conformity may propagate across individuals within a social structure, and consequently blur the lines between what people truly prefer and what people claim to prefer merely to conform. In turn, this corruption of public knowledge accumulates to exacerbate the very social pressures that initiated the individual acts of conformity in the first place. This phenomenon is described by the economic theoretical framework of Preference Falsification (PF), which describes what happens when people explicitly misrepresent their private preferences (i.e., what they truly prefer) due to perceived social pressures, such that people’s public preferences (i.e., what they express) are inconsistent with their private preferences (Kuran, 1997).

While psychological research has independently examined phenomena related to social conformity (e.g., impression management, social desirability bias, social influence), how people acquire and use social information (e.g., cognitive empathy, statistical learning), and other related phenomena, it has not yet integrated them to understand how individual acts of falsification can accumulate to corrupt publicly available information, and how this fuels collective misunderstanding. Here, we build on the theoretical framework of PF by synthesizing related areas of psychological research in order to understand the processes that underlie PF and how they propagate across social structures. We characterize PF as an interdependent, recursive, and multilevel process, by which acts of conformity by one individual may incentivize acts of conformity by other individuals (i.e. interdependent), which may lead to misinformation being expressed across individuals and social groups within a society (i.e. recursive), and ultimately manifest in a corruption of available information and widespread endorsement of unpopular positions (i.e. multilevel).

This framework produces several important predictions and implications: (1) PF predicts widespread public support for preferences that are otherwise privately unsupported by individuals (or vice versa: public opposition for preferences that are otherwise privately supported), which stifles potential change (Kuran, 1987). From this perspective, the status quo persists not only due to self-censorship, but also because people conform to the status quo out of fear of social repercussions (i.e., Preference Falsification). This may then discourage people from considering possible alternatives, as the status quo shapes people’s expectations of what is possible. Thus, although individuals may privately prefer outcomes different from the status quo, they may publicly express preferences that sustain it and in doing so stifle potential social change (i.e., collective conservatism; Kuran, 1987). (2) PF predicts larger differences in public preferences between groups, and smaller differences in public preferences within groups (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Henrich & Boyd, 1998). This provides one mechanism for polarization that thereby increases the perceived costs of expressing preferences that deviate from one’s group (Kuran, 1997; also see Figure 1 for a theoretical representation of how PF can promote and sustain polarization). (3) PF predicts how dissent and honest expression among ostensibly minority groups can ignite unanticipated social movements, via the propagation of public preferences that were previously falsified (Kuran, 1998). Honest expression of private preferences can provide a shock to the social structure by changing societal pressures and exposing previously hidden dissent, such that the perceived costs to expressing particular public preferences become attenuated. Taken together, PF can help to explain how social and political policies that may not be representative of the population are upheld due to the perceived costs of deviating from group norms, and conversely, how individual dissenters can catalyze change by igniting social movements that reduce the social pressures to conform.