Precisely because people who express different opinions do get treated differently, individuals normally tailor their expressions to the prevailing social pressures. Their adjustments vary greatly in social impact. At one extreme are harmless, and possibly beneficial, acts of politeness, as when one tells a friend wearing a garish shirt that he has good taste. At the other are acts of spinelessness on issues of general concern, as when a politician endorses a protectionist measure that he recognizes as harmful to most of his constituents. The pressures generating such acts of insincerity need not originate from the government. Preference falsification is compatible with all political systems, from the most unyielding dictatorship to the most libertarian democracy.

Part I: Living a Lie

The Significance of Preference Falsification

Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressures.

Why introduce a complicated term like preference falsification? Wouldn’t “lying” do? While always a form of lying, preference falsification is a more specific concept. Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions, as when you compliment your host to make him think that you share his taste.

Nor is preference falsification synonymous with “self-censorship,” the suppression of one’s potentially objectionable thoughts. In this instance, preference falsification is the broader concept. 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.

A phrase that captures the meaning of preference falsification exactly is “living a lie.” It was developed by East European dissidents during their long winter of communist dictatorship, because they, too, found their existing vocabulary inadequate. To live a lie is to be burdened by one’s lie. The source of the burden could be the guilt one suffers for having avoided social responsibility, or the anger one experiences for having failed to live up to one’s personal standards, or the resentment one feels for having been induced to suppress one’s individuality. Whatever the nature of the discomfort, it shows persistence.

If one distinguishing characteristic of preference falsification is that it brings discomfort to the falsifier, another is that it is a response to real or imagined social pressures to convey a particular preference. It is thus distinct from the strategic voting that occurs when, in a secret-ballot election, one votes for candidate B because C, one’s favorite, cannot win. Strategic voting entails preference manipulation. But it does not involve preference falsification, because in a private polling booth there are no social pressures to accommodate and no social reactions to control.

The manifestations of preference falsification include punishing people whose views and needs one shares. The logic is simple. Talk being cheap, anyone can claim to be against this lifestyle or that political platform. An effective way of making such a claim credible is to participate in efforts to punish those from whom one is seeking dissociation. A closeted homosexual may become a gay basher to allay suspicions about his own private life.

A person weighing the probable consequences of an action often has reliable information to go on. For instance, a closeted lesbian in small-town America might know with near certainty that if she steps out she will face harassment. In some contexts, however, one’s information about probable reactions is unreliable. A politician with a new idea may be unsure about the reception it will get. Faced with such uncertainty, he might float the idea anonymously, possibly by having a subordinate discuss it with a trusted reporter who agrees to attribute her story to “well-placed sources.” Such a “trial balloon” gives the idea some exposure without requiring the politician to take personal responsibility. If the reaction is unfavorable, he can quickly dissociate himself from the idea, even join the chorus of criticism. If instead the reaction is favorable, he can claim credit and begin promoting the idea openly. The lesson here is that efforts are made to test public opinion. The efforts often prove worthwhile, because taking an unpopular position in public can be very costly. It can turn one’s friends into enemies, damage one’s reputation, and extinguish one’s career, among other possibilities.

In every modern democracy major elections and referenda are conducted by secret ballot. The rationale is to let citizens vote without intimidation. Votes taken by open ballot are considered illegitimate precisely because they may have been tainted by preference falsification.

Preference falsification produces two categories of effects. First, expressed preferences have social consequences, as when women choosing to veil induce conformist responses from women who would rather stay unveiled. Second, the social climate fostered by preference falsification may transform the preferences people are trying to hide. An example would be the eventual disappearance of a religion that is practiced only in secret. In the first category of effects, individual choices shape social outcomes. The second reverses the causality: social outcomes shape individual choices. Paired together, the two categories imply a circular causal relationship between social outcomes and individual choices. They thus suggest that to identify and understand the consequences of preference falsification, one must investigate both how individuals shape social variables and how social variables shape individuals.

The starting point of the analysis is the choice faced by an individual who must convey a preference on some issue. The issue is one where he will receive benefits or incur costs for the preference he expresses. Thus it is unlike that which he would encounter if asked to select, say, among flavors of ice cream, because that choice would not be of concern to others. In the case at hand, our individual knows that he will be judged by the preference he declares. Another important characteristic of this issue is that it will be settled through an aggregation of the relevant preferences expressed.

How will the individual choose what preference to convey? Three distinct considerations may enter his calculations: the satisfaction he is likely to obtain from society’s decision, the rewards and punishments associated with his chosen preference, and finally, the benefits he derives from truthful self-expression. If large numbers of individuals are expressing preferences on the issue, the individual’s capacity to influence the collective decision is likely to be negligible. In this case he will consider society’s decision to be essentially fixed, basing his own preference declaration only on the second and third considerations. Ordinarily, these offer a tradeoff between the benefits of self-expression and those of being perceived as someone with the right preference. Where the latter benefits dominate, our individual will engage in preference falsification.

The preference that our individual ends up conveying to others is what I will call his public preference. It is distinct from his private preference, which is what he would express in the absence of social pressures. By definition, preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one’s private preference.

At any given equilibrium, public opinion may differ from private opinion. In fact, the equilibrium may owe its existence and stability largely to preference falsification on the part of people unsympathetic to the policies it makes possible. Such disgruntled people, even if they form a huge majority, will refrain from dissenting because of social pressures—pressures that they themselves sustain through acts of preference falsification. One socially significant consequence of preference falsification is thus widespread public support for policies that would be rejected in a vote taken by secret ballot. A related consequence is the retention of such policies, to the exclusion of alternative policies capable of commanding stable support. The latter phenomenon, which I call collective conservatism,

Preference falsification influences public discourse. This is because to conceal our private preferences successfully we must hide the knowledge on which they rest. That is, we must reinforce our preference falsification through knowledge falsification. In so doing, we distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain. We conceal from others facts we know to be true and expose them to ones we consider false. This brings us to another possible consequence of preference falsification: widespread ignorance of the status quo’s disadvantages. The disadvantages may once have been appreciated quite widely. Insofar as public discourse excludes criticism of fashionable political choices, however, their shortcomings will tend to get forgotten. And in the process members of society will lose their capacity to want change. The status quo, once sustained because people were afraid to challenge it, will thus come to persist because no one understands its flaws or can imagine a better alternative. Preference falsification will have brought intellectual narrowness and ossification. When that point is reached, current preference falsification ceases to be a source of political stability. From then on, people support the status quo genuinely, because past preference falsification has removed their inclination to want something different.

In the presence of preference falsification, private opposition may spread and intensify indefinitely without any apparent change in support for the status quo. Yet at some point the right event, even an intrinsically minor one, can make a few sufficiently disgruntled individuals reach their thresholds for speaking out against the status quo. Their switches can then impel others to add their own voices to the opposition. Public opposition can grow through a bandwagon process, with each addition generating further additions until much of society stands publicly opposed to the status quo. The revolution will not have been anticipated, because preference falsification concealed the opposition developing under the surface. Even so, it will be easy to explain with the benefit of hindsight. One reason is that the very occurrence of the revolution lowers the personal risk of exposing the vulnerability of the prerevolutionary social order. Another reason is that the revolution creates incentives for people who had been content with the prerevolutionary order to pretend that at heart they were always revolutionaries waiting for a prudent time to speak out.

The possibility of unanticipated revolution rests critically on two factors: the imperfect observability of the criteria on which individuals base their public preferences and the interdependence of those public preferences. In combination, these factors allow small, unobserved changes in private variables to galvanize explosive changes in public opinion. By the same token, they allow private variables to undergo major changes without triggering changes in public opinion. That is, they make it possible for profound transformations to occur, and much tension to build up, in a society that appears asleep. Deceptive stability and explosive change are thus two sides of a single coin.

Private and Public Preferences

In many contexts where an agreement is not indispensable, we get urges to regulate the lives of others, to poke our noses into matters we could leave alone, in short, to be “meddlesome.” Plain observation suggests that meddle-someness is a universal human trait, and also that it drives a huge variety of potentially personal choices into the collective realm—the world of politics. The ubiquity of meddle-someness is traceable, says Hannah Arendt, to the division of labor. If we pursued all our activities in mutual isolation, she observes, our choices would be without significance or consequence to others. Evolutionary psychologists add that early human evolution conferred an advantage on individuals who showed an interest in each other’s activities. Such individuals monitored each other with greater effectiveness, so they cooperated more successfully on matters important to survival. They thus left more descendants, predisposing the human mind to meddlesomeness. Today, under conditions vastly different from those faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, gossip is a universal pastime and soap operas have huge audiences because our minds remain adapted to taking an interest in the affairs of others. Never mind whether nosiness continues to serve economic productivity or political harmony.

The punishments that people endure for their conveyed preferences vary widely in both form and severity. Some public preferences elicit disapproving gestures, such as raised eyebrows and derisive stares. Others also generate negative remarks, which may range from guarded criticism to unmerciful vilification. Another form of punishment is the denial of opportunities. A person considered on the wrong side of an issue may be denied a job or turned down by a social club. Still another form is physical. The individual may suffer harassment, incarceration, torture, even death. On the positive side, a person may receive various benefits for an expressed preference. The possible rewards include smiles, cheers, compliments, popularity, honors, privileges, gifts, promotions, and protection.

A preference acceptable to one group might be unacceptable to another. A house cleaner who reveals her opposition to the welfare system might annoy her neighbors on the dole while simultaneously pleasing her employers who consider their taxes too high. The net payoff a person receives from the various responses to a public preference is his reputational utility—utility from the reputation of harboring that particular preference. The reputational utility conferred by the revelation of a preference can vary with time and place.

Experimental social psychology thus suggests that social pressures, though very powerful, are not necessarily decisive. As individuals, we are evidently prepared to endure some social conflict to say or do what we really want. Our choices must be satisfying a need other than social approval and respect. This other need, I submit, is a need for individuality, autonomy, dignity, and integrity. I am proposing that we value the freedom to choose; that we derive self-esteem from resisting social pressures and establishing ourselves as people to be reckoned with; and that we find satisfaction in speaking our minds, opening up our hearts, acting ourselves. In short, I am suggesting that there is an ever-present voice in each of us that says: “To thine own self be true.” By following this dictate we achieve a sense of satisfaction, if not exhilaration, though possibly at the cost of inviting reprisals. Conversely, when we opt to suppress a thought, misrepresent a want, or assume a phony demeanor, we feel discomfort at having compromised our personhood.

A basic reason we consider uncompromising independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule. Another is that we all identify, at some level, with personal independence.

The gist of the argument thus far is that the choice of a public preference gives rise to three distinct returns: intrinsic utility, reputational utility, and expressive utility. For simplicity, let the sources of utility be additive. This is to say that an individual’s total utility from a particular public preference equals his intrinsic utility from society’s decision plus his reputational utility from the engendered social reactions plus the expressive utility he derives from the displayed self-assertiveness.

Selecting a public preference is an act that may offer a choice between inner and outer peace. The insight was captured beautifully by Rumi, the thirteenth-century Anatolian mystic. Each soul must decide, he said, to stay on the safe land of routine predictabilities, custom, and religious law, or to answer the call of its inner voice and launch into the deep.

Private Opinion, Public Opinion

An activity forms a political issue if it is a matter of social concern, a nonissue if it is widely considered a matter of personal choice. Scientific experimentation on animals is currently a political issue, one that pits scientists against the animal rights lobby. It would turn into a nonissue if public interest in regulating the laboratory were to disappear. Implicit in this distinction is a view of politics that highlights people’s meddlesomeness. To say that experiments on rats constitute a political issue is to take note that one group is trying to control the decisions of another. In this simple illustration, the animal rights lobby is on the offensive, scientists on the defensive; the former wish to restrict customary scientific liberties, the latter to protect them. There are also issues where disagreement involves only the details. A community in agreement on building a railway station may split on the matter of location, with competing factions trying to control the communal decision.

An infinite number of human concerns are candidates for becoming political issues. A small minority actually do. Political discourse focuses on a few concerns at a time, treating the rest as nonissues. Society’s political agenda evidently has a limited “carrying capacity.” The root cause is a factor I have introduced but not yet discussed: the limitations of the human mind. Although a person may mitigate these limitations by handling issues sequentially, the problem is ultimately insoluble, for the hours in a day are fixed. In any case, politics interferes with directly productive activity, which is one reason why most people devote little time to it.

If one consequence of the limitations of reason is the boundedness of society’s political agenda, another is that an individual’s positions on issues may be mutually inconsistent. A person may consider both government spending too high and all proposed cuts unwise, or believe simultaneously that women are the full equals of men and that they need special protections. Such inconsistencies are common because cognitive limitations keep us from incorporating the multitudes of variables and relationships that impinge on our happiness into a single, comprehensive model. Unavoidably we ignore many interconnections among political issues, treating closely related phenomena as unrelated.

A complete theory of collective action requires recognition that some people have unusually intense wants on particular matters, coupled with extraordinarily great expressive needs. Relative to most people, such individuals are insensitive to the prevailing reputational incentives, because they obtain unusually high satisfaction from truthful self-expression. They are inclined to speak their minds even at the risk of severe punishment, and regardless of whether truthful speech can make a difference. Their goals may be selfish or altruistic, good or evil, conservative or revolutionary. The characteristics of the goals matter less than the fact that they are held intensely and expressed sincerely.

Such exceptional individuals who will undertake to activate a movement may be characterized as activists. It is they who, depending on the context, form cells, distribute leaflets, articulate new demands, concoct slogans, establish command structures, and most important, try to woo others into the movement through promises of moral, social, and material support. The generally far more numerous nonactivists are too sensitive to reputational incentives to take part in the activation process. They are followers who will participate only if others have already lowered the cost or raised the benefit of participation. Thus, where the support of the activists is unconditional, that of the nonactivists is conditional on the prevailing political conditions.

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 pressure group.

Even a unidimensional issue might generate many distinct pressure groups. The spectrum from 0 to 100 could feature, say, eleven groups, each at a different point. Typically, however, fewer options enjoy the endorsement of a pressure group, often just a couple. There is a tendency for issues to turn into dichotomous choices that mask complexity, subtlety, and ambiguity. One is either a believer or an unbeliever, for or against equality, a committed revolutionary or an apologist for the status quo.

As a practical matter, then, political competition limits the degree of political pluralism. One reason is that group size is a determinant of political success. Another is that the image of a divided or confused pressure group can be a recipe for political ineffectiveness. Still another is that our cognitive limitations make it unfeasible to debate all possibilities down to the finest details. For all these reasons, activists with similar concerns will often suppress their differences and focus on their common goals. Once a set of pressure groups has formed, activists may either join one of these or develop some new group. The latter course is fraught with uncertainty, if only because the new group’s potentially most enthusiastic members might refrain from committing themselves until it proves itself viable. Reticence to join new pressure groups gives existing groups an advantage over new entrants, often blocking the formation of potentially powerful new groups.

All our political actors are now on the scene. There are two competing pressure groups. Each group features an inner core of activists, and insofar as it is successful, an outer ring of nonactivists. The activists have fixed public preferences that are more or less consistent with their private preferences; the nonactivists’ public preferences depend on the prevailing reputational incentives. Our next task is to explore why a pressure group must add to its core of activists a ring of nonactivists.

Let me define, then, public opinion as the distribution of public preferences and private opinion as the corresponding distribution of private preferences.

To keep matters simple, I assume that all nonactivists find it personally advantageous to join one pressure group or the other. In a polarized political environment, individuals may not be able to position themselves on neutral ground even if they try. Each side may perceive a declaration of neutrality or moderation as collaboration with the enemy, leaving moderates exposed to attacks from two directions at once.

It is public opinion, rather than private opinion, that undergirds political power. Private opinion may be highly unfavorable to a regime, policy, or institution without generating a public outcry for change. The communist regimes of Eastern Europe survived for decades even though they were widely despised. They remained in power as long as public opinion remained overwhelmingly in their favor, collapsing instantly when street crowds mustered the courage to rise against them.

An implication is that pressure groups have an incentive to extend their support as much as possible. This may seem to contradict the “size principle,” which asserts that distributional coalitions (like industrial cartels and legislative alliances) prefer to become exclusive after they reach a certain size. In fact, there is no conflict. A pressure group might represent the interests of a cartel seeking the retention of the regulations essential to its survival. While the cartel remained exclusive, the pressure group would remain open to all segments of society, including those harmed by barriers to competition. If barriers benefit only a small minority, the group’s ultimate success will depend on the stands of nonbeneficiaries.

The Dynamics of Public Opinion

The pressures that flow from public opinion often pay for themselves, in the sense of being self-reproducing. A critical implication is that, to achieve the public opinion that will serve their substantive goals, pressure groups frequently rely on incentives created by public opinion itself.

One reason why public opinion is a source of social pressure is that individuals trying to enhance the credibility of their chosen public preferences show approval of people who have made the same choice and disapproval of people who have made other choices. On abortion, for instance, individuals representing themselves as prochoice will greet the prochoice statements of others with nods of approval and prolife ones with frowns. People feel compelled to back up their declarations of support with concrete actions precisely because preference falsification is common and understood to be so. Anyone can express a particular political view, so by itself a verbal declaration of being prochoice carries little weight. To be perceived as sincere, whether or not one actually is, one’s words must be coupled with concrete actions. Nodding and frowning are two credibility-building actions, albeit ones of minor consequence. More effective ones include heckling a politician, praising an op-ed piece, participating in a demonstration, and donating to a political cause. Taken by individuals for their own reputational needs, all such actions help shape the social pressures that influence the public preference choices of others.

A pressure group thus confers benefits on its members and imposes costs on nonmembers. It does so partly through its members’ efforts to signal their loyalty and sincerity. Together, these observations mean that as a pressure group expands the incentives to join it will grow. A further implication is that, when two groups do battle over public opinion, the winner will not necessarily be the one with the richer, stronger, and better organized core of activists. The advantage a group enjoys on account of its superior core may be overtaken by the disadvantage of a smaller membership; and conversely, a group can compensate for a weaker core of activists with a relatively large membership.

No matter how many equilibria exist, only one can be in place at any given time. The expectation of public opinion determines which gets selected.

For a bandwagon to form and start moving, it is necessary though not sufficient for individual choices to be interdependent. The people making choices must also be heterogeneous, at least in the sense that it takes different amounts of pressure to elicit a particular response. If the same amount were required, they would make their switches en masse. The heterogeneity condition is obviously satisfied in the present context, because members of society differ in their private preferences, expressive needs, and fears of disapproval. Such variations imply a distribution of political thresholds. With heterogeneous decision makers, a bandwagon can keep rolling as long as the changes in social pressure induced by new riders impel at least one additional person to jump on.

In the presence of multiple equilibria, an occurrence of no intrinsic significance may have a dramatic impact on the course of public opinion. Specifically, it may determine which of two or more bandwagons get pushed into motion.

Efforts to distort perceptions of public opinion take various additional forms. Lobbies dwell on polls showing their positions to be popular and attempt to discredit unfavorable polls. They manipulate surveys through the selection and wording of questions. They inflate the participation rates in their rallies, phone-ins, strikes, and boycotts. And through such instruments as textbooks, opinion articles, and mass demonstrations, they endeavor to get their stands accepted as “normal,” as positions that respectable people consider reasonable, beneficial, and efficacious. Such efforts also help, we shall see, to mold private beliefs and preferences. But the immediate goal is usually to control perceptions of the prevailing public opinion. Apparently, political activists have a basic understanding of preference falsification, the bandwagon process, the possibility of multiple bandwagons, and ways of influencing which bandwagon gets under way.

Social psychologists use the term pluralistic ignorance to describe misconceptions of preference distributions. In our context, to raise the possibility of pluralistic ignorance is to recognize that in assessing public opinion people use mental shortcuts that violate basic statistical principles. The commonness of erroneous judgments does not imply, of course, that individual assessments are independent of actual trends. Large shifts in public opinion tend to be widely noticed, and dramatic events make people more receptive to broad indicators of public opinion.

The evidence is that we tend to underestimate the impact of social pressures on public preferences. Discounting the power of pressure, we often mistake public preferences for the underlying private preferences.

The human tendency to underemphasize the external determinants of human choices and overemphasize the internal determinants is known as the fundamental attribution error. The normatively correct principle of attribution calls for caution in ascribing an act to the actor’s personal disposition insofar as that act is typical. For instance, if a committee votes unanimously for reelecting the current chair, one should infer little from this fact alone about the dispositions of individual committee members. Such inferences are justified only if the pressures in operation during the vote are well understood. If it is known that the incumbent chair had some challengers and that the vote was by secret ballot, it is reasonable to infer that she was considered the best person for the job. If the vote was by a show of hands and there were signs that opponents of her reelection would be ostracized, however, nothing should be inferred about any particular voter’s private feelings. Yet research shows that people tend not to distinguish properly between such situations.

Earlier we saw that pluralistic ignorance may exist with respect to public opinion. Now we see that it may also exist with respect to private opinion. Laboratory experiments show that we commonly infer personality traits from actions driven by situational factors. In other words, we regularly mistake public preferences for private preferences.

An important consequence of our tendency to mistake public preferences for private preferences is to compound the power of small events and thus the potential impact of political activities that shape individual expectations. Insofar as we overrate the genuineness of public opinion, we will overestimate its permanence and adapt more readily to its apparent shifts. Therefore public opinion may be very sensitive to signs that it is in flux. A minor demonstration, or a conference that would normally get little attention, may generate a large shift in people’s perceptions, thus activating a bandwagon that will culminate in a dramatically different public opinion.

Institutional Sources of Preference Falsification

In all political systems, the power to govern, make laws, and interpret decisions rests on public opinion. Equally critical, none precludes the distortion of public opinion through preference falsification. This is not to propose that democratic societies are no better off than authoritarian ones. It is to suggest, rather, that democracies are not always responsive to private opinion and that the choices they give citizens do not always get exercised.

The fact that contemporary democracies repress individual expression would not have surprised the great social philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tocqueville observed that in protecting individual citizens from government despotism American democracy had subjected them to a worse form of tyranny, the burden of conformism. So great is the force of American public opinion, he thought, that Americans conform to it readily, even as they glorify freedom, autonomy, and nonconformism. In a similar vein, John Stuart Mill held that government oppression is generally less burdensome than the tyranny of friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens.

If no political regime can prevent the distortion of public opinion, might a critical difference between democratic and authoritarian regimes lie in their responsiveness to public opinion? Lay thinking holds that elected governments are responsive to public opinion whereas dictators are not. Such thinking confuses public opinion with private opinion. Democratic and authoritarian regimes differ in their responsiveness to private, rather than public, opinion. All governments, including the authoritarian, are sensitive to public opinion.

In what sense do democracies and nondemocracies differ in their responsiveness to private opinion? Insofar as the former have fewer means of restricting expression, the incentives they create for preference falsification will be weaker. Two conclusions follow. First, democracies will tend to display less preference falsification than dictatorships. And second, if a democratic government and a dictatorship both abide by public opinion meticulously, the policies implemented by the former will tend to adhere more closely to private opinion. The differences, to be sure, are ones of degree. Even in a democracy committed to personal liberties, social pressures beyond the government’s control may drive a huge wedge between public and private opinion.

No one is perfectly tolerant. Most people exhibit a readiness to censor views that are unexceptional even within their own communities. This should not come as a surprise, because, as the framers of the American Constitution recognized, tolerance is not a natural disposition. In our own century, Ortega y Gasset has characterized tolerance as a cultivated value, one that is neither inherent nor instinctive in the human personality. It is the cornerstone of a liberal worldview that proclaims a “determination to live with an enemy, and even more, with a weak enemy.” Expounding on Ortega y Gasset’s insight, two authors of a study on tolerance observe that “people who believe they know the ‘truth’ on a particular issue . . . may find it difficult to understand why they have an obligation to permit someone with a contrary (and hence obviously false) view to enjoy an equal opportunity for freedom of expression.” If one knows that “racists,” or “killers of unborn babies,” or “heathens” will say things that are erroneous, offensive, and immoral, why should one allow them to spread their views? Moreover, why should one provide a platform to dangerous groups who, if they got the chance, would deny others the right of free expression? When faced with such questions with respect to groups that they themselves consider a threat, even the citizens of countries with long democratic traditions betray a willingness to limit expressive liberties.

In view of the intolerant streak in the human personality, it is hardly puzzling that acts of intolerance have been common throughout history. What is puzzling is that tolerance has become a widely endorsed political ideal, at least in the abstract. It is puzzling, too, that democratic institutions have been adopted and preserved.

Societies have become increasingly complex and individual fortunes increasingly interdependent. Hence we have more reason today to control one another’s expressions than our ancestors did thousands of years ago. We can expect, moreover, to be affected by the expressions of many more strangers. But this rise in social interdependence has not been matched by a commensurate improvement in our cognitive faculties. We are not substantially more intelligent than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and we find ourselves able to observe and influence just a minute fraction of the behaviors pertinent to our own happiness. Whether we like it or not, we have to limit our authority, nosiness, and activism to few of the matters of potential concern to ourselves. The principle of tolerance amounts, then, to a recognition that it has become prohibitively costly to control public opinion in every possible context. This interpretation is consistent with the common observation that cities, whose residents remain unknown to most other residents, exhibit greater tolerance than small towns, where everyone knows everyone else.

Part II: Inhibiting Change

Collective Conservatism

Societies routinely adopt laws, regulations, and policies that they then retain indefinitely. At any particular time, therefore, a social order incorporates multitudes of decisions inherited from the past. This characterization applies both to societies perceived as inert and to ones considered exceptionally dynamic. It applies even to those that promote the notion of “permanent revolution.” No community keeps all of its social arrangements constantly open to change. Some observed social continuities reflect the fact that a measure of social stability is indispensable. If the social order were highly fluid, in the sense that any decision or agreement could be changed instantaneously, people would live in great uncertainty regarding the future, and their incentives to learn, invent, save, and invest would be impaired.

Here I argue that preference falsification is a complementary, yet more elementary, reason for the persistence of unwanted social choices. Hirschman’s exit is a form of public identification with change, as is his “voice,” which he defines as vocal protest. Preference falsification is often cheaper than escape, and it avoids the risks inherent in public protest. Frequently, therefore, it is the initial response of people who become disenchanted with the status quo. As for Olson’s theory, it posits an identifiable potential opposition to the status quo. Yet preference falsification may cause everyone, including those privately supportive of change, to underestimate the extent of popular dissatisfaction. Such misinformation is a more basic obstacle to change than the organizational weaknesses of readily recognizable reformers. It obscures, even conceals, both the desirability and the possibility of reform.

Collective conservatism entails resistance to change on the part of a community; personal conservatism is an attitude against reform on the part of individuals. The latter is not a necessary condition of the former. A community might display a collective attachment to the status quo even if none of its members has any affinity for the status quo as such.

Public opinion may thus outlive the circumstances that created it. When new conditions make a once-popular decision appear to have been a mistake, or when a once-functional structure becomes patently dysfunctional, public opinion will not necessarily adjust.

In a light-hearted commentary on academia, Francis Cornford once suggested that “nothing is ever done until every one is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced so long that it is now time to do something else.” The just-discussed mechanism offers a possible reason why widely desired changes might fail to materialize. When large numbers of people conceal their misgivings about the status quo, individuals may consider their own disenchantments exceptional. They may think that they are in conflict with the rest of society and hence that by being truthful they would only invite trouble. Through preference falsification, they may thus hold in place structures that they could, if only they acted together, easily change.

There are two additional lessons here. First, a generation may continue to influence public opinion long after its days are over. Second, an established public opinion may get carried into the future by generations that bear no responsibility for its inception.

The Obstinacy of Communism

The failures of communism prompted a few Soviet and East European citizens to criticize official policies and institutions. Such dissidents, as they became known in the West, expressed their frustrations through clandestine self-publications (samizdat) and writings published abroad (tamizdat). Given the chasm between the rhetoric of communism and its achievements, the existence of an opposition is easily understood. Harder to comprehend is the rarity of public dissent prior to the collapse of the communist political monopoly in 1989. The crushed uprisings of earlier years—notably, East Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968—are exceptions that prove the rule. For most of several decades, most members of communist-ruled societies displayed a remarkable tolerance for tyranny and inefficiency. They remained docile, submissive, and even outwardly supportive of the status quo. This subservience is attributable partly to punishments meted out by the communist establishment.

Yet brute terror is only one factor in the obstinacy of communism. The system and its instruments of violence were supported by a pervasive culture of mendacity. Individuals routinely applauded speakers they disliked, joined organizations whose mission they opposed, ostracized dissidents they admired, and followed orders they considered nonsensical, unjust, or inhuman, among other manifestations of consent and accommodation.

Official repression met with the approval of ordinary citizens. Indeed, it was predicated on their complicity. By falsifying their preferences and helping to discipline dissenters, citizens jointly sustained a system that many found abominable. In Havel’s own words, the crucial “line of conflict” thus ran not between the Party and the people but “through each person,” for everyone was “both a victim and a supporter of the system.”

A by-product of this fear-induced reticence to register opposition was pluralistic ignorance with respect to private opinion. The multitudes who objected to communism did not know how widely their resentments were shared. They could sense the repressed discontent of their conformist relatives and close friends; they could observe the hardships in the lives of their fellow citizens; and they could intuit that the mass uprisings of the past would not have occurred in the absence of widespread discontent. Still, they lacked reliable information on how many of their fellow citizens favored radical political change—to say nothing of knowing others’ readiness to react.

The Ominous Perseverance of the Caste System

The caste system is widely perceived as the quintessential example of cultural petrification. It divides Indian society into ranked occupational units, or castes, with membership determined primarily by descent. It has persisted for more than two millennia, surviving anti-Hindu movements, foreign invasions, and the penetration of relatively egalitarian religions, including Islam and Christianity. In modern times the caste system has drawn fire from various groups, and discrimination against the traditionally subservient castes is now illegal. Moreover, some caste norms have weakened under the impact of urbanization and industrialization. Yet as a practical matter caste alliances remain a powerful force in Indian social and political life,

The castes formed in any given locality were economically inter dependent. The latrine cleaners were dependent for food on the cultivators, who worked on land belonging to landowners, who used the services of various servants and artisans, and so on. Such interdependencies meant that if a caste broke away from society, it would both jeopardize its own survival and harm the interests of other castes. The interdependencies generated pressures to keep individuals loyal to the system, lest one withdrawal provoke others.

What is it that makes Indians, especially those socially disadvantaged, seek personal security through actions aimed at hurting the interests of their ambitious peers? Until recent times, Indians were born into a society where public opinion greatly favored the caste system, and where, moreover, they were expected to participate in actions supportive of the status quo. Under the circumstances, the individual Indian’s choice was often to meet the system’s demands or become an outcaste. Most Indians opted to go along with the system, even if privately they found it offensive. This explanation sheds light on how the caste sanctions have been self-reproducing, not on how the sanctions arose. At some stage, the upper castes must have used massive force to put the system in place. But once formed, the system would have continued to reproduce itself, generation after generation, with the upper castes joining, though not always leading, the campaigns against rule breakers. By helping to punish challengers, the lower castes would have played a major role in upholding the system.

“Classes, once they have come into being, harden in their mold and perpetuate themselves, even when the social conditions that created them have disappeared.” So wrote Joseph Schumpeter, in dismissing ahistorical explanations of observed class structures. The foregoing explanation for the extraordinary durability of India’s caste system accords a central role to the past. It suggests that expectations rooted in history have played a key role in keeping Indians loyal to the system. If Indian history had been different, so would subsequent Indian perceptions and expectations and, hence, subsequent Indian choices concerning employment, marriage, and social association. The caste system’s extraordinary durability has stemmed, therefore, at least partly from collective conservatism.

The Unwanted Spread of Affirmative Action

A political realm in which preference falsification is especially common is race relations. The source of preference falsification on the issue is the fear of being stigmatized as a racist or, in the case of black Americans, as an abettor of racism. Racism evokes such dreadful images that individuals to whom the charge sticks can expect to suffer social indignities, attacks from the press, and even the destruction of their careers. And the possibility of being accused of sinister racial motives is present in a vast array of contexts. On matters as diverse as rape, broadcasting standards, and deficit reduction, one may be accused of racism for taking a position perceived as unfair to minorities, especially to blacks. Race thus makes for a huge “gap between the public and private selves,” observes Shelby Steele. “Publicly, we usually adhere to the received wisdom that gives us the most advantageous ‘racial face’; privately we are harassed by the uncensored thoughts and feelings that occur to us spontaneously.”

Equal treatment for individuals does not imply equality of results for racial groups. Most Americans reject the racial quotas, timetables, and guidelines instituted under the rubric of “affirmative action” as a means of moving blacks toward parity with whites in education, employment, and ultimately wealth and status.

White Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to special privileges for blacks. But they show extreme caution in expressing themselves publicly, for fear of being labeled as racists. In the process, they drive a wedge between public and private opinion on an array of issues that touch on race, including affirmative action.

In accordance with King’s dream, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 destroyed the legal foundations of white racism, committing the United States to the principle of “equal opportunity.” Within just a few years, however, the civil rights agenda metamorphosed into a campaign to achieve “equal results” in short order through affirmative action. Whatever its intent, the new approach promoted blatant color consciousness: a firm that must have a racially balanced work force cannot judge applicants solely by the “content of their character.”

Grim statistics suggest that affirmative action may not be the most effective response to black poverty. Indeed, a number of eminent scholars, including some who are black, maintain that affirmative action is a remedy better suited to past maladies than to those of the present. Their ranks include Stephen Carter, Richard Epstein, Nathan Glazer, Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and William Julius Wilson. These dissenters do not deny that many individual blacks have benefited from the instituted racial quotas. They recognize, however, that the gains have gone disproportionately to blacks already well-off. And they emphasize that the benefits have been accompanied by high social, psychological, and economic costs. Double standards put all blacks under a cloud of suspicion, including those advancing on their own merits. The knowledge that certain places are reserved for minorities discourages black effort. Decisions made to satisfy affirmative action targets create inefficiencies that reduce the competitiveness of the American economy, with adverse consequences for all groups. Nonblacks whose careers have been thwarted to make room for less qualified blacks, and many others who suspect that they may have suffered, see themselves as victims of “reverse discrimination”; their resentments fuel racial disharmony. Finally, by making it hazardous to fire, demote, or even fail to promote blacks, lest one be sued for job discrimination, affirmative action breeds credentialism—a tendency to put great weight on qualifications that third parties can readily understand, such as educational degrees and formal experience. Credentialism favors the ablest and best educated blacks; it hurts the unskilled, the poorly educated, and the young, especially since affirmative action has been extended to other groups with generally superior credentials, like white women.

Insofar as affirmative action hurts blacks as a group, individual blacks who have supported the official agenda bear some responsibility. And insofar as American society suffers, every American who has engaged in preference falsification carries a share of the blame. Does my explanation amount to “blaming the victim”? If by this one means that victims contribute to their own victimization, the answer is an emphatic yes. The victims of oppressive, misguided, and counterproductive policies invite the perpetuation of their misery whenever they hide, shade, or distort their convictions. That they face very strong pressures to conform does not deny them free will. They are not passive objects caught in the toils of a machine made and preserved entirely by others. The abusive machine may have been built at an earlier time, possibly before they were born; but at some point they themselves began, or will begin, taking part in its maintenance. The pressures that weigh on victims of a policy are sustained at least partly by their own choices.

However, if “blaming the victim” is taken to mean that the victim is unequivocally wrong to engage in preference falsification, the answer is no. It is not immoral to avoid social isolation, material deprivation, and physical injury—although people who willingly bear such penalties do deserve special recognition. Nor is it a sign of mental deficiency to perceive that the penalties for speaking out outweigh the probable gains. The victim’s conformism is ordinarily based on a keen appreciation of his powerlessness as a person and of the advantages of social approval. He is as much a prisoner of an oppressive situation as he is a perpetrator, for he cannot correct it unilaterally.

Part III: Distorting Knowledge

Public Discourse and Private Knowledge

In principle, preference falsification can alter the appearance of one’s personality without modifying its essence. Yet in practice preference falsification does affect private preferences. It distorts public discourse—the corpus of assertions, arguments, and opinions in the public domain. In turn, the distortion of public discourse transforms private knowledge—the understandings that individuals carry in their own heads. The transformation of private knowledge ends up reshaping private preferences.

What is the origin of the models that individuals carry in their heads? One source is personal experimentation. Trial-and-error learning can be slow, however, and potentially very costly. The first fertilizer that a farmer tries could destroy his crops, leaving him bankrupt. In any case, making sense of even a narrow segment of reality can overwhelm a lone individual’s cognitive capabilities.

Most of our models are based at least partly on knowledge provided by others. In a vast array of contexts, we rely heavily on public discourse to decide what is fair, right, good, natural, safe, and economical. Conscious of our acute need for ready knowledge, groups pursuing particular agendas fill public discourse with observations and arguments advantageous to their own causes. They end up regulating our private knowledge, and thus also our private preferences.

What gives the informed potentially immense power over the minds of the uninformed is that free riding on the knowledge of others is an essential vehicle for overcoming one’s cognitive limitations. If others have investigated an issue in depth and their judgment can be trusted, one can dispense with the trouble of reflection by appropriating their apparent understandings. So it is that we consult travel agents in planning a vacation and draw on the views of pundits in assessing the merits of competing political programs. In seeking guidance from experts we effectively transfer to them control over our thoughts.

We rely on a special heuristic, the heuristic of social proof. If a great many people think in a particular way, they must know something we ourselves do not—as in the maxim “two heads are better than one.” The basis of our own judgment becomes that “everyone knows” what is best or right. In effect, we believe an explanation, assertion, prediction, or evaluation because most others do. The uses of social proof are not limited to matters on which we do not experiment or think for ourselves. Even where we possess independent knowledge, the fact that our perceptions are shared assures us of their correctness.

Like other heuristics, the heuristic of social proof serves us admirably in diverse contexts. A very common view usually carries a great deal of truth. As a rule, therefore, we make fewer mistakes by accepting a dominant belief than by rejecting it. Through social proof we can settle complex decisions without having to think deeply. Yet social proof is not a riskless device for economizing on mental effort. If an erroneous belief gains a foothold in people’s minds, the use of social proof may cause it to spread and strengthen.

So appeals to reason and to social proof are not mutually exclusive categories of persuasion. Indeed, as a rule they are undertaken together. A lobbyist arguing that his constituents deserve a subsidy will in the same breath claim that most members of society feel the same way. Even in scholarship, where the authentication of ideas is supposed to be based solely on logic and evidence, appeals to social proof are common. Academic writers routinely cite great scholars to bolster the credibility of their assumptions and inferences.

From a logical standpoint, mere repetition should not enhance the attractiveness of a choice. If you already know that I consider defense spending too high, reiterations of this point give you no new information; hence, they should not affect your own judgment. In reality, we routinely accord informational value to such repetition. We equate multiple exposures to a single belief with the consensus of a group, effectively substituting reiteration for social proof. This is why repetition is a common instrument of persuasion. The informational value of repetition is rooted in one of the heuristics we use to overcome our cognitive limitations: the availability heuristic.

The critical implication is that the flimsiest suggestion as to the merits of a political option may serve as grounds for embracing it with confidence. If the opinions of others are known, so much the better. On the assumption that others have reasons for taking the positions they do, we will internalize whatever opinion seems dominant. Should the need arise for justifying a borrowed opinion, we will do so easily. Our justifications often come from slogans, generalizations, and assertions offered by the mass media. The media help shape not only our positions on issues of the day but also the shallow explanations with which we meet challenges to our views.

The softness or hardness of a belief must not be confused with its power, which is its potential influence over behavior. A belief based solely on social proof—one that is extremely soft—may generate wild passions, as when a student participates fervently in a revolutionary movement whose program she has never read. By the same token, a belief formed through extensive personal experience—one that is very hard—might elicit little action. An educator convinced that schools are in decline will not necessarily act on this information; fearing objections, he might opt to keep quiet.

Insofar as private knowledge rests on public discourse, it can show sensitivity to anything affecting the substance or constitution of public discourse. Faulty models or flawed accounts of public opinion may warp an individual’s private knowledge. So can preference falsification on the part of other individuals trying themselves to avoid social penalties. Some forms of preference falsification alter public discourse, and all affect public opinion. Therefore, preference falsification can distort any private knowledge, hard or soft.

The Unthinkable and the Unthought

The Islamic scholar Mohammed Arkoun makes two distinctions in characterizing public discourse in the Islamic world. One is between the thinkable and the unthinkable, the other between the thought and the unthought.

An unthinkable belief is a thought that one cannot admit having, or even characterize as worth entertaining, without raising doubts about one’s civility, morality, loyalty, practicality, or sanity. An unthought belief is an idea that is not even entertained. Underlying Arkoun’s interpretation of Islamic history is the notion that a belief treated as unthinkable eventually disappears from human consciousness, that it moves from the realm of the thought to that of the unthought.

By transferring beliefs from the realm of the thinkable to that of the unthinkable, social pressures induce the withdrawal of those beliefs from public discourse. The consequent reconstitution of public discourse distorts private knowledge. In particular, it makes people progressively less conscious of the disadvantages of what is publicly favored and increasingly more conscious of the advantages. As a result, private opinion moves against the publicly unfavored alternatives. Having lessened their public popularity, preference falsification thus ends up also lessening their private popularity.

Insofar as public discourse carries information on public preferences, pressure groups have an incentive to regulate it. They do, in fact, reward the articulation of certain thoughts and penalize that of others. They establish what facts may be stated, what words used, and what arguments advanced with impunity. Just as pressures against the vocalization of particular preferences breed preference falsification, those against the expression of particular thoughts generate knowledge falsification. Undertaken as a means of preference falsification, knowledge falsification has an unintended effect: it alters the composition of public discourse, making favored messages more common and unfavored ones less so. An immediate consequence is the distortion of public opinion, and a longer-run consequence is the distortion of private knowledge and private opinion.

The holder of a publicly unquestioned belief faces no reminders of its weaknesses. He finds public discourse to be loaded with facts and arguments consistent with his belief. By contrast, the holder of a belief at odds with public discourse is routinely reminded of the flaws in his thinking. He feels pressured, therefore, to revise his beliefs. If nothing else, he finds himself gripped by doubt and confusion.

The generic name for adjustments that reinforce a tendency, orientation, or outcome is positive feedback. In the present context, the instrument of positive feedback is adjustments in private preferences. These adjustments either strengthen the incumbent equilibrium or replace it with a more extreme alternative. Either way, they have a far-reaching implication for social efficiency: an inefficient decision will become efficient if enough people support it publicly for a sufficiently long time.

In view of the common tendency to equate “what exists” with “what is best,” this is a significant finding. Also significant is that efficiency, inasmuch as it is attained, need not result from a careful balancing of preexisting private interests. Efficiency may be the outcome of adjustments driving private opinion into conformity with an originally inefficient choice.

Earlier I showed that preference falsification may cause the persistence of an inefficient choice. This chapter has shown that preference falsification may also account for cognitive adjustments that will make the inefficiency disappear. Each of these two processes contributes to social stability, the former by blocking the attainment of reformist objectives, the latter by pushing such objectives into the unthought. As an inhibitor of change, preference falsification gets the status quo accepted publicly through the stick of punishment and the carrot of social acceptance. As a distorter of knowledge, it gets the status quo accepted privately.

The Blind Spots of Communism

Personal observations, opinion surveys, and revisionist writings thus all support the view that citizens of the Soviet bloc, however conscious they became of specific communist failures, tended to retain faith in communism itself. Evidently communist ideology blunted their ability to look at communism critically. Official indoctrination provides only part of the explanation. Another part lies in the distortions of public discourse generated by preference falsification on the part of the citizens themselves.

The detachment of abstract Marxist thought from the problems of daily survival promoted mental inconsistencies by encouraging individuals to bifurcate incoming information. Slogans, official speeches, and Marxist forecasts went into the theoretical layer of people’s consciousness; evidence of bureaucratic inefficiency and insights into the uses of markets went into the pragmatic layer. But why did Marxist thought remain partitioned from the concerns of everyday existence? The very factor that made citizens of the Soviet bloc conceal their opposition to communist rule made it hazardous to confront communist ideology with communism’s practical failures. An observant worker could not point out, except at personal risk, that his “worker’s state” offered him a lower standard of living than that enjoyed by workers in “bourgeois-ruled” states. Nor could he draw attention to the fact that shortages were far less common in market economies than in the planned economies. So he kept his thoughts to himself and even participated in the dissemination of official myths, misrepresentations, and sophistries. In the process, he refrained from giving his fellow citizens reasons to reconsider their theoretical convictions.

The Unfading Specter of White Racism

Extending the earlier argument, this chapter proposes that, despite the strong opposition recorded by anonymous polls, preference falsification on affirmative action has produced widespread confusion and ignorance about its consequences. In particular, Americans scarcely recognize the costs of affirmative action. Many harbor misconceptions about its benefits and about its gainers and losers. Few realize how the emphasis on affirmative action has diverted attention from the root causes of the prevailing inequalities, to the detriment of truly disadvantaged Americans, black and nonblack. Only some appreciate how double standards are fueling tribalization and, ultimately, endangering the viability of the American nation. Preference falsification on matters of race has produced such effects by narrowing and perverting the relevant public discourse, including debates within Congress, the courts, universities, and the mass media.

The new thinking on race posits a link between the merit of an idea and the identity of its holder. It treats whiteness as an insurmountable obstacle to producing dependable work on racial matters and blackness as a badge of intrinsic intellectual virtue. Notwithstanding the lip service the new thinking pays to Martin Luther King’s vision, it thus perpetuates the very sort of race consciousness that he found so insidious. In point of fact, it is not unusual for outsiders to see things that insiders habitually miss. Outsiders’ minds have not been conditioned by local sensitivities. They are also freer from the pressures that make insiders engage in preference falsification. Thus the most penetrating account of Soviet communism, 1984, was written by an Englishman who had never set foot in a communist country.

Reform communism was initiated by individuals aware of communism’s shortcomings but too tied to old presumptions to generate viable responses. Many of the boldest and most insightful critics of the current racial agenda exhibit an analogous attachment to old ideas. Their thoughts stay clear of the unthinkable, that is, the riskiest connections, findings, and conclusions.

The common theme of the past few chapters has been that preference falsification promotes, fortifies, and preserves myths. Myths arise because the preconceptions that control our interpretations are based partly on social proof. Preference falsification distorts social proof by removing from public discourse facts and arguments that powerful groups deem unmentionable. As such, it has a profound effect on the evolution of private knowledge. It imparts credibility to myths by shielding them from corrective disclosures.

Part IV: Generating Surprise

Unforeseen Political Revolutions

Where the status quo owes its stability to preference falsification, there are people waiting for an opportunity, and perhaps others who can easily be induced, to stand up for change. Some eye-opening event or an apparent shift in social pressures may cause public opposition to swell. The public preferences of individuals are interdependent, so a jump in public opposition may be self-augmenting. Under the right conditions, every jump will galvanize further jumps.

The potential for change is not fully observable. We can never know exactly how a given event will be interpreted; whether a new technology will alter the balance of political power; or what it would take to turn public opinion against the status quo. Such predictive limitations imply that shifts in public opinion, especially large shifts, may catch everyone by surprise. Yet an unforeseen shift in public opinion may subsequently be explained with ease. The shift will bring into the open long-suppressed grievances and draw attention to factors that have made people cease supporting the status quo.

The point remains that widespread antipathy toward the government is not sufficient to mobilize large numbers for revolutionary action. Antigovernment feelings can certainly bring a revolution within the realm of possibility, but other conditions must come together to set it off. So it is that a nineteenth-century Russian journal once declared: “No village has ever revolted merely because it was hungry.” For hungry people to revolt they must not only blame their misery on the government but believe that revolt is a remedy. If the opposition is minuscule, the expected cost of revolting is immense. A person who chooses to follow the call of his conscience will merely compound his misery—unless, of course, he derives immense satisfaction from expressing his antigovernment feelings. By the same token, a revolution may break out in a society where private preferences, and therefore individual thresholds, tend to be relatively favorable to the government. It is necessary only for additions to the opposition to trigger further defections from the government’s ranks. In other words, the threshold sequence must form a bandwagon that is mobile at the prevailing public opposition.

The overall argument depicts the individual member of society as both powerless to generate a revolution and yet potentially very powerful. The individual is powerless because a revolution requires the mobilization of large numbers, but potentially very powerful because under the right circumstances he might set off a chain reaction. Not that the individual can know precisely when he can make a difference. Although he may sense that his chances of sparking a wildfire are unusually great, he can never be certain about the consequences of his own opposition.

Individuals who become increasingly sympathetic to political change do not necessarily publicize their evolving dispositions. If the government enjoys widespread support and is thus very powerful, such individuals remain outwardly loyal to the status quo. In the process, they keep the government, outside observers, opposition leaders, and even one another in the dark as to the regime’s vulnerability. They conceal the developing latent bandwagon that might topple the regime. They disguise the fact that the government’s public support would collapse precipitously if there were even a slight growth in opposition. Sooner or later, an intrinsically minor event brings a few individuals to their boiling points. They take to the streets, unleashing the long-latent bandwagon. The opposition darts to power. These dynamics are captured beautifully by the old Chinese saying, “A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

If a revolution brings into view both real and simulated grievances against the toppled government, and if the two types are often practically indistinguishable, public discourse will offer historians reasons in abundance why society had to overthrow its old order. From these reasons almost any writer will be able to construct an explanation for the observed eruption. Preference falsification is thus a prime reason why accounts of revolution, whether journalistic or scholarly, typically give revolutions the appearance of inevitability, even when they seemed anything but inevitable until they occurred. Preference falsification contributes, in other words, to making our hindsight better than our foresight.

The Fall of Communism and Other Sudden Overturns

A complex array of trends, events, and decisions thus determines a regime’s fate. Some of the relevant factors, like private opinion and revolutionary thresholds, are only imperfectly observable. Herein lies a fundamental obstacle to predicting political revolutions. Because the imperfect observability of private variables is a universal feature, we can expect to be surprised again and again. In the future, as in the past, seemingly tranquil societies will burst aflame with little warning, toppling regimes considered invincible.

The general argument applies to a much broader set of contexts than revolutions that topple national governments. A specific law, regulation, policy, norm, or custom can be abruptly abandoned when people who have helped sustain it suddenly discover a common desire for change. So it is that long-protectionist nations suddenly embrace trade liberalization; fashions appear and disappear inexplicably; and in a matter of years deep-seated prejudices become dangerous to vent. The same phenomenon of abrupt and unforeseen change is also observed in collectivities narrower than entire nations. Academic departments, corporate managements, and social organizations sometimes change direction at astonishing speed, following long periods of continuity that lulled everyone into considering them frozen. The explanation for the sudden shift will often be found in a bandwagon process that alters the character of preference falsification.

The Hidden Complexities of Social Evolution

One of the most enduring splits in scholarly thought concerns the orderliness of what we call the “social order.” On one side are traditions that treat social relationships as simple, continuous, harmonious, predictable, controllable, and efficient. On the other are traditions that recognize and seek to explain complexity, discontinuity, disharmony, unpredictability, uncontrollability, and inefficiency. The theory of general economic equilibrium, which draws inspiration from Newtonian physics, epitomizes the former class. Examples of the latter include evolutionary economics and the emerging discipline of complexity. The arguments developed in this book are in tune with the latter set of traditions. Unforeseen breaks in public opinion are consistent with the idea, common to many evolutionary theories, including some theories of biological evolution, that invisible phenomena may have enormous consequences. The book’s other evolutionary themes include the persistent inefficiencies caused by collective conservatism and the tensions fueled by incongruities between public and private opinion.

Among my key points is that discontinuities, unintended outcomes, and inefficiencies flow from a coherent social process.

The figure bears upon a long-standing controversy concerning the evolutionary role of ideas. The fount of social change, say many intellectual historians and cultural anthropologists, generally lies in the realm of ideas. By this logic, historical explanation ordinarily must begin with an account of what people were thinking. Other scholars, including many Marxists, treat economic structure as “base” and ideas as “superstructure.” Social change flows, in their view, from the institutions that make up the economic structure. Sound historical explanation requires, first and foremost, attention to the evolution of economic institutions. The former position gives absolute priority to people’s inner worlds (left side of the figure); the latter gives priority to people’s outer worlds (right side). One maintains, for example, that the capitalist spirit creates capitalism; the other claims that capitalism creates the capitalist spirit. Each of these views exhibits what has been called the “fallacy of absolute priority.” This is the notion that any causal series must have an absolute first term. It implies, for instance, that the relationship between chicken and egg must start with either one or the other. Yet by allowing for circularity, and thus treating each entity as both a source and a product, we gain a better understanding of the relationship. Similarly, we achieve a more realistic appreciation of the social order once we see that there is no permanent base and no permanent superstructure. Institutions are both causing and caused, and the same goes for ideas.

Like modern biology, some contemporary social theories treat continuous and discontinuous changes as part of a single, unified process. In Joel Mokyr’s theory of technological evolution numerous small innovations set the stage for technological breakthroughs. And in the theory of technological competition developed by Brian Arthur and Paul David, a technology may spread gradually or rapidly, depending on various interactions. Technological choices may remain fixed for long periods punctuated by episodes of vast adaptation. In the social theory of this book, too, continuous and discontinuous changes coexist. In fact, they are causally related. Small events spread over a long period—new personal experiences, communication failures, policy distortions—may suddenly destabilize the political status quo, generating revolutionary transformations in public opinion, public discourse, and the social order. Political discontinuities are thus consistent with the continuous evolution of individual characteristics. A revolution does not require prior breaks in private knowledge and opinion. Nor need it be followed by abrupt changes in private variables.

There are conditions, of course, under which public and private discontinuities come in quick succession. In the course of a revolution that brings a sharp turn in public discourse, long-settled issues become the focus of attention, and everyone gets exposed to reformist arguments. Public discontinuities are followed, therefore, by private discontinuities. Critical to such an outcome is that few members of any given society think deeply on fundamental issues of the social order. People whose views are governed chiefly by social proof ordinarily lack a capacity for mental resistance to new social demands.

It has been observed that our beliefs are strongest when they have been mildly attacked, for then we have become aware of their vulnerability and learned how to counter criticisms. Prior exposure to mild objections thus produces resistance to later persuasion, which then blocks sharp changes in private knowledge and preferences. By implication, beliefs whose counterarguments were unthought are easier to change than ones whose counterarguments, while treated as unthinkable, have enjoyed at least some public exposure. 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.

The possibility of discontinuous social change implies that individual perceptions, experiences, and choices may have disproportionately significant social consequences. And the existence of hidden circular relationships implies that changes may occur through imperfectly observed channels. These two observations yield a pair of additional implications. First, insofar as social outcomes result from interactions among individual actions, collective responses, and preexisting social structures, no person or group will deserve full credit for an unfolding outcome. Observed social outcomes are bound to be unconstructed. Second, no one can reliably imagine all long-term consequences of any given choice. There will be social outcomes that were unintended.

If social outcomes may be unintended and unconstructed, they can leave potential benefits unachieved or produce net losses. This claim goes against the all-too-common view that whatever exists is necessarily optimal. One variant of such unbridled optimism lies in economics. Some schools of economics hold that prices, outputs, and institutions, or at least ones that show persistence, must represent efficient solutions to processes of optimization and equilibration. The argument presupposes, of course, that selection pressures are quick to weed out any inefficiencies, as when high-price firms succumb to competition without delay. Seldom, however, do its exponents check whether the invoked selection pressures are truly strong enough to maintain efficiency.

Preference falsification is itself a form of free riding, for it is undertaken to avoid the personal cost of achieving a desirable social outcome. As such, it is another basic source of inefficiency. If everyone wants a change of regime, yet no one says so, the unanimously disliked political status quo will persist. Where preference falsification differs from Olsonian free riding is that both its practice and its consequences may remain hidden. Indeed, the actual desire for change can exceed the apparent desire, and the produced inefficiencies need not be recognized. It might be said that discerning individuals will sense the commonness of preference falsification. True, but the very pressures that breed preference falsification may keep such insights unexpressed.

Like biological evolution, social evolution is influenced by chance and contingency, in addition, of course, to genuine desires. Just as improbable stresses may destroy a species superbly adapted to common circumstances, so too intrinsically improbable contingencies may limit the political effectiveness of deeply felt and very widespread needs. Contingencies may maintain, even expand, gaps between private and public opinion. Social evolution does not always bring progress, if by that one means increasingly satisfying social policies and institutions. It is an imperfect process that generates happiness and sadness, triumphs and defeats, rises as well as declines in efficiency.

Preference Falsification and Social Analysis

The “march of science,” wrote Henri Poincaré, is simultaneously “towards unity and simplicity” and “towards variety and complexity.” On the one hand, “new relations are continually being discovered between objects which seemed destined to remain forever unconnected; scattered facts cease to be strangers to each other and tend to be marshalled into an imposing synthesis.” On the other hand, “we are continually perceiving details ever more varied in the phenomena we know, where our crude senses used to be unable to detect any lack of unity.” Both processes, Poincaré went on, are critical to the cumulation of useful knowledge.

This book has developed a series of interrelated mechanisms that connect the past with the present. In doing so, it has simultaneously served both the ends of “unity and simplicity” and those of “variety and complexity.” With regard to the first pair of objectives, the overall model incorporates just a few relationships, all derived from a small set of variables. The relationships form a coherent whole, so they provide a unified explanation for phenomena that tend to be analyzed within separate academic specialties. They allow one to connect, for instance, a society’s intellectual development (the domain of intellectual history) with the transformation of its economic institutions (the province of economic history). With regard to the latter pair of objectives, the argument shows how a given mechanism may account for substantively very different outcomes, such as persistent dictatorship and stable democracy, or beliefs in human equality and beliefs in natural differences. The argument thus helps account for the richness of human history. In making sense of historical variety, I have attached much weight to small events. The book thus provides a rationale, apart from benefits like the quenching of curiosity, for the documentation of historical particulars. It shows that some details of the past may have made a crucial difference to subsequent developments.

The limitations of the dual preference model stem from a combination of two factors. First, some of its elements are related to one another nonlinearly, which is to say that their sensitivities to each other and to outside shocks are variable. In a nonlinear system the consequences of a given perturbation can vary enormously. Depending on circumstances, the effects may be disproportionately large or small. In the present context, nonlinearities are rooted in interdependencies among individual public preferences. They take the form of variations in the sensitivity of public opinion to the distribution of individual characteristics. For example, massive changes in private opinion may leave public opinion undisturbed, only to be followed by a tiny change that transforms public opinion radically. The second factor that limits the model’s explanatory and predictive powers is that the interdependencies among public preferences are imperfectly observable. The joint effect of the two factors is to make it impossible to predict with certainty the consequences of any given political development.

A model’s ability to demonstrate why explanation may prove easier than prediction should not be taken lightly. In the social sciences the two concepts are often used interchangeably, as though a model that yields insights into the past must be equally good at predicting the future. In addition, retrospective accounts seldom make clear what actors actually knew and what they could have known. Frequently such accounts suggest that recorded events “had” to happen, failing to explain why, if so, they were not predicted. Many accounts of the East European Revolution make it seem to have been inevitable. They are all very misleading. If the old communist order were still in place, would we not be advancing persuasive reasons for the permanence of communism? Who would be paying serious attention to a suggestion that communism could easily fall? The truth is that if no revolution had occurred, few observers of Eastern Europe would consider the region’s ongoing political stability a puzzle.

It might appear “unscientific” to assert, in the absence of systematic polling data, that a regime, institution, policy, or political agenda is privately unpopular. Yet the scientific ethos demands only that we gather the best data available and interpret our evidence in the light of sound theory. It does not require us to ignore problems on which data are relatively scarce or imperfect. In any case, the unavailability of good opinion data may itself be a sign of preference falsification. Just as it was significant to Sherlock Holmes that the dog did not bark, it was politically significant that, unlike West Germany, East Germany prohibited independent polling. In the same vein, it is highly significant that American universities, which teach thousands of courses on the social costs of contemporary white racism, offer few courses that are explicitly critical of affirmative action. Dogs that do not bark—untaught courses, unavailable survey data—may yield as much useful information as dogs that do.

There have been fruitful attempts to identify instances of preference falsification in the past, even the remote past. For example, some medievalists have developed a technique for determining concealed messages in old philosophical texts. It is based on the following principle. When an experienced writer expresses a view that goes against public opinion, there is strong reason to believe that he is sincere. When he conveys a view supportive of public opinion, however, one cannot rule out the possibility that he is trying to avoid punishment, especially if the view contradicts what he expressed elsewhere. Medieval philosophers wrote at a time when challenges to popular beliefs often brought retribution. Under the circumstances, they made it a practice to present their most original and potentially most controversial thoughts “between the lines,” for the exclusive benefit of other independent thinkers. As Leo Strauss and others have documented, in the depths of a treatise an able writer would surreptitiously contradict an orthodox tenet that he had defended in many conspicuous passages, with an eye toward exposing his dissent to cultivated readers likely to be sympathetic, but also hiding it from unsophisticated readers likely to be offended. Careful readings of the works of Farabi, Maimonides, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Spinoza, and other towering philosophers suggest that they tended to express their heretical views in relatively inconspicuous passages and in deliberately ambiguous terms, probably to escape persecution.

We come at last to the theory’s potential refutability. Can the propositions and explanations offered herein be disproved? Can they be tested against alternative theories? The answer to these questions is a qualified yes. I start with the qualification. In the social sciences, tests that can be imagined cannot always be performed. One cannot rerun the twentieth century to show that in the absence of preference falsification on the part of Soviet citizens communism would have collapsed long before it finally did. Nor can one rerun Indian history to demonstrate that if Indians had always been in close contact with other cultures there would have been no doctrine of karma. In practice, therefore, we must often rely on natural experiments—strings of uncontrolled events that provide opportunities for investigating the plausibility of proposed theories. But natural experiments are seldom precise enough. Their power is often diminished by variations in factors that one would have wanted to hold fixed. As a result, no single natural experiment will rule out all alternative explanations. Inevitably, our evaluations of alternative theories must rely on how well they explain data from different sources and on how well they agree with our overall understanding of human civilization. This is one reason why I considered it critical to apply my argument to disparate cases—the caste system, communism, and American race relations.

The view, promoted most vigorously by Karl Popper, that science proceeds through conclusive refutations has given way in some circles of physicists to a new view whose most effective expositor has been Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn holds that science advances through the rise of new paradigms that expand the range of explicable phenomena. The Kuhnian philosophy of science recognizes that an observation might admit more than one explanation.

There is no way to foresee all the ways in which future instances of preference falsification will make a difference. But one can identify broad areas of ongoing human conflict where the phenomenon will probably continue to play a large role. Throughout the world, nationalist, irredentist, and tribalist movements are pressuring individuals to assert differentiating identities. In so doing, they are raising fears, hostilities, and countermovements among threatened groups. Religious fundamentalisms are pursuing analogous goals with similar effects, invariably in reaction to real or imagined secular threats to religious freedom. Another huge battleground involves gender roles and family structure. Various participants in conflict over these issues, from militant feminists to cultural conservatives, are striving to make it imprudent to defend ideas or behaviors to which they object. Economic distribution constitutes yet another issue for which preference falsification is a major factor. On matters ranging from land reform to social security, pressures exist to make people misrepresent their dispositions. Finally, especially in economically underdeveloped regions, struggles over development strategy are generating heavy social pressures to limit public discourse. In each of these areas and many others, future patterns of preference falsification will have enduring legacies. They will foster political stability, accentuate social trends, create winners and losers, and shape the evolution of human knowledge.