Preference Falsification
Timur Kuran · 1995
"People routinely misrepresent what they want under social pressure. Aggregated, those small lies hold up regimes and norms almost nobody privately supports, make them look stable right up to the moment they collapse, and corrupt what a society is able to know about itself."
You tell the host the food is delicious. Multiply that reflex by a whole society and you get a country where everyone applauds a system that almost no one believes in — and where each person, seeing everyone else applaud, concludes they are alone in their doubt. Timur Kuran, an economist, calls the reflex preference falsification: misrepresenting your wants under perceived social pressure. His claim in Private Truths, Public Lies is that it is not a footnote to social life but one of its load-bearing structures — the reason widely disliked arrangements persist, the reason their fall surprises everyone including the experts, and the reason public opinion can be a poor guide to what the public actually thinks.
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