Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.

• Author: Lomasky, Loren E.

It is astounding how many of the most elegant and penetrating theories of political economy grow out of ideas so simple as on first blush to seem prosaic. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is a metaphorical illustration of the idea that the uncoordinated self-interested activities of a diverse multitude can regularly generate an order that serves the common good. The model of the Prisoner's Dilemma is a sort of obverse, revealing that individuals who act with impeccable rationality can generate outcomes inferior to what would have come about had they all been less rational. Malthus created a stir that has not yet subsided by observing that arithmetic growth in food production does not go at all well with exponential increase in population, and Marx narrates the epic rise and fall of Capital as the inexorable playing out of the destiny of an economic system that dies unless it can continuously feed on surplus value expropriated from labor. Each of these ideas has been the fount of a voluminous literature that has invigorated economic science. It does not, of course, follow that an intellectually beautiful and stimulating idea is also true.

Timur Kuran's central insight in Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) is also delightfully simple. People, he reminds us, often have reasons to express preferences they do not genuinely hold. If midway through his dinner party my boss asks me if I'm having a good time, I am apt not to reveal my conviction that the tastelessness of the food is matched only by that of the guests. Rather, I remark with all the sincerity and enthusiasm I am able to muster how delighted I am to be in attendance. If at that party a group of the guests is ruing the low quality of television fare and remarking that they tune in only to Public Broadcasting Service programs, I may choose simply to nod and go along rather than reveal my preference for a broadcast episode of The Simpsons or X-Files to any number of Masterpiece Theatre episodes. Whether for fear of some setback to one's material prospects or from apprehension about what people might think of one, the gate to the recesses of one's beliefs and attitudes may be kept securely locked.

What one chooses to reveal to others is what Kuran calls a public preference. Public preferences may vary systematically according to the particular public with whom one communicates and how much frankness toward that party is deemed desirable. If a private preference is to be strictly parallel, then it will be what one reveals to oneself. Perhaps because he finds such a notion of self-revelation opaque, Kuran instead defines a person's private preference as "what he would express in the absence of social pressures" (17). Although the force of the contrast will usually be clear enough, this way of expressing it is somewhat defective. First, people sometimes disguise their private preferences for reasons other than social pressure; one may wish to amuse others or to be thought a bold and unconventional fellow or to conceal something for the interlocutor's own good despite not being pressured in any way (except internally) to do so. Second, and more important, one's own private preference structure can incorporate significant ambiguities. I shall say something about the latter point in the concluding paragraphs of this essay.

A divergence between public and private preferences, according to Kuran, constitutes preference falsification. For two main reasons, it tends to be costly. First, normally by expressing a preference one is causally efficacious to a greater or lesser degree in bringing about the object of that preference. If you prefer pancakes to eggs and accurately reveal that preference to the waitress, then it is pancakes you will get. If you vote for holding the company picnic in August rather than June, you increase the probability of an August picnic. Preference falsification thus sacrifices causal efficacy. Second, we often find dissembling distasteful, especially when the need to do so seems imposed by external circumstance. As anyone who has written a letter to the editor, cheered at a sporting event, or carried on a vociferous bar-stool debate knows, truthful self-expression is itself a consumption good. That too is sacrificed by preference falsification.

Countering these costs is the sobering fact that just as you can affect the world, the world can affect you: Recall the part of the world represented by one's boss and the other guests. Dinner parties are small stuff, but affairs of state exemplify a similar cost structure. In tyrannous regimes one unfortunate instance of allowing a private preference to slip out can result in a trip to the Gulag. In liberal democratic societies consequences are rarely so dire. Nonetheless, there too preference revelation is constrained. Being regarded as someone...