Quick Take: Can "Preference Falsification" Be Defeated?

If most people agree that the naked emperor is wearing beautiful clothes, then we have a very serious social problem

Steven Pinker, one of the greatest intellectuals alive, is releasing one of those modern books with a really long subtitle¹ later this month. Most interestingly to me, the book discusses a pretty fashionable idea — “preference falsification” — that is becoming increasingly popular both as a concept and as attitude to everyday life.

The term “preference falsification” was coined in the 1987 by the academic Timur Kuran in this paper. In tune with the time, the paper analyzes the idea that some voters — that Kuran described as “chameleon voters” — do not hold fixed preferences over public‑policy options, and just choose the most popular idea so they look smart and avoid backlash.

This is a development of a pretty popular notion in the era: that many conservative voters in many countries were ashamed to tell pollsters they would vote for the horrible rightist candidate of the day, and thus you ended up with such candidate always getting slightly better results in the actual elections. What Kuran did was giving this concept a turn of the screw, making it applicable to people who would engage in “preference falsification” not just in front of the pollster, but as a general strategy to protect their careers and social standing. As he wrote:

As utility maximizers, individuals naturally take account of the costs and benefits that stem from the preferences they convey. This does not mean that they never oppose popular policies. Sometimes they express their opposition in the expectation of changing people's preferences. At other times they do so knowing full well not only that they are powerless but also that through their opposition they damage their reputation in the eyes of powerful groups. The reason, as I argue below, is that they also derive utility from the act of expressing their preferences, that is, from displaying personal integrity. If people derive utility from expressing their preferences, it follows that they incur an opportunity cost from concealing them.

The focus of Kuran’s paper, then, “is on the mechanics and implications of preference falsification, which occurs when an individual's public policy preference differs from his private preference - that is, when the preference he declares in public differs from that he would express in a secret ballot.”

This was a really smart paper and Kuran argued, correctly, that preference falsification can have profound implications for democratic decision‑making and the efficiency of public‑choice equilibria. Anybody who remembers Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” will rapidly understand such implications. In Chinese culture, “preference falsification” is a pretty obvious concept, well-known by all educated people because of an old story that makes Andersen’s tale seem pretty tame and even childish:

Emperor Whisperers: Point Deer Make Horse

As a historian, I find “preference falsification” to be a fascinating concept. In every society, in every era, one can constantly find “virtue-signalers” making every effort to make it clear that they are in line with the current thing (paganism, bombing Middle Eastern countries, not bombing Middle Eastern countries, subsidized emasculation of children) and that they trust the Leader even more than the Leader trusts him or herself. After one looks at a few of these cases, it soon becomes clear that many, if not most, of these virtue-signalers are engaging in preference falsification and they would support the exact opposite thing if they found it profitable.

Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations in which we would be really dumb if we were not to use preference falsification. My father, a member of Catalonia’s underground Communist Party during Spain’s Franquismo and a lifelong, old-school Commie, happened to be a poor kid who studied hard, becoming a very good branch employee who rose through the ranks and ended up a banking executive. This often put him in difficult situations with moneyed people who didn’t suspect that we had a copy of Das Kapital back home.

In particular, my father loved to tell me a story about how one day he went to a funeral with my mother in 1988, because the wife of a good client had died. It so happened that this funeral coincided in time and space with that of a very famous figure of the late Francoist regime, Francisco Franco’s widow Carmen Polo.

Carmen and Hubby, in the early 1970s.

So my mum and dad were walking around the cemetery, and they came across another of my father’s clients, a very wealthy man who became very emotional when he saw my father, thinking that he was there to attend Carmen’s funeral like a good Francoist. With tears in his eyes, he embraced my father, saying:

“I always knew you were one of the good ones, Román. I always knew!”

From that point on, my Communist father told me, he was constantly invited to right-wing events and meetings, and he always had to excuse himself with one convenient excuse that the Francoists would accept: that he was sympathetic to their cause, but he also was a monarchist and couldn’t do anything that His Majesty — whom Franco had appointed as his successor — wouldn’t approve of first².

Of course, my father hated the king and all his works. And yet, as a banking executive, in public he had no choice other than systematically engaging in preference falsification.

In the end, preference falsification is not that mysterious. It’s just about people who would say one thing but find it easier to say another. Rob Henderson explains here that a 2019 Cato/YouGov survey found that 25% of those with a high school education worried about job risks over their politics. The figure rose to 34% per cent for university graduates and an astonishing 44% for those with postgraduate degrees.

As Henderson adds, “the higher your education, the better you understood the rules of the game and the cost of breaking them.” In my experience in big media companies and big international banks, filled to the brim with Ivy Leaguers and the like, it’s more like 90% who worry about job risks over their politics. I’ve written extensively about how thinkers throughout history have understood this, so they used esoteric trickery to convey hidden messages in their work:

Quick Take: Look for Esoteric Writing

All thinkers — all people, arguably — ever have had opinions that they knew would damage their careers or make their heads easily detachable from their necks; many just cheer for the current thing, while the brave run risks and almost always ending up lamenting the choice. Cowards with principles just engage in some degree of preference falsification while hiding secret messages within their work, hoping that those smart to notice will just do that, and they become esoteric writers.

I’m not innocent of this murkiness. In my daily life, I hate lying, and yet I understand the necessity of a degree of duplicity. As a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, for example, I soon realized that unchecked immigration would become a disaster for Western societies, at a time — some fifteen years ago — when this wasn’t a fashionable thing to say, and learned to keep my mouth shut about it³.

What I never did was to cheer for mass immigration with the rest of the virtue-signalers. I was so successful in staying a centrist that, at one point in Brussels, two female colleagues approached me to discuss whether we should come together to denounce to the WSJ honchos a fourth colleague who had made negative comments about Muslims in the city after a string of terror attacks. How dare he!

I made a show of considering the issue carefully and convinced the two wannabe snitches that we would all be better off if we kept things quiet, inside the Brussels office. I would talk to the fourth colleague so he would be more discreet about his awful opinions, and would recommend him some reading options so that he would know what the current thing was.

I was lucky. Only a fool or a hero would be the kid in “The Emperor's New Clothes,” insisting that the emperor is not wearing any new clothes for a parade. The rational reaction is to praise the emperor’s new clothes, out of flattery and fear. In Andersen’s tale, the kid is vindicated and not punished, although it’s very possible that this ending wasn’t that preferred by the author.

In a 2014 article in the Times Literary Supplement, Janetta Goldstein wrote that Andersen had an alternative ending for The Emperor’s New Clothes, which he revealed to Mary Howitt, his English-language translator. In that ending, the people beat up the child who spoke up, “and those who had no walking sticks threw mud at him.” The emperor, meanwhile, goes on with his procession, which sounds a lot like a Chinese ending⁴.

1. “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life” (Scribner). In Amazon here.

2. Quick Spanish politics refresher: the king quickly betrayed Franco’s principles, as Franco fully expected, and pushed for the quick democratization and current-thinging of Spain, which honestly was the only real option available at the time, the height of the Cold War, outside of an unlikely Communist takeover. Right wingers still, reluctantly, respected the king, being conservative upholders of traditions, and to this day that has given Spain’s monarchy leeway to remain politically neutral.

3. At the time, there were very few anti-immigration parties with any prospects anywhere and every editor in the paper would have been shocked to learn that I wasn’t enthusiastic about facilitating the international movement of labor so our bosses would have to pay their gardeners less. Even back then, I knew this shouldn’t be a controversial or even a right-coded issue (it was the right who pushed for mass immigration first, while the left followed Karl Marx himself and opposed it, for the most part, roughly until the 1990s) but still I had nothing to gain by being vocal on this matter. When specifically asked I responded honestly: as the father of two mixed-race kids, the very last fucking thing I honestly wanted was that actual, real xenophobes would become ascendant in the West because the supposed moderates were too dumb and arrogant to see a failed policy when it killed its citizens live on TV. So, yeah, I would like a little bit of law enforcement on the border, please. Thank you. Most rational people, even if very much into the current thing, had no problem with this objection, until the woke explosion of the late 2010s made even that argument toxic for many.

4. To the best of my knowledge, the whole issue with the alleged, alternative ending to Andersen’s tale is still been furiously debated by scholars.