Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference FalsificationPreference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. |
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... experiment that presents a perceptually trivial problem , individual judgments would be immune to group pressures . The experiment he went on to conduct became instantly famous , partly for its elegance , but partly because it stunned ...
... experiment , where a confederate of the experi- menter provides the correct answer before the subject can speak , with all the other confederates continuing to give incorrect answers , the proportion of promajority errors falls to 5.5 ...
... experiments . In one experiment , the figure of a penguin was made to change gradually into that of a man through a succession of images , or vice versa.47 People who saw the sequence in the penguin- to - man direction generally labeled ...
Contents
Collective Conservatism | 105 |
The Obstinacy of Communism | 118 |
The Ominous Perseverance of the Caste System | 128 |
Copyright | |
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