"Imagine that a person in a position to alter your career invites you to a party at his home. When you arrive at the party, the talk of the moment seems to be about the living room's pale neutral colors, the latest trend in interior decoration. The look does not appeal to you, but you would rather not say so, lest your host be hurt. Feeling pressured to say something, you compliment his 'sophisticated taste'...

"Your evening contained [an instance] of preference falsification, the act of misrepresenting one's genuine wants under perceived social pressures...[Y]ou conveyed impressions at odds with your private thoughts and desires, at least partly to avoid disapproval." (pp.3-4).

"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...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," (pp.4-5).

"[A]nother [distinguishing feature] is that it is a response to real or imagined social pressures to convey a particular preference," (p.5).

"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." (p.16).

"The reason our individual might opt for preference falsification is that his public preferences influence how he is valued and treated...Insofar as he deviates from society's dominant goals, he will lose status and suffer rejection...Through participation in the social system, he gains access to goods and services he could not possibly acquire on his own," (pp.26-27).

"The distinction between in-trinsic and reputational utility is crucial to what follows. Intrinsic utility flows from substantive outcomes, reputational utility from reactions to one's public preferences," (p.29).

"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...that we find satisfaction in speaking our minds, opening up our hearts, acting ourselves. Conversely, when we opt to suppress a thought, misrepresent a want, or assume a phony demeanor, we feel discomfort at having compromised our personhood," (p.31).

"The individual cultivates his individuality maximally by supporting publicly whatever option between 0 and 100 he likes best in private. I will call the ensuing satisfaction his expressive utility. In terms of the notation introduced above, the maximization of expressive utility entails setting y equal to x," (p.31).

• Economists and your economics courses force you to fight a lot of social desirability bias:

• "We should protect American workers from foreign competition"

• "We should only buy American"
• "We should save the [declining X] industry"
• "We should raise minimum wages"
• "We should put people ahead of profits"
• "We should tax the rich more"
• "Corporations are making too much profits"
• "We should spend more on healthcare"

• Not saying there are no good arguments for these, but most people agree with them only because they sound good

"Under common circumstances, the transformations of public opinion will eventually produce an equilibrium. That is, public opinion will become self-reproducing," (p.18).

"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," (p.18).

"A related consequence is the retention of such policies, to the exclusion of alternative policies capable of commanding stable support..which I call collective conservatism.," (p.18).

"[A]nother possible consequence of preference falsification [is] widespread ignorance of the status quo's disadvantages...Insofar as public discourse excludes criticism of fashionable political choices...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," (p.19).

"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," (p.20).

"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," (p.20)

"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. 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," (pp.20-21)