Preference Falsification
mra...@willamette.edu
"How can societies experience such dramatic reversals [as the end of
apartheid in South Africa, widespread smoking bans and Republican
control of Congress] in such short periods? In his inventive and
sometimes astonishing book, Timur Kuran offers an answer--one that
bears not just on revolutionary movements, but also on feminism,
conformity, cognitive dissonance, the moral majority, 'outing'
homosexuals, rationality, hate speech codes, Gorbachev, hippies and
the caste system (all of which make prominent appearances in these
pages)...Much of the interest of Kuran's book is owed to his
insistence, unusual and refreshing among economists (of whom he is
one), that people's choices, and even their desires, are not given and
fixed, but are a function of social and psychological conditions,
above all pressures imposed by other people...Kuran's book is a
terrific success."
--
Basically the short explanation is that large numbers of people
believe or do Z, but keep their mouths shut about it because Z is
unpopular. But when a shift of happens, and the people who believe or
do Z are no longer afraid to admit it, that social change can be quite
swift.
So, ob future speculations: What is something you think is currently
regarded as less or more popular than it is due to preference
falsification? When do you think that will no longer suffer from
preference falsification?
--
Mike Ralls