“Preference Falsification: How Social Conformity As an Interdependent, Recursive, and Multilevel Process Corrupts Public Knowledge”, 2021-12-14 ():
Throughout life, people often misrepresent their preferences to maintain social harmony, yet the cumulative effects of individual acts of conformity on society are largely underexplored. This phenomenon is captured by the economic theoretical framework of Preference Falsification, which describes why people misrepresent their preferences in the face of social pressures, and how misrepresentation accumulates to broader misunderstandings that can fuel political polarization.
We first describe why the current political climate may foster motivations to misrepresent preferences, as individuals are increasingly strongly identified with their political groups and siloed into like-minded communities with strong pressures to conform to group norms.
Next, we adopt a psychological lens to understand Preference Falsification at different levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level, to examine how failures in cognitive empathy and statistical learning facilitate social conformity that gives rise to falsification, and (2) at the collective level, to examine how misrepresented preferences propagate across social relationships and structures.
Our goal is to advance theory by demonstrating that Preference Falsification provides a generative framework that describes how various micro-level phenomena related to social influence can propagate across social structures and corrupt public knowledge.
Ultimately, we argue that Preference Falsification limits access to accurate and truthful information, which fuels misinformation and poses a barrier to social change.
[Keywords: deception, impression management, information processing, biases, polarization, preference falsification, social conformity, social influence]