The inspiration for this post was reading this:
“It was a shock to see so many Iranians who had previously minded their own business—merchants, professionals, clerics, students, housewives—clash violently with police. The economist Timur Kuran explains this change as the consequence of “preference falsification.” Years of …surveillance had taught Iranians to conceal their grievances. Yet when a minor provocation—the publication of an editorial—shook things up, the discontent poured out. The more that people were exposed to their compatriots’ views, the more they shared their own, touching off a chain reaction of disclosure.
Preference falsification explains how a revolution could be both inevitable and unforeseeable. Subterranean pressures mount, unnoticed, until they erupt.
Yet [this] presumes that people have stable preferences to reveal. Do they? … People don’t know how to act, so they take cues from their neighbors or react to their opponents. With everyone predicating their behavior on everyone else’s, norms shift rapidly, and complicated feedback effects ensue.” - Daniel Immerwahr, The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen. The New Yorker August 4, 2025
Which got me thinking and reading about “preference falsification”, a term coined by the economist Timur Kuran. Preference falsification occurs when individuals misrepresent their private viewpoints about public matters out of a desire for social acceptance or to curry favor with a powerful group. More from my reading on preference falsification:
Kuran, Timur (1995) Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, p 114.
“Preference falsification can inhibit change because … a collective reluctance to change a bad political regime or public policy may be observed as a result. Preference falsification can distort knowledge through the removal of facts and arguments from public discourse that imparts credibility to myths by shielding them from corrective disclosures.”
Davis, William L. (2004) Preference falsification in the economics profession. Econ Journal Watch, no. 2: 359.
“A majority of [American economists] who responded to a survey I conducted admit, at least privately, that academic research mainly benefits academic researchers who use it to advance their own careers and that journal articles have very little impact on our understanding of the real world and the practice of public policy… Preference falsification leads to inefficiencies and propagates ignorance.”
Kinsella, Stephen (2009) Preference Falsification in Teaching. Econ Journal Watch, no. 3: 352.
“The theory of preference falsification develops a framework in which individuals sometimes refrain from displaying privately held preferences or beliefs in order to appease, or curry favor with, a power group…The individual’s reputation will suffer by not adopting the viewpoint of the powerful group…Integrity is defined as the distance between one’s private preferences and one’s public preferences. The closer one’s private and public preferences, the more integrity one retains.
In the former Soviet Union public discourse was regulated with propaganda on a regular basis, causing citizens who challenged the prevailing economic system to use euphemisms to disguise their complaints about Communism. When citizens publicly challenged an official position or a specific policy they did so by appearing sympathetic to broader communist goals. And while protests were allowed, they were generally confined to a “Party-defined zone of acceptability,” which meant that protestors never really criticized the doctrine of Communism itself.
The effect of such behavior in each case has been the reproduction of a public opinion over generations that perpetuated an inefficient policy or institution. And this in turn affects the public discourse of events over time.”
So people go along to get along and cultures ossify. But every once in a while, alternative perspectives break through and the whole thing crumples, sometimes very quickly. That may be happening now, in America, as the Age of Woke passes. That might be why the Language of Woke* feels so…yesterday.
* eg, Privilege, violence (as in “environmental violence”), systems of oppression, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, justice-involved, involuntary confinement, etc.