Your Unpopular Opinion Is More Popular Than You Think - FutureIQ

8,564 views Wait, is this logic right? • Oct 25, 2024

Slog Reference: Preference Falsification

Description

Do you think that your opinion is different than everyone else? Are you afraid that your opinion might be unpopular? This thought itself is much more common than you think. We take a lot of decisions in our life assuming the opinions of other people, not realising how much this impacts our day-to-day life. But we may be thinking entirely wrong about how others think. In this episode, we have explained the theory of Preference Falsification that was coined by Timur Kuran in his book “Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification”.

We breakdown the concept along with discussing several real life examples in the spheres of politics, social life, personal & professional spaces. Something as political as should gay marriage be legal to something as trivial as should we go have a pizza party at the office for this week’s Fun Friday activities? Preference falsification is an on-going phenomena which impacts every aspect of our life. We elaborate on hidden preferences, revealed preferences, and explain how this can transform into a preference cascade, and if it is at all possible to escape this cycle.

Click below to buy the book “Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification” by Timur Kuran:
https://tapthe.link/vEIYB2KQ2

More Videos You May Enjoy:
Democracy's Biggest Lie: https://youtu.be/ns57h46YjZ8
From Instinct to Insight - How Do We Really Decide? Bayesian Thinking - Future IQ: https://youtu.be/9_Ffrs0YyX0
You're A Part of A Cult: https://youtu.be/eEfmHpstjSg
Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions? https://youtu.be/CBIm7TqXQ4w
You’re Wrong About Everyone - https://youtu.be/z68pF6oXP20
Group Conformism: https://youtu.be/_XhIECCt_P8
Fighting Misinformation: https://youtu.be/_NVtf7-GNAg

Chapters:
00:00 What is Preference Falsification?
01:55 LGBTQ+ Movement in the US
03:15 Abilene Paradox
06:00 How does this affect different areas of life?
07:10 Impact on Professional Life
08:37 Impact on Political & Social Areas
09:05 Isn't this the same as Conformism?
10:10 Reverse Preference Falsification
12:10 Examples of Preference Cascade
14:17 Examples of Reverse Preference Falsification
16:00 Use of this in Politics
17:15 How can you initiate Reverse Preference Falsification?

Sources Cited:
Men in Saudi: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180975
Abilene Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
Dartmouth preference falsification: https://x.com/paulnovosad/status/1787915830409187513
Sex and Drugs in colleges: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/sex-and-drugs-and-high-school-but-also-social-psychology/384339/
Article analyzing preference falsification and how it collapses: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Related Slog Matches

Preference Falsification

Manual

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Transcript

- Shri Kant what fraction of men in Saudi Arabia do you think support their wives working outside the home Saudi Arabia very little like barely percent 2% the funny thing is the answer differs very widely depending on how you ask and that teaches us a lot about democracy okay how does the answer depend on how you ask it's a straightforward question if you ask men in public most of them say no they do not support their WI working outside the home only 8% of them have their wives working outside okay but if you ask privately if you have a secret ballot 87% support wives working outside can you tell me what's going on 87% they're lying one of them is lying I

0m 50s mean either the men in public are lying or the men in private are lying with the same men how what how this is a concept called prefer falsification okay okay most of these men actually support women working outside the home uhhuh but most of them think that most of the others don't support it oh so their preference on whether or not they support their wives working out of home is dictated by what the other men think their preference is not dictated their preference is very clear that they want their wives to work outside H that's the 87% correct what they claim in public obviously depends on what they think other people believe right okay so if

1m 36s you believe uh that the majority don't want women working outside then even if you do want women working outside you are afraid to say that in public because you will lose status see that's the thing they are afraid it's this will happen in Saudi Arabia I don't think this will happen elsewhere this happens everywhere okay like gay marriage in the US and in general support for homosexuality okay okay in the 1980s it was almost Unthinkable for there to be gay marriage yeah in the 1990s there was some support building up but still uh the social status of gay people was very poor constitutionally M individual states could actually make gay marriage criminally illegal okay yeah yeah there

2m 26s was a lot of homophobia in the US yeah the social status of gay people were so poor that most of them preferred to stay in the closet which means not let anyone know that they are gay because otherwise they would be subject to ridicule they would be subject even to get beaten up every once in a while yep that happened yes right so by the way this was preference falsification they are gay but they're pretending to be straight outside okay okay not just that but many many straight men also although they support gay people they felt a social pressure to make anti-gay statements and make fun of gay people so that you know otherwise their buddies would call them

3m 10s gay right I've seen that with my own eyes this kind of stuff happening makes sense now I'm thinking the examples that you're giving are largely from political circles not something that we experience like you and me Common People experience we do all the time very likely that you end up going to restaurants neither of you want to go to and doing activities watching shows that neither of you want to watch okay this is called the abene Paradox okay this the original story is from a management expert and his story is this there's a couple and the parents-in-law and the father-in-law suggests oh let's go to abene to have like dinner okay and the Mother-in-law said that's a great idea and the husband

3m 52s who really didn't want to go to abene because it is like a long and hot journey and the restaurant isn't even very good said well everyone wants to go so he says yeah cool let's go and everyone go to Aban and on the way back everyone talks about how they had a good experience in reality neither of the four wanted to go okay the father-in-law suggested that because he thought the other three want to go because every abene trip the other three are so enthusiastic about and the same thought process each of those three had okay replace abene with kapu thali and you have a story from my life absolutely every office has a situation like this

4m 33s right you just think that everyone likes this ex thing right right unless you happen to have like a strong will Maverick who's willing to State their opinion even if that makes them unpopular in front of a father-in-law that strong W Maverick has to take a backseat okay I wonder who you're talking about I don't know who I'm talking I'm just speaking in general yes so basically everybody else falsified their preferences because the father mother-in-law who also falsified his preference thought they wanted to go to Abby but see especially in loving families this can happen right you suggest doing things that you don't want to do but you think the other people want to do and then the other people

5m 15s accept that because they think you want to do it because you suggested it and this is not uncommon okay this is like reverse projection man I mean there is one preference that everybody has which stays hidden there is one preference that gets revealed but that not exactly the preference of everybody in the group but you end up going with the revealed preference not the hidden preference correct and the thing is that probably like five years ago that was the real preference but now it has gotten stuck in everybody's head and one person moved away another person moved away from that preference but the common thing remained right that's how you end up with these public preferences which are not

5m 54s privately supported yeah I'm now thinking how does preference falsification impact in different areas of my life like there is one area of my life which is personal one area of my life which is professional then there is a social uh area of my life there is a political aspect to my life so in each of these I can see certain preference falsifications happening but I can't actually think of examples right away let's go with some simple examples right okay in personal front Okay kids who go to college and the whole preferences around sex drugs alcohol okay there are studies showing both kinds of of uh preference falsification okay there are colleges where the students feel

6m 36s pressured into doing Alcohol and Other such things even though a majority of them actually didn't want to do it but the college has this Aura Aura of this being the cool thing to do and if you don't do it you are not the cool student yeah pure pressure we call it pure pressure but and there are of course colleges which are the opposite also right where there are people who are okay we're doing all of this but you know socially it is not acceptable so they don't do itti anasan exactly right so that's at the personal level right in professional it happens in offices all the time but one of the most common ways this happens is sany for the boss okay

7m 19s you believe boss wants something so everyone is like you know we should do this we should do this huh and uh oh no you tell the other coworkers to impress the boss okay and the boss either doesn't care or cared 5 years ago okay or the boss is irritated why do they keep doing this right but then to keep the moral up the boss will probably say oh great this is so nice yeah happens right yeah so nobody's working to actual benefit but most of them are working towards some random preference that everybody thought and falsified amongst themselves so human beings want social approval right and if that social approval requires you to crush your own

8m 03s dreams and hide your real thoughts most of you are going to do it yes right except for a few like I said Mavericks iconoclasts iconoclasts wow word of the day right there iconoclast means icon imagine a little Idol of God and clast is your smashing it right so that's what somebody needs to be to be able to beat this concept of preference falsification because you know the social approval thing is your God okay I was almost afraid Channel but that explains the personal and professional circles yeah social I mean our example of Saudi Arabian men and just generally the status of women there right is excellent example of that and political is say gay marriage in the

8m 51s US and of course if you think about it like I would say 70% of politics there is preference falsification going on but we won't get into those details today that's that's true but now I'm thinking back to one of the episodes we did on group conformism and I'm wondering if what is happening here is they're conforming to the ideas of the group to the preferences of the group yeah so check out our episode on group conformance okay it's a very powerful thing there what happens is that you actually start believing the thing that the entire group believes right so there is no clash between what you believe inside and what you're showing outside you actually believe that thing even

9m 32s though in reality it is not at all true but your brain convinces you it is true because you want to be liked by the group okay oh so there I remember you are retconning your beliefs to agree with those of the group Absolut even if you are original belief sort of Started from the opposite side correct no there the simple experiment was that a line which is clearly longer than the other lines you called it short because six people before you said this line is shorter okay so your brain actually makes you do that okay now I'm wondering if there is a way to reverse preference falsification because you know the theory of it so you should technically

10m 11s be able to swing the concept the other way around Yeah so basically sunlight is the best disinfectant right if everybody knew that a majority of the people actually agree with them there would be no need for preference falsification true correct so let's go back to the example of gay marriage in the US right in the 1980s there were some brave people who started high-profile campaigns for gay rights okay now obviously everyone who did this at this time they were in such a small minority or at least most people thought this is a minority yeah so they were prosecuted they were martyred you know they ran into all kinds of problems right anyone who does that does not have a good life

10m 57s right but what happens is that over time the number of people willing to fight for something like this increases and the amount of effort it takes or the amount of sacrifice it takes yeah decreases as the number increases correct and then there comes a Tipping Point where most people can suddenly see that oh these guys already have so much support and with a little more support it's going to be the majority so now you're no longer afraid of stating your true preference right there is enough support for that and then a whole bunch of people quickly come out and reveal their true preferences at this point what happens is that there is a sudden swing from say only

11m 40s 30% support to 70% you know this concept is called a preference Cascade and it just it's like a domino effect one Falls and then they keep falling all in line sort of so to speak I'm trying to think of uh what popular examples of preference Cascades that we have seen but we don't really know of them as preference Cascades well I mean what I have seen uh right is uh the eco-friendly movement in India related to festivals right yeah uh I mean when I was a kid we would love firecrackers okay but now in my circles even the kids don't want firecrackers in fact the kids are yelling at the parents because the parents are trying to buy and the kids

12m 24s say no okay similarly uh holy colors from horrible toxic colors we have now gone to Colors which are extremely eco-friendly and I think edible these days uh similarly eco-friendly ganpati the Idols are now made of uh shadu mati shadu mati correct yeah so those things have happened at a global skill uh there are things like a public overthrow of a government is a preference Cascade right what happened in Bangladesh just a few months uh back right it seemed like oh Hina is in charge of Bangladesh and control set and then within days it had flipped and the same thing we saw in the Arab Spring with Egypt and Tunisia like four five countries overthrowing their

13m 09s governments because as soon as you see that oh if Egyptians are doing it maybe the same is true of us right Indian independence movement can also be called a preference Cascade but a very long and slow one right initially only a few people were willing to publicly say that we should fight the British government and a lot of people were just not ready to say it publicly but then slowly it shifted yeah for fear of Retribution for fear of punishments and a lot of other reasons but then they slowly gathered momentum and then it became a movement and I see I see that definitely and I'm also thinking that uh me was me was absolutely a example of a preference

13m 55s Cascade like that right because a woman who gets sexually harassed has very high pressure to keep it hidden okay because otherwise her career suffers anyway the guy does not really get any punishment and there's all kinds of problems right but once high-profile me to cases came out and a marketing campaign was created so many women started talking about it that a lot of them felt a sense of responsibility to talk about it right so that everyone knows how much of this is going on what happened with the me to movement was that then it became too far in the opposite direction where the slightest accusation would lead to a person getting cancelled even before they had a

14m 39s chance to make their case right I'm not saying we don't believe the women I'm saying there should have been an opportunity given to defend which didn't happen yeah in some sense what is happening is that now this is reverse preference falsification okay it is preference falsification just in the opposite direction so there are cases in the US where people who are against cancel culture are afraid to State their views because they're worried they'll get uh cancelled right okay so an excellent example comes from Dartmouth College right there were student protests there and the president uh came out against student protests okay so the student body decided to hold a vote of no confidence of no confidence against the

15m 24s president okay when they had an open vote the no confidence was supported 13 to as in 13 of the voters were like we don't want this President anymore we don't have any confidence in the president but same student body when they had a secret ballot the vote flipped it was 87 against okay okay so that's preference falsification clearly right there for you preference falsification has so many uses for evil man I mean I can see how politicians can use it to their advantage oh absolutely politicians are experts at being e evil no I mean politicians are experts at using preference falsification okay they create an atmosphere where the views they want to push forward seem like the

16m 11s only acceptable social consensus and then everybody else has to just hide their thing and uh that's why it takes again like strong protests for somebody to be able to break that illusion of consensus right yeah I'm thinking about dictators and how they use preference falsification North Korea being one clear example no no no simpler right most dictatorships do not have the support right they need right but they are able to convince the entire country that most other people support them right because what happens is that the day everyone who doesn't support that dictator realize this and they come out on the street the dictator runs we have seen that again and again and again right uh so most dictatorships survive

17m 06s purely through preference falsification and one of the biggest ones over the years I'm invoking Godwin's law here but yeah Hitler came to power in exactly the same way yeah that's why it makes sense that an iconoclast a martyr or someone who's willing to swim against the tide is needed to sort of shift the needle from that falsified preference into something different like just shifting of the needle requires an icono class a mar but can it be done without an icono one really good thing about modern technology MH is that it allows us to have Anonymous accounts right that's why it is important for Twitter Facebook Etc to have Anonymous accounts right because there people can State their true

17m 54s preferences and start the correct Cascade with without having to Martyr themselves right yeah but see the problem with Twitter is that Anonymous accounts on Twitter are cascading into a very different direction like they're creating Eco Chambers to Cascade that preference yeah so part of it is that it is being misused and part of it is the algorithm okay the algorithm is bad because it is already deciding what your preferences are and then feeding you that content so it is feeding into your preference falsification and what you want is the opposite right that's why try to stay away from the algorithm and follow like the serious proper accounts yeah we've spoken about this curate your social media very carefully because what

18m 39s you curate is what the algorithm will feed you and if you let the algorithm decide what to feed you you'll end up in a very big mess but in addition to that it is important for there to be secret ballots to for there to be anonymous surveys that can be filled out and of course crazy activists right one of the things is that when there is is a protest okay there is a lot of pressure on the regular people who are not protesting to make fun of the protesters but that itself is usually a form of preference falsification right because you're trying to impress the people around you yeah and that's why it is sort of important to let the protesters

19m 18s protest and at least try to understand where uh they are coming from right that is why it is okay to throw soup on the monaa or whatever other painting soup was thrown on because that kind of protest gets the topic into discussion which is important because it's related to climate change that's what the protesters are protesting not climate change but you know what anyway please go on in addition also try to use preference falsification as a tool for good right for example in your company if you create a culture that we are all nice and polite and kind to each other right there will be a number of people who don't like being kind and who would

19m 57s like to be toxic but they've hide that preference and that makes the company a good place to work absolutely every single person watching out there is nodding their head vigorously yes absolutely agreed because without preference falsification every day in every company would be Twitter out TR going on right it would be a toxic Place absolutely agreed but what a fascinating uh thing to take home especially around this time uh because very soon we are going to have to explicitly specify our preferences on a piece of paper or maybe through a button so make sure that you are not falsifying those preferences is all I'm going to say but um anything else to conclude the whole thing to bring the whole thing

20m 49s together anything else about preference falsification that you want people to remember so there's a great line right news is what someone somewhere is trying to suppress everything else is advertising right so in that sense anything that you feel like suppressing and not talking about publicly ask yourself why is that happening and should you be talking about it yes well we are here we are talking about it and we'd love for you to talk about it as well so anything you want to talk about drop it in the comments this is me Shri naen future IQ thank you