A Conspiracy of Silence

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Countless times every day, people ask us what we think, what we want, and how we feel. We tell a barista what coffee we want. We explain to coworkers how they can help us with a project. We share with family members which movie we want to watch. But sometimes our answers don't reveal what we really want, and our opinions don't match how we really feel. We may stay silent when a family member says something obnoxious. We might groan internally at a coworker's bad joke but say nothing aloud. I remember an incident not long ago. I was on a Zoom call with a group of people, and one of them said something that made me uncomfortable. But this person clearly did not realize they were saying anything wrong, And I didn't want to jump into the conversation and say what I really thought. Let it slide, I thought. It's not a big deal. There are plenty of scenarios where this strategy makes sense. Hiding the way we feel can serve as social lubricant. It helps keep the peace. But what happens when such behavior multiplies beyond the individual? To entire societies. What happens when large numbers of people disagree with something that is happening, but each of them, in their own heart, says, you know what? Forget it. I'm just going to smile and go along. Even worse, what happens when large numbers of people say the opposite of what they really feel, perhaps because they are afraid of what might happen if they spoke the truth? I want to revisit an episode we first recorded in 2020. It explores a phenomenon I think about often, one that shapes our individual lives and the fate of nations. Today on Hidden Brain, the profound repercussions of hiding how we really feel. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University, Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Many economists study how people's choices reflect their inner preferences. If I like one product rather than another, I buy the product I like. My behavior reflects my preferences. Over the past several decades, Duke University economist and political scientist Timur Kuran has studied how our outward behavior sometimes does not reflect our inner preferences. The rupture between our inner thoughts and outward actions has profound consequences in our personal and professional lives and in our politics. Timur Kuran, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm wondering if we can start with a very simple example of this phenomenon that you've studied for so many years, Timur. We all go over to friends' and neighbors' homes for a dinner party or for a birthday party. What happens in the course of these conversations that reveal this idea you're talking about where our inner thoughts don't always manifest in our outward actions and behavior?

Well, sometimes when we go over to friends, we have to jointly decide what we're going to do together. And sometimes it so happens that the group perceives that everyone wants to watch a movie when actually no one does, or few do. So people, to appear cooperative, say that they would like to watch a movie, and everybody ends up leaving the event dissatisfied or less satisfied than they could have been. They've watched a movie when none of them really wanted to spend the evening that way.

And I feel I have been to dinner parties where I have not necessarily had the greatest time of my life. But when you leave, you don't tell your host, I really had a boring evening. You say nice things. In some ways, your outward behavior does not necessarily reflect how you feel on the inside.

And in the process, you miscommunicate what you generally enjoy. So you may be giving your host and other guests, perhaps, who are leaving at the same time, that you're the type of person who loves to watch movies. And maybe the same episode will occur again at the next gathering at somebody else's home. Everyone's expectation will be that this is a group that loves to watch movies. So the inefficiency will perpetuate itself.

Uh-huh.

Simply because all the guests, just like you, have said to the host that they had a good time. So the problem doesn't correct itself.

Some years ago, I think you were at USC, I believe, and you have a story about how the same behavior manifests itself in our professional life. If I recall correctly, the economics department was looking to diversify the staff and bring on more women onto the faculty. Tell me what happened in private conversations and in public conversations around that issue.

Department was under pressure to hire more women. There was a great willingness on the part of most members of the department to do this. But there was a sense that if we limited ourselves to looking at women or had decided in advance to hire a female candidate, that we might be making a mistake and that we would be sacrificing quality. This was not voiced, however. These concerns were not voiced in the department meeting. They were voiced in private conversations. And when we actually started deciding and in the presence of everyone else, nobody voiced the objections that were quite commonly being voiced privately.

I want to look at one third example before we tie all of these together. You grew up in Turkey, and your family was— a decidedly secular family and you believed in the secular project of Turkey. But there was something happening in the country at the time that you were growing up when you were a child that you didn't quite realize. You didn't realize that there were people who actually had deep disagreements with the way you and your family looked at the world and looked at the future of Turkey, but they were not voicing those disagreements, but those disagreements were actually just under the surface. Can you describe to me what happened?

Yes, those disagreements you're referring to were actually quite widespread, but they were not being voiced among secular intellectuals and secular leaders. At the time when I was growing up in Turkey in the 1960s and the 1970s, a form of assertive secularism, which was not simply the separation of church and state, or in this case, mosque and state, but the control of religion by the state and the repression of religion. You could not be hired by a state agency if you were a woman and wearing a headscarf. This was generating enormous resentments, and there were people who could see that these resentments were building up and that they would explode and that they could backfire, yet they could not voice these because opposing this measure would be perceived as being against Turkey's modernization process, being anti-Western.

So we looked at these 3 different domains, sort of the interpersonal domain, the professional domain, the political domain, and you've in some ways connected these different things together into a common phenomenon that you call preference falsification. What is preference falsification, Timur?

Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one's wants because of perceived social pressures, and it aims specifically to manipulate the perceptions of others about one's motivations or dispositions. Preference falsification is a form of lying, but one aimed at disguising your true preference and also the information that underlies that preference.

Hmm. Now, some people might say it sounds like self-censorship, but you argue it's not quite the same as self-censorship.

It's broader because preference falsification can take the form of actively pretending that you have a preference that is quite different from the preference you privately have. You may express your private preference to your spouse, to a close friend, and in public project a very different preference. That's preference falsification. It's not simply going quiet. It's not simply deciding not to enter the conversation. It can involve entering the conversation on the opposite side of where you would like to belong.

Timur has studied societies with widespread preference falsification. Now, the phenomenon can be hard to spot because people don't go around waving a flag saying that they are falsifying their preferences. The point, after all, is to misrepresent how you really feel. But one way to spot it is when one regime comes to an end and a new one suddenly springs up in its place. That's what happened in East Germany in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.

Thousands of East Germans came across the border today Perhaps more than 100,000, so many that border police lost count.

So Timur, you've done some work looking at the Soviet Union and the satellite states of the Soviet Union before and after, in some ways, the demise of the Berlin Wall. In East Germany, what did we see before the wall came down? What did we see after the wall came down?

Before the wall came down, East Germans were almost unanimously supporting the prevailing regime. There were very, very few dissidents. After the wall came down, very few people would actually admit to having been sincere supporters of the regime that fell. It became hazardous to admit that one sincerely believed in the regime.

You tell the interesting story of a New York Times correspondent who went to Eastern Europe. I believe the story may have to do with Czechoslovakia, not East Germany. Tell me that story and what the correspondent found before and after, in some ways, the demise of communism.

After several East European satellites of the Soviet Union fell in quick succession, the New York Times was full of stories about people who could finally speak the truth after years of falsifying their preferences and falsifying their knowledge. They finally felt free to criticize the regime. And every day the paper was full of stories about people who finally felt liberated. Well, it occurred to the New York Times after several weeks that they hadn't really covered the former establishment, the communists. So they sent one of their reporters to Czechoslovakia to see how communists were faring and what they thought about the changes that were taking place. And in his first article he sent from Prague, said, well, I went looking for communists and I couldn't find a communist anywhere.

Hmm.

And people who had made a career by rising in the Communist Party, running communist organizations, They were now all saying that they were not really communists at any point, that they were simply playing along in order to advance, in order to feed their children, in order to have a roof over their heads.

And you see the same thing, of course, in other countries which are not necessarily divided on the lines of communism versus capitalism. After Saddam Hussein fell, in Iraq, it was hard to find people who were fans of Saddam Hussein when a few weeks earlier it was very hard to find critics of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And probably the same thing in China before and after the revolution. You see the same patterns in other countries too?

Oh, absolutely. And in China, the people who had supported the Cultural Revolution wholeheartedly denied that they did that after the regime fell. In Iraq, people serving Saddam were doing so for the same reason that many Czechs and many East Germans and many Poles served their communist regimes without believing in the regime. There was preference falsification in Iraq too. Of course, it's difficult after a regime change occurs to separate the sincere believers from the preference falsifiers.

When we come back, how leaders create preference falsification among their followers and how dictators can get millions to fall in line. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Timur Kuran is the author of Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. He points out there were many political dissidents in East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down. Most preferred to remain in the shadows. After the wall came down and the communist regime crumbled, there were many East Germans who still felt loyalty toward the old regime. But now, with the tide turned, it was the turn of these communist sympathizers to remain silent. to hide their true beliefs. Tomorrow, I want to talk about how authoritarian regimes create the conditions for preference falsification. And I want to jump forward from the 20th century to the 21st century. In 2013, the world woke up one day to news from North Korea. This morning, North Korea is reeling.

Its Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un completed a stunning power play Thursday against his uncle. North Korea's news agency announced the regime's number 2 man was executed for trying to overthrow the government. As Seth Doane reports, this high-profile purge is unprecedented.

Can you talk a moment both about what happened in North Korea, if you remember that incident, Timur, but also about the larger idea about the strategic use of violence in order to enforce preference falsification?

I do remember that episode. One of its effects was to make North Korea's dictator signal that absolutely anyone could be punished and punished severely for disloyalty. If Kim can execute a relative and do so without any due process, he could do this to anyone. Authoritarian regimes like that of North Korea limit dissent or eliminate dissent entirely, also by blocking the emergence of a civic society. Individuals are not allowed to form groups that have any autonomy. The state controls everything. A second measure that these regimes used is The goal is to give people the sense that they are always being watched. There are cameras everywhere, there are informants everywhere, and people are encouraged to send information to the regime about signs of dissent to give the sense that no one is immune. No matter how small your community, no matter how useful you are to the regime, To the dictator himself, you are not immune. If you are disloyal or you signal that you might be disloyal, that you're sympathetic to dissenters, you will be punished.

Hmm. You know, I'm remembering a video from that incident that was probably circulated by state media. And if I recall correctly, it showed Kim's uncle This was a major party gathering with hundreds and hundreds of senior people in North Korea gathered, and Kim's uncle was basically grabbed from this big meeting in full public view of all these other people, taken outside the meeting, and was shortly thereafter given a trial, quote unquote a trial, and then shot. You could argue if Kim wanted to get rid of his uncle, He could have put his uncle on trial or had his uncle arrested at his home and then, you know, had a trial in secret and done all of this in hiding. But in some ways, the very visibility of what happened, that you could not just take North Korea's number 2 man and have him executed, but you could take him from this meeting of all the dignitaries of North Korea, really sent a signal in some ways that no one was safe. And I want you to talk for a moment about the theatricality of the violence that is often necessary. to enforce this kind of preference falsification.

The choreography here includes not just the audacity of dragging Kim's uncle out of this gathering, but the fact that nobody in the audience objected. Everybody— and these were powerful people who were part of the North Korean regime. There were military leaders, there were industrial leaders, there were major political leaders. Nobody lifted a finger to defend the uncle. This is part of the theatrics to demonstrate to the entire nation that if you are disloyal, if you do anything that threatens the regime, nobody will come to your help because everybody is living in fear.

Mm-hmm.

is part of the system of control. Saddam did something very similar, except it was even more dramatic. In one of the party congresses, he identified somebody in the audience, had them dragged out and shot in the hallway, and the entire party congress heard the shot. And the And nobody made a move. And that was Saddam's way of communicating the same message. And of course, this was very widely publicized for the same reason that Kim widely publicized his execution.

So we imagine that in totalitarian states, the powers that be hold on to power through ruthless acts of violence like we've just been talking about. Of course, this is true, but you say this does not explain how widely preference falsification is practiced. In some ways, if you looked at the prison population, for example, of the old Soviet Union, you don't necessarily see a huge number of people in prison. In other words, you don't need many, many examples of this kind of violence to actually have preference falsification multiply itself across an entire society.

No, you don't. Of course, there were periods in the Soviet Union of massive violence under Stalin. There were millions of people who were either executed or sent to the Gulag Archipelago in Siberia. This does happen. But when we look at Eastern Europe as a whole, and if we look at Soviet history, we see periods when there was actually very little violence. The violence committed earlier was enough to keep people in line. You just needed to punish people occasionally. And there was the, the case of a high-level person in the East German Secret Service who was found guilty of something, and he was demoted to being the doorman.

Hmm.

And this was a visible reminder to everyone every day As they entered the big building of the German Secret Service, of what could happen, how you could lose all your comforts and all your privileges if you fell out of line. But there were parts of Eastern Europe, like Czechoslovakia, where there was actually very little violence. The prisons did not have an especially large number of political prisoners. What kept the system going is that people were expected to turn on dissidents and to avoid befriending them, even if they agreed with them.

Mm-hmm.

So when Václav Havel, the famous writer and later the president of Czechoslovakia and then later president of the Czech Republic, when he and a few friends of his signed a declaration called Charter 77, which asked the Czech Republic essentially to respect certain human rights, the government launched a campaign of vilification and expected citizens to participate in it. Millions of people, including schoolchildren, wrote letters to newspapers condemning these traitors, these monsters. And the people who signed the declaration lost many of their friends. There were people who, when they saw them walking down the street, they moved to the other side so as not to have to say hello to them. So what sustained these East European regimes was not just the punishments that were delivered by the regime. It was not just the oppression of the regime, but it was actually people helping to vilify the enemies of the regime or the perceived enemies of the regime.

So in some ways, people now are not just necessarily falling in line as a result of the fear they feel from the top. In some ways, they're becoming Enforcers themselves. And in some ways, that's how the system perpetuates.

The system perpetuates itself by turning the victims into victimizers, and everyone becomes complicit in this system of oppression, which also creates a great deal of guilt in people. One of the reasons why Václav Havel's friends would move to the other side of the road when they saw him coming is that it gave them pain to have to ignore Václav, not say hello to him, or as the case might be, to have to say something insulting to him when they actually deep down, they admired what he was doing and they felt ashamed that they were not part of this group of dissidents themselves. So each act of conformism, each act of preference falsification that is undertaken to buy some comfort becomes a burden on everyone else. It makes everyone else feel the need to issue similar signals.

Hmm. So one of the profound implications of this theory is that it helps explain something that seems mysterious otherwise, which is when you look at different societies, the speed at which revolutionary change can sometimes unfold is often staggering. So even— we talked about East Germany earlier. More than 3/4 of East Germans had not foreseen that the fall of communism was coming. Most people believed the regime was stable. Can you talk about this idea of how preference falsification in some ways conceals vulnerabilities in societies and allows in some ways for revolutionary change to happen. This was true in your own native land of Turkey. It's true in the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. It's true in China, many other places. The speed of change can be explained in some ways by the extent of preference falsification.

Yes. In these repressive regimes, there are millions of people who are doing what is expected of them to signal that they are supporters of the regime when they actually are dissatisfied, but they don't reveal themselves.

Hmm.

While they are becoming increasingly disillusioned, they are still going along. They are still informing on others. But if a few people get to the point where they do say enough is enough. You get to the point where you're ready to jump in. But we don't know until a movement gets going. We don't see that actually the potential is there. So even the CIA did not see the East European revolutions coming. The KGB did not see this.

Mm-hmm.

The dissidents themselves did not see it as the signs of the approaching revolution started to multiply, Václav Havel was asked whether a revolution was coming and he said, let's stop dreaming. He didn't see it coming.

And this is true in some ways of your own family's experience in Turkey, Timur. I mean, your family in some ways, as we discussed earlier, were decidedly secular. They believed in the idea of a secular Turkey. They believed that this would be the regime going forward, your family failed to see what was coming down the pike.

This is correct. And when I was growing up in Turkey, I failed to see what was coming in. I failed to see the resentments that were building up. I bought into the notion that there were some obscurantists or very conservative conservative Muslims who were backward-thinking, but with modernization their numbers would diminish and education would solve the problem. There was nothing to worry about. I did not see at the time the pain that this was generating and the many resentments that it was generating that would cause huge problems for Turkey down the road.

You're a scholar of Islamic studies besides the other work you've done. And one of the interesting things you've looked at recently is the rise in some ways of atheism in many parts of the Muslim world. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because again, that's the flip side of what you've just described happened in Turkey. What does the data show in terms of what's happening underneath the surface in many Muslim-majority countries?

The percentage of atheists and deists, people who classify themselves as believing in God but not in Islam, is rising. And the figures are startlingly high. Even at religious schools, they are in double digits.

Wow.

In Iran, religiosity has fallen dramatically. The evidence from Saudi Arabia shows a rise in the percentage of atheists and people who have secretly converted out of Islam. None of this, of course, gets captured in public statistics, and you won't see it in outward behaviors. But actually what happened in Turkey is now happening in reverse. In the middle of the 20th century, it was genuinely religious people who were hiding their religiosity and pretending to be secular. Now there are many people who are actually secular who are pretending to be religious, Mm-hmm. or who no longer believe in God or who no longer believe in Islam but are pretending publicly to do so. Fear has changed sides and the form of religious preference falsification has changed sides. It's just the same phenomenon, but the opposite side is benefiting.

We've looked at preference falsification in North Korea, the Soviet Union, and other repressive regimes. It's clear that totalitarian states create ideal conditions for the formation of preference falsification. Many of us might imagine that countries with a free press, with protections for free speech, democracies, that these would not be nations where preference falsification flourishes. But is that true? When we come back, we'll take a closer look at preference falsification in the United States. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey, and a personalized experience with a personal flight attendant. With priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Timur Kuran first began proposing his ideas about preference falsification some 2 decades ago, many of his colleagues said, okay, that kind of stuff happens in repressive totalitarian regimes. It can't happen in democracies like the United States where the freedom of expression is enshrined in the Constitution. Timur says this was a dangerous misunderstanding. You don't need reeducation camps in Siberia to frighten people into falling in line.

Recent studies show a majority of Americans are afraid to share their political views, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. Of course, it varies depending on the context, depending on whether the The country is red or blue, but a substantial share of Americans are afraid that if they express their political views truthfully, that they will get demoted. They might get fired. And there are substantial numbers of Americans who believe that people who hold the wrong political views should be fired, should not be given opportunities. And this is just a very concrete cost of today of expressing political views.

I want to look at preference falsification on both the right and the left and maybe start with the Republican Party. I want to go back to 2016. candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. He was a very unusual candidate. He said many things that were unconventional for a politician. He played on some of the questions we've been talking about because he articulated views that many people may have held, but were uncomfortable expressing themselves. And so he became their vehicle for the views. But also, in interpersonal conversations and debates, Trump regularly insulted many of his opponents. Sometimes he went so far as to insult not just his opponents, But the families of his opponents. I remember one time he mocked the appearance of Heidi Cruz, the wife of Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.

Trump has clearly attacked Cruz's wife by putting up that side-by-side of the 2 women with Cruz's wife looking very awkward, not a great moment for her, and Melania Trump looking, you know, like a model.

So, I mean, basically he was saying my wife's prettier than Can you talk a bit about the ways in which these dramatic expressions of insult may have in some ways shaped how Republicans started to respond to Donald Trump? You started to recognize that if you crossed him in a debate, you were not just going to get a policy response, you were going to get a smackdown. You were going to get insulted. Maybe even your family members would get insulted.

Yes. This is something, it's analogous to the theatrics in North Korea and in Baghdad we talked about through those insults and attacks Trump was sending in 2016, that if you crossed him, no matter who you were, you would get attacked and he would try to destroy your reputation and that his followers would join in attacking you. And it was very important that he demonstrate that nobody was immune to this. He has attacked leading commentators on Fox News who have been among his supporters. He's tried to destroy their reputations. He's insulted them. The message he sends by doing that is very similar to the message North Korea's dictator sent when he had his uncle executed in plain sight.

Mm-hmm.

Everyone went along with what happened. Nobody objected. In Trump's case, very few people defend publicly the person who is being attacked The person who was picked by Trump to be part of his cabinet, and suddenly he's demonized, he's fired, and very few people stand up for him. People continue to support Trump. So there's a parallel here in the tactics being employed to build and maintain power.

I want to play you a clip of Republican Senator Bob Corker chastising his fellow Republicans for being unwilling to cross President Trump, even if that meant sacrificing their core beliefs about I would bet that 95% of the people on this side of the aisle support intellectually this amendment, and a lot of them would vote for it if it came to vote.

But no, no, no, gosh, we, we might poke the bear. If the president gets upset with us, then we might not be in the majority. And so let's don't do anything that might upset the president. So look, I'm a moderate.

I'm a moderate. Pretty remarkable, Timur. In some ways, when I'm hearing that, I'm hearing in some ways the language of preference falsification.

Absolutely. And people are afraid— in this case, Republican officeholders are afraid if they cross Trump, he might not support them in their reelection bid, that Trump might support an opponent more to his liking. So there have been many people who privately wish that Trump would go away and disagree with many of the policies that he is pursuing, disagree vehemently with his style, but don't object. Even his opponents in the 2016 election, in the primaries, like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, have fallen in line.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things you said earlier stuck with me, which is that in some ways, each time he did one of these things and people did not cross him, it sent a signal. The signal was not just that he could say whatever he wanted. The signal was that no one would actually stand up to him from his own party. Of course, once you do that, you essentially send a signal that going forward, you are alone if you basically stand up and cross Donald Trump. In some ways, that is so similar to what you were telling me earlier. In the conversation we were having about Kim Jong-un or what happened in Turkey or what happened in the Soviet Union.

He actually articulated his strategy quite well when he said, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York and nothing would happen to me. This was a signal he was sending to all Republicans not to cross him, that he could do anything to them, and the party would stay behind him. His reason for attacking McCain was also an element of this strategy. McCain is a hero of both the right and the left. Why, you might ask, would Trump, while he's running for president in 2016, go out of his way to criticize McCain as a loser for having become a prisoner in Vietnam? You would think that tens of millions of Republicans would be horrified by that. Well, his strategy there was to show that he could take on even a hero like McCain. Many observers, and I would include myself in the group, did not appreciate at the time. When he attacked McCain, I thought, well, now he's gone a step too far. He's lost the military vote, but he actually went up in the polls, not down.

Timur says the 2020 election provides another case study in preference falsification among Republicans. Even after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidency and that the attempts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election had failed, few Republicans came forward to voice their support for the truth.

This is preference falsification in spades. Most Republican elites believe that Trump lost the election. It turns out that 88% of Republicans in general believe the election was stolen. Trump may continue whether he actively tries to run in 2024 or not. He may continue leading the party and he may play a very important role in selecting not only the next nominee of the Republican Party, but also nominees in various states. So many Republican officeholders are at the moment just waiting to see what will happen. And while they are waiting, they are continuing to play this game of also supporting his efforts to overturn the result of the election.

Let's look at an example of preference falsification on the left. In 2020, over the summer especially, the country was captivated by the Black Lives Matter movement, and this was especially true in California. In the 2020 election, one of the things that was on the California ballot, the ballot proposition for Californians, was to vote on affirmative action. And I want to play you a little clip of what happened in that ballot initiative.

California voters soundly rejected Prop 16, which would've restored affirmative action and racial preferences. Every single major elected Democrat, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, big labor unions across the state, big organization, nonprofit organizations, all in favor of it, but the voters said no.

Can you talk about this for a moment, Tamor, that there was such support for Black Lives Matter in 2020, and you would think that a state that basically was strongly for Black Lives Matter would also support affirmative action, but in some ways it seemed as if the private preferences of Californians was not being revealed in the protests that we saw on the streets.

This is not new. Affirmative action, whether it's racial affirmative action or gender-based affirmative action, it has generally been unpopular even in heavily Democratic states. This is what we find when we poll people, giving them anonymity. In public, though, especially in heavily Democratic States, many people pretend that they support it. And the extent of preference falsification is especially high among educated people, among corporate leaders, in academia, in journalism. And so because they strongly support affirmative action, we get the sense that This is a widely supported policy measure, but in fact, it is not.

So between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Donald Trump, who was widely seen as a misogynist by those on the left, lost support among men but held steady with women between the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 presidential election. election. Trump obviously was also seen widely by those on the left as a racist, but he lost ground among white voters and gained ground among Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Now, many of the differences between 2016 and 2020 are small, but it's revealing that Trump did not lose ground among the very groups who were said to be affected the worst by his presidency. There are lots of theories about why this has happened. Can preference falsification explain some of these outcomes to more Absolutely.

And we need to recognize it's possible for a person to dislike Trump as a person, think that he did a horrible job, think that he said horrible things perhaps against them. They're Latino, and he has said— he's characterized all Hispanics as rapists and murderers. And at the same time, like certain positions that he is taking, controversial positions he's taking. I think this probably explains why Trump did not lose ground among African Americans and why he even gained ground among Muslims. It's too early now to know exactly why these groups supported or increased their support for Trump, but I think that we're going to find out that these certain policies that the left dislikes and that Trump has very vocally supported and pursued probably played a role. They wouldn't admit it publicly, which is why the pollsters missed the rising support within those groups, but probably These are the factors that drove the rise in Trump support.

One of the really interesting things that you say about preference falsification is that there are ways to express your discontent with the regime or with a new system, but you have to do it in a way that is subtle. One of the ways you can do it is through humor. I want to play you a clip of the comedian Chris Rock. talking about woke culture at the Academy Awards where he was hosting. It's the 88th Academy Awards, which means this whole no Black nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times.

Okay?

You got to figure that it happened in the '50s, in the '60s, and Black people did not protest. Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time. You know, we got real things to protest. You know, we're too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won Best Cinematographer. What's revealing here, Timur, is not just that he's making the joke, but that the audience is laughing. And this might not be an audience that's actually very comfortable with what he's saying. Can you talk a little bit about how humor sometimes is a marker of what's underneath the surface in many societies.

Humor is used in repressive societies and in contexts where people feel constrained in what they can say, or to signal that one is aware of certain contradictions without taking ownership of the preferences being expressed or the facts being pointed to. In laughing, they signal that they understand what is being communicated but don't have to take ownership for it.

So it's almost like the court jester role in sort of ancient times. I mean, the one person who could speak truth to the king was the court jester because it was understood that the jester was jesting and everyone can laugh and you can discuss sort of truths that are beneath the surface without being marched off to be executed.

Yes. This is exactly the role that comedians play. And comedy flourishes in repressive societies and it tends to gravitate toward areas where we are uncomfortable speaking openly. To understand the areas where preference falsification is rampant, looking at the comedy shows is a good place to start.

I'm wondering whether preference falsification is more likely to help people and groups who have strong views or extreme views rather than moderates. I mean, if you think there should be, for example, zero immigration to the United States, you can call anyone who has even mildly pro-immigrant views a traitor. On the other hand, if you think that there should be open borders to the United States, you can call anyone who calls for any immigration restrictions a racist. I feel it's harder to do this if you have moderate views precisely because moderation suggests a certain amount of flexibility, nuance or even compromise. Does preference falsification, you think, tend to drive moderation out of the conversation and reward extreme positions?

It does. And it's one of the manifestations of it is the hyperpolarization we see in the United States today. In both parties, we are seeing struggles between extremists and moderates. it's the moderates who are finding it necessary to falsify their preferences, to give up certain nuances in their arguments. And those individuals find it very risky to participate in debates because they get demonized by both sides.

I'm wondering if you can talk a moment about what the consequences of this are. What are the consequences? I mean, we've seen in some ways how preference falsification operates and sort of the effects that it has. But what are the consequences? Should we just simply say, well, different groups rise and fall, different things come to the fore at different times? What are the negative effects of preference falsification? What are the things that it doesn't allow us to do that a freer expression and sharing of ideas might allow us to do?

One of the huge costs is that we can't have an informed debate. All sorts of ideas that might prove very useful don't get expressed. And bad ideas don't get scrutinized because people are afraid of criticizing them. And sometimes there, on some issues, there are 2 extreme ideas that are surviving in different communities, one on the right, one on the left. Neither gets scrutinized, neither gets criticized. People who have reservations, people who have ways of improving the ideas, they don't express themselves. Well, if the potential solutions, potential remedies don't get expressed, then nobody will build on them.

So we've seen how preference falsification has all these negative effects. I want to spend a moment talking about a couple of potentially positive effects of preference falsification. Can you talk a moment about how it's In some ways, preference falsification might play a role in maintaining norms of decency and mutual respect because in some ways, we are afraid to cross one another. This might go all the way back to the initial conversation we were having. If everyone expressed everything they were feeling in their hearts, much social interaction would come to a grinding halt because if we actually told everyone what we thought of them, we would likely have very few friends left.

That's true, and that you've pointed to one of the favorable consequences of preference falsification. We have friends who have bad taste in what they wear. We have friends who get terrible haircuts. If we expressed our preference, this would make it quite uncomfortable for them, and if If everyone reminded us of all the things they didn't like about us all the time, it would be pretty uncomfortable for us. So preference falsification is also an instrument of civility.

Timur Kuran is an economist and political scientist at Duke University. He's the author of Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Timur, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you very much for the discussion, Shankar. It was an honor.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero for this episode is our former producer, Raina Cohen. Raina first introduced me to Timur Kuran's work while we were working on another episode. I've been fascinated by the theory of preference falsification Raina has also shaped many other Hidden Brain episodes. As a colleague, she was always thoughtful and kind. We miss her and are so grateful for all her contributions to our show. If you found the insights in this or other Hidden Brain episodes to be valuable to you, please consider making a financial contribution to help us build more stories like these. You can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week. Thank you. One thing casual fans don't understand is how fucking good pro wrestling is.

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