Social secrets

Some secrets, like most truths, are too good to remain under wraps. Most foreigners I meet can’t resist the temptation to make me part of their clandestine knowledge and disclose where the one good Italian restaurant in town is at. As if, as a native Italian, my seal of approval would somehow graduate them as gourmet scouts. Secrets like these are trades in disguise, and bonding techniques too. Instead of exchanging goods of similar value, they provide something exclusive first. That seduces us and brings us closer to each other. 

If you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll let you in on my secret — most Italian restaurants abroad are frankly not that great. If you aspire to roam away from the notorious carb staples of Italian cuisine, you will likely end up wishing you had not. But I don’t have the heart to say that to anyone’s face, so I produce a grimace of appreciation and nod that yes, the tagliatelle bolognese at “Luigi’s” is so exquisitely “al dente”.

With those little lies, I tell myself that I am doing no harm, so long as the lie goes undetected. But the one who I lied to might not share my view. The moment I consider my petty dishonesty from the perspective of those I lie to, I recognize that I would feel betrayed if that was the reference. Betrayal, like a private, exclusive secret of the opposite sign, cancels closeness and increases distance.

Like myself, many can’t resist lifting themselves free of social pressures through the lever of white lies. The act of misrepresenting one’s truths under social pressure is called preference falsification. The pressure toward preference falsification is compatible with all political systems, from dictatorships to liberal democracies. Just look at the macro-micro disconnect between Marc Andreessen’s “It’s Time to Build” very public essay and his wife’s private NIMBYst lament against affordable housing in Atherton, CA. Where tolerance is a prized virtue, hostility is private business. 

Lies and ethical transgressions of all sorts are one of two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former more harshly, but the origin of this imbalance is somewhat mysterious. Perhaps it is just easier to see a full shape instead of an empty contour. Either way, it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and intent. Hence, preference falsification – like clouds, Christopher Nolan’s movies, and most acts of omission – exists over our heads. 

Preference falsification is also prevalent because it is a cheap escape from criticism. A trick to buy validation and build temporary bridges. It creates a kind of social meddling that people are tacitly ok with, chiefly because it gives them rope to reciprocate the favor. It is a silently known social posture, whose cooperative game theory results in collective payoffs. It is an act of social conservativeness. 

Preference falsification aims specifically at manipulating the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions, as when I begrudgingly agree that Luigi’s tagliatelle bolognese is, indeed, the best I’ve ever had. Had I merely kept quiet during the discussion about pasta, would have that been self-censorship? In pretending to like it, I went beyond self-censorship. I deliberately projected a contrived opinion. 

If one distinguishing characteristic of preference falsification is that it brings discomfort to the falsifier, another is that it is a response to real or imagined social pressures to convey a particular preference. You have to agree with your counterparty because taking an unpopular position in public can be very costly. Exaggerate my pasta example a few orders of magnitude and you can easily grasp how unpopular positions can turn one’s friends into enemies, damage one’s reputation, and extinguish one’s career, among other possibilities. 

Like social chameleons, people find it prudent to project approved preferences in public settings, as if preferences could vary their skin coloration to hide from judgment, criticism, or isolation. These are the settings in which people’s social standing depends on their professed dispositions. 

Honesty is corrupted by a principal-agent conflict that balloons in direct proportion to the subject’s stakes. Speaking our minds about tagliatelle or community housing tends to hurt people, offend them and push them away. Our individual interest is often not aligned with the interest of our community. But when that happens, the interest of our community prevails. Ubi maior, minor cessat – a greater purpose makes smaller interests negligible. 

You probably experienced something along those lines at a family or social gathering, like a Thanksgiving or Christmas reunion. There is always some distant relative, uncle, or cousin you don’t want to see or engage with. I know I do. But then, between appetizers and mom’s casserole, you decide to put on your best face and soldier through, entertain dull conversations, compliment the cook, and even smile at times. Extended family reunions, like miniature parliamentary assemblies, are prime examples of preference falsification. 

Like speech and survival instincts, cooperation is one of the most characteristic traits of the human species. We are instinctively wired to appease, avoid conflict and please others. We are interested in other people’s businesses because we understand that this is how we thrive and grow both as individuals and as a species. We are programmed to be nosy neighbors. 

Those who show an interest in others’ activities manifest a clear evolutionary advantage. Like curtain twitchers, we monitor each other with curiosity and method, so we are able to learn and cooperate successfully on matters important to survival. This is a starkly visible trait in effective salesmen who know how to work the floor or seasoned politicians that forge alliances. Good connectors, like jugglers, observe carefully to then spin the plates before they get wobbly. 

Today, under conditions vastly different from those faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, gossip is a universal pastime, and soap operas have a huge audience. Our wiring remains adapted to taking an interest in the affairs of others, as a form of ‘fitness interdependence’. Humans rely on cooperation to survive and understanding how and why cooperation succeeds is an integral part of solving the many challenges we face. Gossip is data collection. 

Gossip informs individuals about public preferences, and preference falsification is often cheaper than escape. It avoids the risks inherent in public protest – isolation from cooperation. Thus, it might be safe to assume that collective dissatisfaction is extremely hard to truly measure. As if, at any given time, social preferences are burdened by a collective tax to grease the cogs of cooperation. Communicated preferences are the blurred polaroid of popular dissatisfaction. Communities might then display fake attachments to the status quo. Collective conservatism can hide private revolutions.

Preference falsification produces two categories of effects. First, expressed preferences have social consequences. To test that, try ordering a grilled Atlantic salmon at Peter Luger’s. Second, the social climate fostered by preference falsification may transform the preferences people are trying to hide. While at Peter Luger’s, contemplate the odds someone at your table might have preferred a grilled salmon over their steak. They might be higher than you thought. 

The preferences of salmon enthusiasts that end up ordering steak are public preferences. It is distinct from their private preferences, which they would have expressed freely in the absence of the social pressure of ordering a steak at a notorious steakhouse. Preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one’s private preference. It’s a tacit trade and one that solves for acceptance rather than identity. 

Preference falsification also impoverishes public discourse. To conceal private preferences successfully, we must hide the knowledge on which they rest. As much as social pressure makes us pick steak over salmon or the club over a good novel by the fireplace, it makes us reinforce our preference falsification through knowledge falsification. We distort, corrupt, and impoverish knowledge in the public domain by lying to ourselves first. We expose lies first by concealing truths from others, then to ourselves, and we learn to grow comfortable doing so over time. Public lies become private truths via repetition. 

Indeed, repeated information is perceived as more truthful than new information. This is known as the illusory truth effect and it occurs because repetition increases processing fluency. Fluency and truth are frequently correlated. When statements are repeated, iteration serves to increase the coherence between its elements. As such, if you don’t believe the Earth is flat, your social environment just hasn’t exposed you enough to an alternative cosmography. 

Take, for instance, the case of woke culture. Wokeness, a loose constellation of ideas that are changing the way most white, educated people in the West view society, constructs truths partly via repetition and partly via the annihilation of criticism. Public and private discourse on woke ideals diverges substantially, presenting the fallacy of most woke arguments. 

Many former liberals and centrists, like your author, have experienced over the past few years a form of discomfort about articulating positions that others might misconstrue – because being misunderstood comes at a high social cost. Wokes, by policing the use of language with pronouns and crowning themselves as arbiters of correctness, identified an effective method of building a tribe, and an aspirational one too. 

Wokeness is a type of tribal thinking. Those passionate about women's empowerment in the workplace might switch to the high gears of defunding the police before realizing it. Woke public preferences tend to slip into purity spirals: the relentless, competitive pursuit of moral ideas for their own sake, with “no upper limit, and no agreed interpretation.” The means justify the means.

What is happening with woke culture is hardly a novelty. Throughout history, we have witnessed how the power of cheap heuristics has cemented social cohesion irrespective of its own degree of truth. Given our psychological tendencies to conform and participate, it is easy to believe something false, once articulated forcefully by a group in power, like liberal academics, or by simply expressed repetitively, like regime propaganda. Such heuristics allow us to economize on decision-making time and work well in many cases. 

The truth is – by its own construction – an inefficient process. The cultivation of your own identity, starting from your private preferences, is something that goes against our engrained survival mechanism. At the moment I am writing this, there are high chances some of your wardrobe, political opinion, diet choices, or who you voted for in the last election are squarely against your private preferences. Though social conformism is nothing new, it is much more important when the gap between private and public preferences becomes undetected in yourself. 

Deviants are routinely made to feel uncomfortable, so among strangers, people tend to consider dissidence imprudent. But the basic reason we consider uncompromising independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule. 

Crowds possess a conservative spirit because individuals do so, as a self-preservation instinct. Collectives are the most obstinate maintainers of traditional ideas. Yet occasionally they shed their immobility with startling suddenness and overthrow venerable institutions. The suddenness is only a superficial effect. Unobserved continuities may be a source of observed discontinuities.