A Conspiracy of Silence

We all self-censor at times. We keep quiet at dinner with our in-laws, or nod passively in a work meeting. But what happens when we take this deception a step further, and pretend we believe the opposite of what we really feel? In this favorite episode from 2020, economist and political scientist Timur Kuran explains how our personal, professional and political lives are shaped by the fear of what other people think.

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A Conspiracy of Silence

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ April 14, 2022

We all self-censor at times. We keep quiet at dinner with our in-laws, or nod passively in a work meeting. But what happens when we take this deception of silence a step further, and pretend we believe the opposite of what we really feel? In this favorite episode from 2020, economist and political scientist Timur Kuran explains how our personal, professional and political lives are shaped by the fear of what other people think.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us have had moments when we censor ourselves. A friend says something, we disagree, but instead of arguing, we smile and hide our discomfort. We go along to get along. There are times though, when we carry this deception a step further, we don't just smile and go along, we actively pretend we believe the opposite of what we really think. Why would we do that? Maybe we were attending a wedding and our hosts have prepared a special meal. We don't like it, but we say, "It's great." We feel it would be hurtful to say what we really think. Or maybe there's a new initiative underway at our company. We hate it, but we recognize that management won't look kindly at dissenters. So we pretend to like the plan. At a larger scale, perhaps our country is doing something we detest, but protesting can get us in trouble with powerful people. So we pretend to be supporters. There are also times when we are the ones causing others to hide their true beliefs. We are the hosts at the wedding, or we are the ones who are enthusiastic about a new initiative at our company or a new policy in the country. Others pretend to agree with us because they are afraid of what we might think of them, afraid of what we might do.This week on Hidden Brain, how our personal, professional, and political lives are shaped by the fear of what other people think.Bob Corker: 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 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.Shankar Vedantam: 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.Timur Kuran: Thank you for inviting me.Shankar Vedantam: 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?Timur Kuran: 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 co-operative, 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.Shankar Vedantam: 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.Timur Kuran: 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, 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.Shankar Vedantam: 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.Timur Kuran: The 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.Shankar Vedantam: 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?Timur Kuran: 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.Shankar Vedantam: So we looked at these three different domains, the interpersonal domain, the professional domain, and 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?Timur Kuran: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one's wants because of perceived social pressures. And it aimed specifically to manipulate the perceptions of others about one's motivations or disp

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