How People Lie About Gay Sex and Homophobia
This article is for subscribers only.
Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Social theorists, above all DukeUniversity’s Timur Kuran, have drawn attention to the phenomenonof “preference falsification.” The basic idea is that whenpeople speak in public, they aren’t always truthful about theirpreferences. What they say is different from what they reallythink.
In unfree societies, people may be too frightened todisclose their actual views in opinion surveys. But preferencefalsification can also afflict democracies, if social pressureslead people to misdescribe their real views and behavior.