Knowledge falsification
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Knowledge falsification is the deliberate misrepresentation of what one knows under perceived social pressures. It is usually undertaken to signal a preference that differs from one’s private preference. In other words, people use it to support their preference falsification.[1]
Definition and societal implications
Successful concealment of one's private preferences requires hiding the knowledge on which they rest. Thus, one may practice knowledge falsification by misrepresenting what one knows under different kinds of social and political pressures. In other words, preference falsification must be bolstered through knowledge falsification. Among the effects of knowledge falsification is the distortion, corruption, and impoverishment of knowledge in the public domain. Society is denied exposure to what is believed to be true, and it gets exposed instead to information considered false.
Timur Kuran, who coined the term, analyzes the social effects of knowledge falsification in his 1995 book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification.[2] They include widespread ignorance about policy failures and about the potential advantages of reforms. Knowledge falsification can also bring intellectual narrowness and ossification. Yet another of its possible consequences is the persistence of policies, customs, norms, fashions, and institutions that are widely disliked. As with preference falsification, knowledge falsification need not be a response solely, or even mainly, to pressures from the state or some other organized political entity. The pressures may come from individuals seeking simply to display conformity to an agenda that appears politically popular.
Focusing on the inefficiencies of knowledge falsification, Cass Sunstein argues that societies benefit from institutions aimed at minimizing it. He observes: “Knowledge falsification, bred by the natural human inclination to defer to the crowd, can create serious problems for the crowd itself. If members of the crowd are not revealing what they know, errors and even disasters are inevitable.”[3] On that basis, he argues that leaders, legislatures, corporations, schools, and committees should deliberately promote their own exposure to dissenting discourses. Courts work better, he shows, when their decision-making bodies include people who bring to evaluations diverse information and interpretations of facts.[4]
The foregoing observations echo Friedrich Hayek’s views about the advantages of democracy. “Democracy is, above all, a process of forming opinion,” wrote Hayek, and “it is in its dynamic, rather than its static, aspects that the value of democracy proves itself.”[5] Developing Hayek’s claim, Michael Wohlgemuth argues that democratic constitutions limit the scope of both preference falsification and knowledge falsification (he coins the term “opinion falsification” as an aggregate concept that captures both knowledge and preference falsification). Democratic constitutions facilitate, on the one hand, the process of filtering out of public discourses contrived public knowledge and public preferences and, on the other, the discovery of knowledge and preferences that individuals keep private.[6]
On any given issue, the prevalence of knowledge falsification may vary systematically across demographic groups that differ in endured social, cultural, and political pressures. And, the members of any given demographic group may differ in what knowledge they convey to others, depending on the audience. In this vein, Kuran and Edward McCaffery show that publicly conveyed perceptions of discrimination differ systematically depending on survey mode. On controversial matters of discrimination, Americans appear more willing to reveal pertinent knowledge online than offline.[7]
References
- ^ Kuran, Timur (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Harvard University Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-674-70758-0.
- ^ Kuran, Timur (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Harvard University Press. pp. 10–14. ISBN 978-0-674-70758-0.
- ^ Sunstein, Cass R. (2003). Why Societies Need Dissent. Harvard University Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-674-01768-9.
- ^ Sunstein, Cass R. (2003). Why Societies Need Dissent. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01768-9.
- ^ Hayek, F. A. (2020). The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition. Routledge. pp. 174, 57–198. ISBN 978-0-429-63797-1.
- ^ Wohlgemuth, Michael (2002-09-01). "Democracy and Opinion Falsification: Towards a New Austrian Political Economy". Constitutional Political Economy. 13 (3): 223–246. doi:10.1023/A:1016156332351. ISSN 1572-9966.
- ^ Kuran, Timur; McCaffery, Edward J. (2004). "Expanding Discrimination Research: Beyond Ethnicity and to the Web*". Social Science Quarterly. 85 (3): 713–730. doi:10.1111/j.0038-4941.2004.00241.x. ISSN 0038-4941.