Nice discussion of the concept of preference falsification.
What comes to Robert’s mind is all the camping (or whatever you want to call it) going on in the streets of San Francisco. Everyone is sort of walking around the city, thinking to themselves, “eventually these people are going to have to be removed,” but the political will is not there (yet) at the decision-making layer. It will come. And it will come fast. Human nature.
Q: What is preference falsification?
A: It’s the act of misrepresenting one’s wants because of perceived social pressures. It aims specifically to manipulate the perceptions of others about one’s motivations or dispositions.
Q: What are some examples?
A: Intellectual preference falsification occurs when scholars refrain from expressing skepticism of a theory for fear of being ridiculed or losing friends. A closeted gay man is engaged in a form of sexual preference falsification. On college campuses, conservative students and faculty commonly falsify their political preferences for fear of ostracism. Political preference falsification was also a survival tool in Eastern Europe before 1989, where support for communism was mostly feigned.