Ceux qui niaient le christianisme élevant la voix et ceux qui croyaient encore faisant silence, il arriva ce qui s’est vu si souvent depuis parmi nous, non seulement en fait de religion, mais en toute autre matière. Les hommes qui conservaient l’ancienne foi craignirent d’être les seuls à lui rester fidèles, et, redoutant plus l’isolement que l’erreur, ils se joignirent à la foule sans penser comme elle. Ce qui n’était encore que le sentiment d’une partie de la nation parut ainsi l’opinion de tous, et sembla dès lors irrésistible aux yeux mêmes de ceux qui lui donnaient cette fausse apparence (Tocqueville et al. 1856: 152).
Abstract
In the vast and rich literature on opinion dynamics, the role of preference falsification has generally been dismissed. Following the lead of Timur Kuran, in this paper we present one of the first multi-agent models that explores how opinion dynamics can be affected by the possible divorce between private and public opinions. It is also the first attempt to explore the role of social hierarchies in opinion dynamics conditioned by preference falsification. Our model formalizes heterogeneous evolving agents guided by a cognitively feasible set of heuristics and embedded in a social-rank-dependent structure of interactions. In social-rank-heterophilic encounters where people experience a high pressure of face-to-face interactions, unanimous support for the high social-rank preferred option emerges, while in any other scenario this option gathers majority but not unanimous support. Preference falsification has a crucial role in the emergence of unanimity, but it also creates the conditions for further private opinion actualizations that end up generating a self-sustained and sincere unanimity. When social-rank-homophilic encounters are the rule, or when group dynamics are irrelevant for opinion expression, agents never find incentives to falsify their opinions, therefore generating a social situation that resembles the general idea behind the ethnographic work of James C. Scott: true opinion expression in daily social-rank-homophilic encounters and a persistent opinion falsification in dissimilar social-rank interactions.
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Notes
Although preferences, beliefs and opinions are different phenomena, in this work (and as is usual in opinion dynamics models), by fiat, we shall use the three terms as being synonymous.
There are some developments of Kuran’s models outside the field of opinion dynamics. As Duggins pointed out (2017: 1.4), theyassume global information and rational action, and have not yet been applied to the study of interpersonal influence within social networks. Therefore, the models share the same limitations as Kuran’s models (see Arce et al. 2003; Bernheim 1994; Ginkel and Smith 1999; Klick and Parisi 2008; Makowsky and Rubin 2013; Rubin 2014; Tullock 1974).
It was initially developed using Netlogo v. 5.3.1, and the production version was refactorized and run using NetLogo 6.0.4 on several *NIX systems at the Laboratory for Socio-Historical Dynamics Simulation (Autonomous University of Barcelona). The outcome dataset was analyzed and plotted using R scripts, LO-Calc and SPSS. Some other spreadsheet and wordprocessing applications have been used to test and check early numerical outcomes.
It is worth mentioning that, contrary to our thesis, Kuran argues (1995a: 181–183) that preference falsification and cognitive dissonance reduction cannot have an important role in the evolution of private opinions in these scenarios. In this regard, he states that the most important mechanisms are by necessity cognitive (i.e., the social proof heuristic and availability heuristic) (1987b: 655 note 19, 1995a: block 3, 1998a: 150–151, 1998b, c; Kuran and Sunstein 1999), so private opinion would only change as a consequence of direct social influence (and probably throughout generations, 1987b: 658, 1998b). For a convincing response which states that preference falsification and cognitive dissonance reduction can also have a role in private opinion changes, see Elster (1996).
In these models, the global opinion that agents take into account is the modal opinion of the population. In our model, agents consider the mean opinion. Moreover, our model concedes a very limited role to mass media as a mere reporter of the state of public opinion, and unlike most current models that consider mass media as external perturbations (see, for example, Gargiulo and Gandica 2017; Grabowsky and Kosinsky 2006; Kurahashi-Nakamura et al. 2016; Watts and Dodds 2007).
Seminal models on opinion dynamics centred on the study of consensus emergence produced unanimity (see Abelson 1964; Berger 1981; De Groot 1974; French 1956), while classic binary models and their developments can produce consensus as well as polarization depending on their variations (for a detailed discussion, see Castellano et al. 2009).
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This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy National R&D Plan (Grant No. CSO2015-64740-R and Grant No. FFI2017-89639-P).
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León-Medina, F.J., Tena-Sánchez, J. & Miguel, F.J. Fakers becoming believers: how opinion dynamics are shaped by preference falsification, impression management and coherence heuristics. Qual Quant 54, 385–412 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00909-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-019-00909-2