The Role of Preference Falsification in Public Opinion Dynamics

Opinion dynamics are a relevant issue in social sciences as much as for their academic interest as for their social and political significance. Nowadays there is a vast and rich literature on the topic, but the role of preference falsification and status hierarchies have generally been dismissed. Following the lead of Timur Kuran, in this paper we present one of the firsts 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 status hierarchies in preference falsification-conditioned opinion dynamics. The multi-agent simulation technique allows us to overcome some of the main limitations of Kuran’s mathematical models. Our model formalizes heterogeneous evolving agents guided by cognitive feasible heuristics and embedded in a status-dependent structure of interactions. The model formalizes private opinion as a continuous variable (xi) and the publicly expressed opinion as a binary variable (zi). In status-heterophilic encounters where people consider local opinions as much as the mean population opinion, unanimous support for the high-status preferred option emerges, while in any other scenario this option gathers a majoritarian 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 status-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 status-homophilic encounters and a persistent opinion falsification in dissimilar-status interactions.