Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

Too often, people’s behavior is clearly not in their own, self-centered, best interest. So he sees roles for both explanations of social behavior; some is based on rationality and some on conformity with social norms—the same position taken in this book. His arguments are not based on quantitative research, however, and he does not believe in the possibility of general lawlike regularities in social behavior.²³ But his discussion of social norms is exhaustive and helpful to understanding their impact on society.

Another attempt to bridge the rational–sociological divide is Timur Kuran’s book, Private Truths, Public Lies. He proposes a remedy for a theoretical problem that comes up when using rational choice theory to explain conformist behavior.²⁴ Rational choice theory usually holds that people’s preferences are stable. So it is a problem for the theory when people seem to act as if their preferences are malleable or reversible, as when they yield their own desires to social pressure. He argues that people often have two sets of preferences or values—one private, the other public—because pressures of social conformity distort how people express their preferences. The result is that people may misrepresent or lie about their true views, which can have profound social and political ramifications when it happens on a large scale. If people have alternative preference sets—one private, one public—it also may explain shifting public behavior.

Kuran’s theory, which is not based on psychological research, has some problems. As seen when reviewing psychological research, social motives for agreement with others often affect private attitudes as well as public expressions.²⁵ As people reflect on their public statements, made in response to social conformity, they may modify their private attitudes to correspond to their public behavior. Kuran’s idea is more likely to be true in situations when a person is forced to make a specific public statement or is highly rewarded for it.

Cutting through the complexities of rational choice theory, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner offer a simple way to explain human behavior in their popular book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.