Preference Falsification
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Imagine you are part of an office culture that is generally helpful.
However, you start to observe that one of your teammates is taking advantage of this culture and constantly making others especially new joiners to pick up her work load.
You see this happening and want to say something about it to your management.
You draft a strongly worded email and just before hitting send, you start to second guess yourself.
Should you do it?
Should you be the person to point this out?
Will complaining hurt your promotion prospects?
Are you arriving at this decision too hastily?
Will your colleagues trust you with secrets if you did this?
Will you be the outcast in your group?
Are you breaching your company’s values of being helpful to each other?
All these might be valid questions, I would argue most are not but what likely happens next is very important.
Do you send it or do you not? If you did, you will be part of a minority.
Most people won’t.
This idea of believing something to be true and wanting to do something about it but choosing to project the opposite in public is known as preference falsification.
Politicking Opinions & Protests
No matter which era of politics you look at, there is some level of preference falsification among the population of the time.
From 1940’s Germany to 2021 Myanmar, people often hide what they really think about something and they will choose to share an opinion that they feel will be publicly acceptable by the rest.
Needless to say, this can lead to some disastrous consequences. Sometimes it leads to prolonged life of a bad practice/policy and sometimes it leads to violent political revolutions.
Let’s take the BLM protests from last year. Most people would agree that looting is bad (let alone during a protest) and should be punished irrespective of who the perpetrator is. But a lot of people would rather look away and pretend like it is nothing than to say something and risk an avalanche of people calling them racists.
Same holds true in the case of police brutality, most people want to say something when they see someone being mistreated by law enforcement but they would rather ignore it (look away) than risk having to be the one protesting powerful, weapon carrying government officials.
This is one of the reasons why a lot of political movements across the world go from 0 - 90 in violence within a couple of weeks of street protests. So many people hold opinions contrary to what is publicly expressed that when it does come out, a lot of people are surprised that they even existed.
Falsification @ the Workplace
Most tech workplaces (especially in cities) have a liberal culture so the opinions shared and promoted in these spaces are often aligned with liberal values.
However, we need to acknowledge that there are conservatives at our offices as well.
And a lot of times by actively shutting down counter stances to the status quo at the office, conservative voices are silenced. The opposite is also true when it comes to conservative dominated workplaces.
Google vs James Damore is a classic example in which the ideological echo chamber of a company damaged its reputation as an attractive employer.
To be for diversity when it suits you but not when it is uncomfortable to confront is a hypocritical stance to take for any company and it further silences people of that organisation who hold a counter-viewpoint to that of the dominant culture.
Most people would rather shut up than voice their opinion in a culture like this.
Countering Preference Falsification
The best course of action is to of course speak out when you have a viewpoint.
To silence yourself is to deny support or confirmation to someone else with the same opinion.
And to possibly look away from someone’s right being taken away.
Here is an excerpt from Gal Beckerman’s review of the book “Buried by the Times” (highly recommended) about NYT’s alleged burying of Jewish struggles during WW2.
"More shocking even than the chronic burying of articles with the word 'Jew' in them is how often that word was rubbed out of articles that specifically dealt with the Jewish condition. It's almost surreal at times. How could you possibly tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning Jews? But The Times did, describing how '500,000 persons … were herded into less than 7 percent of Warsaw’s buildings,' and how '400,000 persons were deported' to their deaths at Treblinka. As Leff put it, The Times, 'when it ran front-page stories, described refugees seeking shelter, Frenchmen facing confiscation, or civilians dying in German camps, without making clear the refugees, Frenchmen, and civilians were mostly Jews.'"
So many lives could have been saved had this turned out differently.
So speak out. And be loud.
So that is it! I think I went a little deep and preachy with this one.
But I believe this is important given current period we are going through.
And as someone with an audience, I would regret it if I didn’t.
Thanks for reading.
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