„Preference Cascade“, „Preference Falsifikation“ bzw. die Prägung durch in der Gruppe akzeptierte Meinungen

Gestern las ich im Rahmen des „Brexit“ etwas über eine „Preference Cascade“, diesen finde ich durchaus interessant.

Dazu zB diese Stelle:

What’s a “preference cascade?”It’s people who believed they were alone in their beliefs who suddenly find out that they are part of a much larger group. It’s human nature to not want to be an oddball. It’s human nature not to want to be a one-man revolution. It’s when you find out that most of the people around you share your views that revolutions are made.

Es hat also etwas von dem Effekt, dass man bemerkt, dass „der Kaiser nackt ist“. Wobei es eben nicht der Hinweis eines Einzelnen ist, der die Menge aufweckt, sondern eher der Effekt, dass man merkt, dass alle anderen auch eine Meinung haben, die man sich vorher nicht zu trauen gesagt hat, weil man sie für problematisch hielt. Es ist also in gewisser Weise der „Stärke in der Gruppe“-Effekt, aber auch der Effekt, dass viele sich erst dann trauen, zu einer Idee zu stehen, wenn sie merken, dass man dies darf.

Es geht also darum, dass wir als „Gruppentiere“ Angst haben uns ohne Mitstreiter zu einer unpopulären Idee zu bekennen.

In dem oben verlinkten Beitrag kommt noch etwas interessantes zu Revolutionen und der Tea Party in Amerika:

It’s perfectly illustrated by a post by Glenn Reynolds explaining how revolutions seem to appear out of nowhere.

“This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.”

It also illustrates why the Tea Party movement occurred when it did. Certainly, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see had something to do with it. Certainly collapsing home prices had something to do with it. Certainly ObamaCare with its government take-over of health care had something to do with it. Certainly staggering unemployment unchecked by those trillions the government wasted had something to do with it. Certainly promises of tax hikes had something to do with it. But this “perfect storm” was accompanied by the internet revolution which did away with the MSM as the gatekeeper of news and opinion. The internet enable Americans to realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime.

For the first time, people were not dependent on the MSM’s control of the narrative; they were able to create their own “people’s narrative” even as the NY Times, Washington Post, the alphabet networks and the local dailies still shilled for the Obama regime. And like the people in Cairo and Damascus, they found that their ideas were not solitary ones. They found that their friends and neighbors thought exactly the same thing that they did and they turned out in the streets for the first time ever – a Conservative street demonstration. It was unheard of ….revolutionary.

Eine solche Entwicklung könnte aus meiner Sicht durchaus zum Brexit und dem gegenwärtigen Ruck hin zu AfD und anderen eher rechtlastigen Parteien geführt haben: Die Leute hatten das Gefühl, das ihre Meinung nicht mehr gehört wird und sie haben in diesen Parteien ein Umfeld gefunden, in dem sie sie plötzlich ausdrücken konnten. Gerade das Gefühl, dass auf diese Weise der Druck wegfiel, der durch hohe politische Korrektheit erreichtet worden war, bei der man bloß nichts falsches sagen durfte, mag dann den Effekt verursacht haben.

Der eigentlich Grund warum ich diesen Begriff interessant finde ist aber eher die Feminismuskritik. Es macht aus meiner Sicht noch einmal deutlich, warum man zum einen Kristalisationspunkte braucht und zum anderen auch eine gewisse Öffentlichkeit  haben muss: Nur dann, wenn Leute Gruppen bilden können, in denen es vollkommen okay ist, radikalen Feminismus blöd finden zu können, kann ein solcher Effekt sich entwickeln, dass irgendwann die Idee der Kritik am radikalen Feminismus zulässig, da vernünftig wird.

Der etwas allgemeinere Effekt scheint auch allgemeiner unter „Preference falsification“ zu laufen, wobei es dabei darum geht, dass wir unsere Meinung an das Anpassen, was sozial akzeptiert ist.

Preference falsification
In articulating preferences, individuals frequently tailor their choices to what appears socially acceptable. In other words, they convey preferences that differ from what they genuinely want. Kuran calls the resulting misrepresentation “preference falsification.” In his 1995 book, Private Truths, Public Lies, he argues that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and that it has huge social and political consequences. These consequences all hinge on interdependencies between individual decisions as to what preference to convey publicly. A person who hides his discontent about a fashion, policy, or political regime makes it harder for others to express discontent.

One socially significant consequence of preference falsification is thus widespread public support for social options that would be rejected decisively in a vote taken by secret ballot. Privately unpopular policies may be retained indefinitely as people reproduce conformist social pressures through individual acts of preference falsification.

In falsifying preferences, people hide the knowledge on which it rests. In the process, they distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain. They make it harder for others to become informed about the drawbacks of existing arrangements and the merits of their alternatives. Another consequence of preference falsification is thus widespread ignorance about the advantages of change. Over long periods, preference falsification can dampen a community’s capacity to want change by bringing about intellectual narrowness and ossification.

The first of these consequences is driven by people’s need for social approval, the second by their reliance on each other for information.

Kuran has applied these observations to a range of contexts. He has used the theory developed in Private Truths, Public Lies to explain why major political revolutions catch us by surprise, how ethnic tensions can feed on themselves, why India’s caste system has been a powerful social force for millennia, and why minor risks sometimes generate mass hysteria.[4]

Der Feminismus scheint mir durchaus mit diesen Methoden zu arbeiten, da er stark darauf setzt, dass jeder, der vom Feminismus abweicht, als Frauenfeind dargestellt wird und jedes entgegenstehendes Wissen bekämpft wird.