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  5. Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

  • Luca Braghieri
American Economic Review (Forthcoming)

Abstract

A prominent argument in the political-correctness debate is that people may feel pressure to publicly espouse socio-political views that they may not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations may render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper formalizes the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses. The results show that: i) social image concerns drive a wedge between the sensitive socio-political attitudes that college students report in private and in public; ii) public utterances are indeed less informative than private utterances; iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naivete.

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