American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission
American Economic Review
(pp. 3877–3904)
Abstract
A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might 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 sociopolitical attitudes that college students report in private and in public; (ii) public utterances are indeed less informative than private utterances; and (iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naïveté.Citation
Braghieri, Luca. 2024. "Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission." American Economic Review 114 (12): 3877–3904. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20210039Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
- D91 Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
- I23 Higher Education; Research Institutions
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification