Political correctness, social image, and information transmission

A prominent argument in the debate about political correctness is that people may feel pressure to publicly espouse views on a set of sensitive political topics that they may not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations may render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper provides a formalization of the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses, where the debate about political correctness has been particularly heated. The results of the experiment show that: i) social image concerns indeed drive a wedge between the sensitive political attitudes that college students report in private and in public; ii) public utterances are less informative than private utterances according to a host of canonical measures of informativeness; iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naiveté.