The overall objective of this project is to explore systematically the link between individual cognition and the evolution of social policies and institutions. Important as it is, this link has received little attention, although many influential thinkers have called attention to it. The framework of analysis will be a collective choice model developed in earlier work, a key feature of which is a distinction between the individual's privately held and publicly declared preferences. This framework will be extended and refined through the incorporation of some major findings of psychology. These include the individual's proclivity to separate interrelated issues; his inability to identify the status quo; his resistance to changing his beliefs; and his readiness to reduce his cognitive dissonance. The focus will be on the role of these cognitive phenomena in blocking social change. Among the particular issues addressed are preference and belief polarization; cultural persistence; the persistence of inconsistencies among collective decisions; the long-term social benefits of controversy; and finally, feedback from collective decisions to the belief systems that underlie individual choices. Another related goal of this project is to reconcile the observation that societies cling to the status quo with the seemingly contradictory fact that they are capable of immense change. One explanation rests on the idea that changes in people's preferences concerning a collective issue might remain hidden from view because of preference falsification - until, that is, a relatively small shock puts in motion a bandwagon process that generates a massive shift in the distribution of public preferences. This is a very ambitious and important research agenda. The project could produce a new school of thought based on a synthesis of economics, cognitive psychology, history, sociology and political science. At the very least it provides new insights into the dynamics of social and economic change. For example, a theory of cognitive limitations could explain why social change is often undesigned, unwanted, and unannounced.
