Self-censorship and the strategic omission of facts from communication

People often exchange facts about charged issues like public health, climate change, and racial justice. In turn, such exchanges inform beliefs and attitudes that guide many consequential decisions. This paper examines how word-of-mouth communications about charged issues are distorted by moral attitudes and social pressure. Across six pre-registered experiments, we investigate self-censorship, people’s tendency to omit relevant, attitude-incongruent facts from communication. We argue that although people reflectively endorse norms of unbiased evidence-sharing, a desire to avoid social sanction for surfacing “the wrong sorts of facts” leads them to omit relevant information when talking about charged issues with ingroup audiences. This tendency cannot be explained by selective attention to or motivated reasoning about the evidence: Even immediately after affirming that attitude-incongruent facts are true and relevant, people hesitate to share them. By contrast, and consistent with impression management, self-censorship is mediated by expectations of social judgment and reduced in the absence of observers. Whereas prior work has examined the sharing of false information (i.e., fake news), the non-sharing of true information represents a parallel threat – one which is harder to detect and, we further show, easier to morally justify; but one which may nonetheless distort beliefs and harm welfare.