The US is taking a more compromise approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they want to do. Daymood and his co-authors wanted to explore these very different approaches. So they developed an agent-based computer simulation that simulated how people move between the desire to express disagreement and the fear of punishment. The model also includes how the authority adjusts its oversight and its policies to minimize dissent at the lowest possible enforcement costs.
“This is not some kind of learning theory,” Dimude said. “And it's not based on empirical statistics. We didn't go out and ask 1,000 people, 'What would you do if you were faced with this situation?' Would you disagree or self-censor?” and then plug that data into the model. Our The model allows us to embed some assumptions about how we think people behave in general, but then allows us to explore parameters. What happens if you become more or less bold? What happens if the punishments are more or less severe? Is the government more or less tolerant? And we can make predictions based on our fundamental assumptions about what will happen.”
Let a hundred flowers bloom
According to their model, the most extreme case is an authoritarian government that adopts a draconian punitive strategy that effectively suppresses any dissent among the general population. “The best strategic choice for everyone is to just say nothing at this point,” Daymood said. “So why doesn’t every authoritarian government on the planet just do this?” This forced them to take a closer look at the dynamics. “Perhaps authoritarian regimes start out somewhat moderate,” he said. “Perhaps the only way to reach this extreme endpoint is through small changes over time.”
Daymood points to China Hundred Flowers Campaign in the 1950s as a case in point. Here, Chairman Mao Zedong first encouraged open criticism of his government and then took aggressive action when dissent got out of hand. The model showed that in this case, self-censorship of dissenters gradually increases, culminating over time in almost complete submission.
But there's one catch. “The opposite of Hundred Flowers is that if the population is bold enough, this strategy will not work,” Daymood said. “An authoritarian regime can't find a way to become completely draconian. People just stubbornly continue to disagree. So every time it tries to become stricter, it ends up on the hook every time, because people are still there, they still disagree. They say, 'Catch us if you dare.'”
