declaring how they felt about people who didnt look like them. They would act on their actual preferences later, in confidential e-mails to the people they wanted to date. Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didnt matter to them. But the response data tell a different story. The white men who said that race didnt matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didnt matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men. Is it possible that race really didnt matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them? Or, more likely, did they say that race didnt FREAK ONOMIC S   matter because they wanted to come across-especially to potential mates of their own race-as open-minded?       The gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the in- formation we know to be true is often vast. (Or, put a more familiar way: we say one thing and do another.) This can be seen in personal relationships, in commercial transactions, and of course in politics. By now we are fully accustomed to the false public proclamations of politicians themselves. But voters lie too. Consider an election be- tween a black candidate and a white candidate. Might white voters lie to pollsters, claiming they will vote for the black candidate in order to appear more color-blind than they actually are? Apparently so. In New York Citys 1989 mayoral race between David Dinkins (a black candidate) and Rudolph Giuliani (who is white), Dinkins won by only a few points. Although Dinkins became the citys first black mayor, his slender margin of victory came as a surprise, for pre- election polls showed Dinkins winning by nearly 15 points. When