A voluminous literature in social sciences pays pride of place to the role of social context in the way individuals express their preferences in the public domain. The predisposition to voice opinions publicly is shaped by social perceptions about the degree of acceptance of such opinions in the social environment. But which factors influence these perceptions? Building on the Sociology of the Space theory, I try to provide an answer to this question by pointing to the role of the social environment. Beliefs of appropriateness, I argue, are based on group-size dynamics, which help individuals evaluate which opinions are “legitimized” and which are “stigmatized” in the public realm. Citizens who belong to the minority group in terms of preferences related with salient issues may face the dilemma of preference falsification through which they forge in public what is true in the private sphere (Kuran, 1991). I put this idea into the test by looking at the case of Spanish citizens holding centralist preferences in Catalonia. Using longitudinal survey data (2004-2017) from the Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials (ICPS) and the Centre d´Estudis d´Opinió (CEO), I show that the relationship between Catalonia and Spain increases as a salient issue since 2010. Then, I leverage the identification strategy by using differences-in-differences estimation. There is a declining pattern in the willingness to declare the vote intention for those citizens who live in pro-independence majority regions within Catalonia and hold centralist preferences after 2010.