The Role of Public Opinion in Contemporary Society

Nowadays, the term Public Opinion is in every form of discourse. If you read newspapers or listen to news, you will constantly encounter references to public opinion. However, in spite of being a very common term, not everybody could exactly explain what public opinion is.

The media relevance of public opinion is the obvious consequence of the importance of public opinion in our society. In a contemporary democratic society, public opinion becomes the only legitimate source of power.

Power necessarily flows from public opinion.

And when we talk here about power, we are referring not only to political power, which is obvious, but also to economic or social power.

A very good example to understand the communication battle for public opinion in the political arena was the case of Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. As you probably remember, the affair of the president of the United States with the intern Monica Lewinsky almost cost the Bill Clinton the presidency of the country.

Click here to access the dossier of The Washington Post about the case

What was at stake in that case was Bill Clinton’s moral value, his integrity. The public debate was about the moral quality of his actions, whether his relationship with the young intern was ethically correct or not, whether he had lied to the American people or not.

Then we saw that Public Opinion has the power to determine the public moral judgment of an individual. And this public moral judgment is essential for the career of a politician. If the public opinion had decreed that Clinton has no moral integrity, his political life would have been totally ruined.

This maxim also applies in the business world. You will have to build and maintain the image of moral integrity in front of the public because this image is the key to the trust of the people.

And as we learned when we defined Strategic Communication, the everyday job of the professional communicator consists in building TRUST in the organization he/she is working for.

In 1995 three African-American teenagers were treated disrespectfully at one of the Eddie Bauer stores in Maryland. The security guards accused them of having stolen the T-shorts they were wearing. The mother of one of the teenagers went with the story to the Washington Post.

The published story emphasized the racial connotations of the case. The company was associated by the public with the idea of racial discrimination. To face the serious crisis, Eddie Bauer hired the firm Hill and Knowlton.

Again, we have an example of how a negative public moral judgment may have severe consequences – in this case financial consequences – for individuals and organizations.

Definition of Public Opinion

The German social-psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the most important authority in the field of public opinion, defines the term as follows:

“A tacit and public consensus, a general agreement concerning issues that have a strong moral or aesthetic charge, and that determines the ideas you can express or the behaviors you can adopt in public without taken the risk of being isolated.”

Key elements in this definition:

1.1 – “Tacit consensus”: The adjective “tacit” means here “unspoken”, “unwritten”. Public opinion establishes rules of behavior, but these rules, as opposed to the law, are not formally written down.

1.2 – “Strong moral or aesthetic charge”: Public opinion is always a general agreement about certain issues with strong moral or aesthetic component. That means that public opinion determines in every society what is regarded as morally right (good) or morally wrong (evil), but also what is beautiful or ugly, in or out. Fashion is, for instance, a manifestation of public opinion.

1.3 – “Risk of isolation”: According to Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the fear of isolation is the binding element of public opinion. The individual is afraid of what other people may think or say about him/her. This is one aspect of the human being’s social nature. This is also the reason why many people prefer not to talk in public when they think that their ideas would be disapproved by the group.

Ideas that are not expressed will never become public opinion.

This is the core thought of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s theory of the Spiral of Silence.

Opinions that are not spoken out tend to fade away and finally disappear. As Timur Kuran stated, what is un-expressed becomes un-though, and finally un-thinkable.

Fear of isolation is, no doubt, one of the reasons why people join certain opinions and trends, but there may be others.

Paul Lazarsfeld believes that people join those opinions and ideas that are perceived as generally accepted to feel in the “winning side”, to belong with the winner, which will constitute the other side of our human nature. This strong urge of the individual is also a crucial moment in the process of public opinion formation. Lazarsfeld refers to it as the “Band-Wagon Effect”.

Public Opinion and Social Control

The main social function of Public Opinion is, according to the American sociologist Edward A. Ross, to make possible SOCIAL CONTROL, social order.

In this sense, Public Opinion will always be conservative, that means, it will always protect and preserve the STATUS QUO.

What is this? The Status Quo?

We defined the Status Quo as the “system of beliefs, values and social structures that characterizes a society”.

Protecting the Status Quo, public opinion will always promote conformism.

It will also give cohesion to the society protecting the core values society rests on.

Public Opinion Punishment

We have already mentioned that isolation is the punishment for those individuals who deviate from what public opinion dictates.

Still, not only anonymous individuals suffer the punishment of public opinion. The control exerted by public opinion also affects politicians and even large corporations. We have already seen examples of both cases in this learning module. Bill Clinton almost lost the presidency of the United States when he got into troubles with the public opinion. Eddie Bauer also had to face a serious crisis when then company appeared in the press associated to the ideal of racial discrimination.

In the next leaning module about crisis communication, we will analyze in depth the Exxon-Valdez case. Exxon, one of the giants of the U.S. oil industry, suffered severe financial consequences when one of its tankers, the Exxon-Valdez sank in Alaskan Prince William Sound causing one of the worst environmental catastrophes of the history.

Environment has become one of the idols of public opinion in contemporary Western societies. To offend against this idol had severe consequences for the company. People were cutting their Exxon credit cards in front of TV cameras. There were boycotts against Exxon gas stations worldwide. The stocks of the company dramatically sank.

One of the most important roles of the professional communicator is to represent the company in front of the tribunal of public opinion. To keep a good image – or to restore the name when things go badly.

Public Opinion Dynamic

We have defined public opinion as conservative force that protects the social and political Status Quo. Still, it is also evident that we to do here with a dynamic phenomenon. Public opinion is constantly changing. The change can be a long process that can extend for generations, but it can also happen in short time.

There seems to be a contradiction between those two statements. How does public opinion change come about?

How can a conservative force be constantly changing?

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann believes that public opinion changes because there are individuals who either are not afraid of the isolation or have the courage to face it when their ideas collide with the public opinion.

She called those individuals “opinion leaders”.

Opinion leaders are key persons because they can start dynamics that change the contents and directions of public opinion.

This is the reason why they also play an important role in strategic communication. It is important to identify opinion leaders in the population in order to make prognoses about possible changes in public opinion and anticipate trends.

Social Engineering

In this section, we will explore the work of the most relevant authors on the subject public opinion. Two of them, Gustave Le Bon and Walter Lippmann had a strong influence on Edward l. Bernays (you shoudl be familiar with this name, AKA “father of spin”, at this stage of the course). Lippmann published his classic “Public Opinion” in 1922, one year before Bernays brought out “Crystallizing Public Opinion”. The third one, Robert E. Park, offers an interest contrast with Le Bon’s social-psychological approach to public opinion.

Gustave Le Bon

This French author is the founder of a scientific discipline that we know now as “social-psychology”.

His most important book is:

“The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1895)

We will know discuss some relevant passages of this book.

The most important characteristic of the crowd is, according to Le Bon, its lack of rationality.

“The crowd thinks in images … Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only very distant relation with the observed fact.”

Individuals, when they are a part of the crowd, give up the use of their reason. This is the reason why Le Bon states that the “crowd thinks in images”. The word “image” has here a large meaning. The author is not only talking about images as “pictures”, but about mental images, preconceived ideas about the different aspects of reality. Thus, the crowd will never have access to the truth because those images determine and distort the way they perceive the real world.

Based on those images, and with the necessity of any critical thinking, the crowd builds an own world that becomes its reality, but that not “the” reality.

Le Bon called this world based in images “illusion”:

“Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

This statement suggests that it impossible to enlighten or to educate the crowd, because in order to achieve that goal you will have to fight against those images that prevent rational thinking.

And those who try to do it will run the risk of being a victim of the crowd.

The most fascinating question is however HOW TO CONTROL THIS CROWD.

Le Bon thought that he had the answer to this question, too.

“It is necessary by their condensation, if I must thus express myself, they should produce a startling image which fills and besets the mind. To know the art of impressing the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them.”

If you want to control the mass, according to Le Bon, you will have to adapt yourself to the nature and characteristics of the crowd. The mass leader needs to use the existing “images” or to produce new ones that are strong enough to “fill and beset the minds” of the people who form the crowd.

To create those images that can “fill and beset their minds”, it is necessary to appeal to the emotions of the people in the crowd and to avoid complex rational processes.

As you see, Le Bon did not present the crowd in an especially flattering light.

However, this phenomenon, the crowd, plays a very important role in a democratic system. The votes that are going to decide who holds power come from the very people who form the crowd.

This is alarming in a democracy, because it implies that power is based on the illusions Le Bon talked about, and that the way to achieve political power is to create a discourse that appeals to the emotions of the people and entirely lacks rationality.

Robert E. Park

Our next author, Robert E. Park tries to save the theory of democracy differentiating between the crowd and the public. The crowd, according to Park might be what Le Bon describes, but it is a phenomenon of the past or of primitive cultures. In modern societies, the crowd has been replace by the public.

His most important book “The Crowd and the Public” (1904) can be considered a response to Le Bon’s theories. In this book, Park distinguish both concepts as follows:

“Characteristically the crowd always functions at the perception stage of awareness-development, while the behavior of the public, which is expressed in public opinion, results from the discussion among individuals who assume opposing positions. This discussion is based upon the presentation of facts.”

For Park, the Crowd-Mind embodied the triumph of unreasoned instinct, whereas “Public Opinion” was the sum of individual critical attitudes. Of course, the democracy should be based on a society of critical individuals.

When Park writes that the crowd “always functions at the perception stage of awareness-development”, he is referring to its lack of rationality. The people in the crowd form their opinion the very moment they are exposed to the stimuli (the images Le Bon talked about). There is no critical reflection about what they perceive.

The public is different, according to Park. Their opinions are the result of a sophisticated and educated discussion based on the analysis of facts. Thus, those members of the crowd are not easily influenced by the appeals to their emotions. They will always critically analyze what is behind those messages.

Park’s ideas imply that there are no crowds in contemporary democratic societies. Of course, not everybody would agree with this statement.

Walter Lippmann

One of the authors who strongly disagrees with Park is Walter Lippmann.

Walter Lippmann was the most influential American journalist of the 20th Century. He wrote in several important newspapers from the 1920ies to the 1970ies, almost until his death (1974). Especially famous was his opinion column “Today and Tomorrow” in The New York Herald Tribune. When he was starting his journalistic activity he wrote two very influential books:

“Public Opinion” (1922)

“The Phantom Public” (1925)

We will now analyze three key passages in those books.

First of all, Lippmann believes that Park’s differentiation of crowd and public is itself just an illusion.

The nature of both Crowd and Public Opinion is exactly the same, according to Lippmann. Both are the consequence of the social nature of the human being, whose life is unthinkable without the warmth of human society (necessary for survival as individual and as species).

For Walter Lippmann, public opinion is an “essentially irrational force”:

“For the most part we do not first see, and then define. We define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

Walter Lippmann was the first author who used the term STEREOTYPE in the modern sense of the word.

A stereotype is a simplified version of any given aspect of the reality, a generalization.

The reality, the outer world, Lippmann refers to, is too complex. Our mind is, on the other hand, too limited: We cannot perceive the whole reality. Thus, a reduction of complexity is necessary. The stereotype helps us organize information in this complex reality.

Stereotypes, which Lippmann defines as pictures in our heads, are therefore always a simplification of the reality: The reduction of the complexity of reality to a couple of features.

Stereotypes create a pseudo-environment in our heads, a virtual reality informing ordinary thought and behavior. But this pseudo-environment – pseudo or virtual reality – is our only reality, the only world we know and in which we move around.

In his second book, “The Phantom Public”, Lippmann discusses how to control the power that flows from public opinion. His conclusions do not differ much from what Gustave Le Bon wrote.

“The making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes is not an Hegelian mystery … but an art well known to leaders, politicians and steering committees. It consists essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas, and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous will out of a heterogeneous mass of desires.”

Again, we find the idea that emotional appeals are much stronger, and more effective, than a rational discourse when it comes to influence public opinion (or the crowd, because Walter Lippmann does not find any difference between both terms). Lippmann is also aware of the power of symbols to generate emotions. In this regard, he was anticipating the use and abuse of symbols in the propaganda during World War II.

Lippmann is perfectly aware that the mass of people needs individuals who give homogeneity to a large group of different people:

“The process, therefore, by which general opinions are brought to cooperation consists of an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance. Before a mass of general opinions can eventuate in executive action, the choice is narrowed down to a few alternatives. The victorious alternative is executed not by a mass but by individuals in control of its energy.”

The “intensification of feeling” and the “degradation of significance” is a recurrent idea in Walter Lippmann when he explains how to deal with public opinion. Lippmann is convinced that emotions are more effective than rational appeals, first of all, because they do not require cognitive efforts. They are much easier to interpret.

The individual who wants to influence public opinion will have to adapt his/her messages to this nature of public opinion. This is one of the most important ideas of Walter Lippmann – and also his most important lesson in the field of strategic communication. The secret of gaining public opinion is not to change the mind of the people, but to adapt the own discourse to their expectations and their language.

This is the only foundation of what Edward l. Bernays called social engineering.