Formation of public opinion – development phases,

constitution, processes.

L 5

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014

In the 1940s and 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, and colleagues formulated a breakthrough theory of public opinion formation that sought to reconcile the role of media influence with the growing realization that, in a variety of decision‐making scenarios, ranging from political to personal, individuals may be influenced more by exposure to each other than to the media.

According to their theory, illustrated schematically in figure 1, a small minority of “opinion leaders” (stars) act as intermediaries between the mass media and the majority of society (circles). Because information, and thereby influence “flows” from the media through opinion leaders to their respective followers, Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) called their model the “two‐step flow” of communication, in contrast with the then paradigmatic one‐step, or “hypodermic,” model that treated individuals as atomized objects of media influence (Bineham 1988).

Schematic of the Two‐Step Flow Model of Influence

But what exactly does the two‐step flow say about influentials, and how precisely do they exert influence over the (presumably much larger) population of noninfluentials?

Although the dual concepts of personal influence and opinion leadership have been extensively documented, it is nevertheless unclear exactly how, or even if, the influentials of the two‐step flow are responsible for diffusion processes, technology adoption, or other processes of social change.

In fact, it is generally the case that most social change is driven not by influentials but by easily influenced individuals influencing other easily influenced individuals.

Based on these results, we argue that, although our models are at best a simplified and partial representation of a complex reality, they nevertheless highlight that claims regarding the importance of influentials should rest on carefully specified assumptions about who influences whom and how.

Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), originally defined opinion leaders as “the individuals who were likely to influence other persons in their immediate environment,” and this definition remains in use, more or less unchanged.

It is important to note that opinion leaders are not “leaders” in the usual sense—they do not head formal organizations nor are they public figures such as newspaper columnists, critics, or media personalities, whose influence is exerted indirectly via organized media or authority structures.

Rather their influence is direct and derives from their informal status as individuals who are highly informed, respected, or simply “connected.”

As Keller and Berry (2003, 1) specify: “It’s not about the first names that come to mind when you think about the people with influence in this country—the leaders of government, the CEO’s of larger corporations, or the wealthy. Rather, it’s about millions of people … who shape the opinions and trends in our country.”

Although the notion of opinion leadership seems clear, precisely how the influence of opinion leaders over their “immediate environment” shapes opinions and trends across entire communities, or even a country, is not specified by the two‐step flow model itself.

Often it is described simply as “a process of the moving of information from the media to opinion leaders, and influence moving from opinion leaders to their followers”, where the mechanics of the process itself are either left unspecified or, alternatively, are asserted to derive from some diffusion process.

The absence of special individuals in formal models of diffusion, of course, does not necessarily mean that they do not arise in a real diffusion process or that they do not play an important role. It does suggest, however, that the matter has not been resolved either by the two‐step flow itself or by diffusion of innovations theory.

It is observation that some people are more influential than others in their immediate environment translate to the much stronger and more interesting claim that some special group of influentials plays a critical, or at least important, role in forming and directing public opinion?

In addition to describing a rule for how individuals influence each others’ decisions, we also need to specify who influences whom—that is, we require a formal description of the associated influence network. Unfortunately, empirical evidence regarding real world influence networks is limited. Although a number of sociometric studies of influence have been conducted.

The resulting influence network, illustrated schematically in figure 2, differs from the two‐step flow schematic of figure 1 in two important ways. First, whereas in figure 1 influence can only flow from opinion leaders to followers, in figure 2, it can flow in either direction.

Second, in figure 2 influence can propagate for many steps, whereas in figure 1 it can propagate only two.

The figure 2 is consistent with available empirical evidence—arguably more so than figure 1.

Numerous studies, including that of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), suggest that opinion leaders and followers alike are exposed to mixtures of interpersonal and media influence and that differences in influence are more appropriately described on a continuum than dichotomously - two-part.

Furthermore, while the implications of multistep flow for the influentials hypothesis have not been studied, multistep flow itself has been recognized as a likely feature of most diffusion processes.

Brown and Reingen (1987), for example, found that, even in a relatively small population, 90% of recommendation chains extended over more than one step and 38% involved at least four individuals.

Schematic of Network Model of Influence

Although our model therefore embodies some important qualitative features of real world interpersonal influence networks, it nevertheless contains two assumptions regarding the structure of these networks that merit critical examination in light of our objectives.

First, the influence distribution, exhibits relatively little variation around its average. Influentials in such a world, while clearly more influential than average, are rarely many times more influential.

Second, aside from the distribution of influence, the network exhibits no other structure—it is entirely random.

Although neither of these assumptions is demonstrably incorrect, neither is clearly correct either—the empirical evidence is unfortunately inconclusive.

The Seven Stages of Public Opinion

Public opinion is not static. People's views about an issue can develop and change over time from disconnected, poorly informed reactions to more thoughtful and considered conclusions, from changeable public opinion to settled public judgment.

This process evolves through seven distinct stages, according to Daniel Yankelovich, author, public opinion analyst and co-founder of Public Agenda.

And unless one understands where people are in this process, survey results can frequently mislead.

The Seven Stages of Public Opinion

People often approach an issue initially with strong, emotionally laden feelings and opinions, which tend to be unstable and changeable.

People may not understand an issue or problem particularly well.

They may not have thought through the consequences of their opinions, and resist confronting realistic costs and trade-offs.

The Seven Stages of Public Opinion

The quality of public opinion at this stage is raw and unformed. However, when people's views have progressed through all seven stages of public opinion, their ideas become solid and stable, and they accept the consequences of the views they hold. When public opinion is fully developed, opinion surveys will reveal a reliable and stable picture of people's thinking, a picture which accurately reflects their values, priorities, and beliefs.

Stage 1 :

Dawning Awareness: In this stage, people become aware of an issue, but do not yet feel a pressing need to take action. For instance, surveys show that most Americans say child care is a serious problem when they are questioned about it, but it rarely surfaces when people are asked to name the most important issues facing the country. People acknowledge the problem, but there is little real urgency. Americans are aware of many problems, but only a few rise to the top of their list of priorities. Distinguishing between awareness and urgency is essential to interpreting public opinion correctly.

Stage 2 :

Greater Urgency, people move beyond awareness to a sense of urgency. The dominant sentiment is often a panicky appeal to "do something!" Health care moved squarely into this second stage when the economic recession of the early 1990s had many people terrified about losing their jobs. Much of this anxiety was channeled into worry about insurance coverage. Although the health care issue had been kicking around for years, the public's concern rose sharply in economic bad times. In today's more comfortable economy, health care has receded as a top tier issue, and the debate centers more on the quality of care than on lack of insurance coverage.

Stage 3 :

Reaching for Solutions

In the third stage, the public begins to look at alternatives for dealing with issues, converting free-floating concern into calls for action. Often, the public's attention focuses on choices that experts or policy-makers have crafted without being helped to understand the implications.

Since people do not fully understand the choices presented to them, stage three is a period of stunningly false endorsements, that is, the public expresses support for a proposal but backs down as soon as the costs and trade-offs are clarified.

Stage 3 :

Reaching for Solutions

In the health care debate, for example, people favor broad expansion of health care coverage for children, low-income workers and others, but support wavers –hesitate, when people consider the likely costs.

Stage 4 :

Wishful Thinking

This is where the public's resistance to facing trade-offs is most manifest as people initially assume they can "have it all." On difficult issues — ones that require significant change or sacrifice — the public's wishful thinking must be overcome before people come to grips with more realistic solutions.

Stage 4 :

Wishful Thinking

With health care, people start with the assumption that complete health care is a right, and that insurance should pay for any treatment that will save lives, regardless of the cost.

Yet the public balks at increased premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The public shows resistance to facing realistic costs and trade-offs on the issue of health care.

Stage 5 :

Weighing The Choices

In this stage, the public does "choice work": weighing the pros and cons of the alternatives for dealing with an issue. Stage 5 is hard work, as people come to understand that easy, cost-free solutions are unlikely to work, and that seemingly simple solutions may have down-sides. When the public has given a lot of thought to an issue and proposals for addressing it, they begin to hold firmly to their opinions even when presented with unpleasant consequences.

Stage 5 :

Weighing The Choices

One example currently being played out around the country concerns raising standards in public schools. People are now more familiar with the debate, and their support for raising standards holds, even as they acknowledge that raising standards could result in higher drop-out rates, and even when they consider the prospect of failing youngsters who have tried hard, but have not learned what is expected. Stages 3, 4 and 5 can be grouped together under the general heading "working through" — a term which encompasses rational thought as well as feelings and ethical concerns.

Stage 6 :

Taking a Stand Intellectually

Stage 7 : It can take decades for some issues to arrive at the last stage of public opinion, and the issue of women in the work place is one such example. Over time the public has come to accept the idea of women working outside the home and strongly endorses ideas such as equal pay for equal work and non-discriminatory hiring.The only core of the issue that remains even somewhat controversial is whether mothers of young children should work outside the home.

Stage 7 :

The intellectual resolution of Stage 6 requires people to clarify fuzzy thinking, reconcile inconsistencies, consider relevant facts and new realities, and grasp the full consequences of choices. The emotional resolution of Stage 7 requires people to accommodate themselves to different situations, change their own thinking and behavior, and confront their own ambivalent feelings. The final two stages can be grouped together as the stages where the public comes to resolution about an issue.

In spite of differences in definition, students of public opinion generally agree at least that it is a collection of individual opinions on an issue of public interest, and they usually note that these opinions can exercise influence over individual behavior, group behavior, and government policy.Because public opinion is acknowledged to play a role in several diverse areas, leading writers on the subject have included sociologists (Tonnies 1887; Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Albig 1956), political theorists (Bryce 1888; Lasswell 1927; Lippmann 1922), social psychologists (Allport 1937; Cantril 1966), and historians (Bauer 1929).

The principal approaches to the study of public opinion may be divided into four partially overlapping categories: quantitative measurement of opinion distributions; investigation of the internal relationships among the individual opinions that make up public opinion on an issue; description or analysis of the political role of public opinion; and study both of the communication media that disseminate the ideas on which opinions are based and of the uses that propagandists and other manipulators make of these media.

Repeated experiments and observations in several countries have indicated that people have a remarkable ability to ignore easily available facts when these facts are of little interest to them.

Merely increasing the amount of information available will not necessarily increase public knowledge, although this generalization probably will not hold true in developing areas where there is a strong unfulfilled demand for more mass media.

Opinion measurement has also disclosed strong correlations between educational, religious, geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic factors, on the one hand, and the opinions that people hold on political subjects, on the other.

The present study focuses on the European debate as a constitutive process, and seeks to understand the dynamics of this process in order to explain the meaning that it creates. But the idea of the constitution as a product understood empirically as the new treaty and theoretically as whether a constitutional treaty is indeed desirable and feasible for a polity such as the EU is never far away. Hence, the term constitution in its various senses ñ as the process by which a specific utterance or an entire community becomes meaningful and as the textual product on which communities are based ñ is of central importance to the investigation.

The rhetorical understanding of the particularity of meaning by which the constitutionist position is guided means emphasis is placed on the here and now of each particular utterance.

The creation of meaning depends as much on the contexts in which texts are produced as on the situations in which they are received, but the present study neither investigates the meanings as intended by the rhetors themselves nor as perceived by the audiences.

Attitude and opinion data provide a basis for inferring the meaning of opinions held by individuals and groups and also for predictions about their future behavior.

Such inferences and predictions, if they are to be made effectively, require a theoretical foundation which explains the processes by which people adopt and express particular opinions. Here is a theory of three processes by which persons respond to social influence.

PUBLIC opinion, if we wish to see it as it is, should be regarded as an organic process, and not merely as a state of agreement about some question of the day.

It is, in truth, a complex growth, always continuous with the past, never becoming simple, and only partly unified from time to time for the sake of definite action.

Like other phases of intelligence, it is of the nature of a drama, many characters taking part in a variegated unity of action.

The leaders of the day, not only in politics but in every field, the class groups-capitalists, socialists, organized labor, professional men, farmers and the like-the various types of radicals and reactionaries;all these are members of an intricate, progressing whole.

And it is a whole for the same reason that a play is, because the characters, though divergent and often conflicting, interact upon one another and create a total movement which the mind must follow by a total process.

The view that we have no public opinion except when, and in so far as people agree, is a residue of that obsolete social philosophy which regarded individuals as normally isolated, and social life as due to their emerging partly from this isolation and coming together in certain specific ways.

It is true that a process of opinion can hardly exist without a certain underlying like-mindedness, sufficient for mutual understanding and influence, among the members of the group; if they are separated into uncommunicating sections the unity of action is lost.

The main argument for basing the idea of public opinion upon agreement is that this is the only method of decision and consequently of action; which is what all is for; in other words, that it is only as agreement that opinion can function.It is true that decision is a phase of the utmost importance, corresponding to choice in the individual, and that the whole process of attention, discussion, and democratic organization is, in a sense, a preparation for it. It is equally true, however, that it is only a partial and often a superficial act, involving compromise and adjusted to a particular contingency.

A real understanding of the human mind, both in its individual and public aspects, requires that it be seen in the whole process, of which majorities and decisions are but transient phases.

The choice of to-day is important; but the inchoate conditions which are breeding the choices to come are at least equally so.