Public Opinion about Public Opinion

That great philosopher, Lucifer, once said:

   Public opinion is nothing more than this,
   what people think that other people think.

Okay, Victorian playwright Alfred Austin actually put these words in the mouth of his title character, Prince Lucifer, in his 1891 play.

(yes I've mentioned this before, back in 2008)

What I'm discussing here is part of a larger work I'm fiddling with, the idea that we don't spend enough time studying people's opinions about public opinion -- or, for lack of a better word, meta-opinion.  There are theoretical traditions where this is more common (Spiral of Silence comes immediately to mind).  These traditions tend to view public opinion from a social control perspective.  Two factors come into play here: (1) we're always sensing the climate of opinion around us, and (2) a fear of isolation leads us to go with the majority, or at least not express our minority viewpoints as readily as we might.

Psychology has examined this in detail at the micro, individual level, or small-group level (my favorite, false consensus, but see also pluralistic ignorance for a more macro and contradictory approach). 

My point is related to, but separate from, what people think about public opinion polls.  In a sense, people view such polls negatively when the results disagree with their own positions, an example of the hostile media effect.  It's vital we tease out the difference between how people respond to a poll -- and who published it -- and how they think about public opinion in a broader sense.  In the latter, I'm talking about their acceptance (or rejection) of the idea of public opinion, their acceptance that other opinions have merit, their acceptance of whether such opinions should guide policy.  How do people define public opinion?  And has this definition changed in a world that has moved from mainstream few-to-many media to social media in which we have an almost instantaneous access to, as our friend Lucifer said above, "what other people think?"  I'm guessing social media, From Facebook to Twitter, have changed our ideas of what truly is public opinion.  And I'm guessing it's become something more narrow, more in tune with our "friends" and "followers."

And it's entirely possible I'm completely wrong.

This is me thinking aloud as I work on a longer, more thorough examination of the topic, hopefully with actual data gathered (or found elsewhere) to fully explore whether people think of public opinion today in a very different way than they used to -- and what that means for public policy, for elections, and ultimately for a healthy democracy.

Prejudice and Perception

We tend to see more people agreeing with our viewpoints than actually share our opinions.  This false consensus effect is well established by hundreds of studies.  And, according to a new study, prejudiced people are even more likely to engage in these cognitive biases -- or as the authors put it: "prejudiced people perceived more consensus for their attitudes toward Aboriginal Australians than did nonprejudiced people."

The explanation?  People are motivated to justify socially undesirable beliefs by extending those beliefs to a majority of others, even when the majority doesn't actually share those beliefs. 

Prejudice, you might say, loves company.

The media side of all this?

We tested whether three sources of normative information (own prejudice, peer prejudice, media prejudice) would predict estimates of normative community attitudes. Of these, only media prejudice contributed to estimates of community attitudes. The more participants believed media attitudes to be negative, the more negative they rated the community's attitudes toward Aboriginal Australians, and this was independent of one's own level of prejudice. That is, prejudiced and nonprejudiced people alike perceived the same level of media attitude and the same level of community attitudes. Community attitudes then mediated a relation between media prejudice and consensus, whereby more negative community attitudes predicted less perceived consensus.

 That's interesting, the sentence I bold faced above.  I'm not sure how well this applies beyond this particular topic, but given the times in which we live, there's a lot of room here for exploration. 
 

Facebook and False Consensus

To save time, energy, and to keep cool in this blistering heat, instead of doing something original I'll just point to a column I wrote and that was published yesterday in my local daily newspaper.  The title above says it all.  Enjoy.

Hypo Time

A couple of days ago I blogged about social networking and people's perception of public opinion, and whether the former influences the latter. Skimming that blog may help this post make more sense (but no promises, it's me after all).

I've always been interested in people's perception of opinion. We tend to project our own opinions on the public at large. In other words, we tend to think others think the same way we do, what the social scientists sometimes call projection but based also on the fact we tend to hang out with people much like ourselves, thus skewing our perception of opinion for a broader public.

I've been wondering whether social networking, at being tied in to the mundane and profound thoughts of so many friends and quasi-friends, can influence our perceptions of opinion. Thus, I'm gonna toss out a few possible hypotheses over the next day or two.

Hypothesis 1: The greater the use of social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), the greater the likelihood one will perceive other people agreeing with your own opinion.

Huh? Wouldn't more information make you more accurate, not less so? I don't think so. First off, we tend to link to people like ourselves, even if they're only barely friends, so that should increase the likelihood we'll think the world agrees with us because that's all the opinions we see expressed. Our narrow little worlds make us a bit more likely to overestimate how many people agree with us, and I think social networking only accelerates, not moderates, this effect. I'd love to see this tested.

Hypothesis 2: Social networking posts include only poll information that favors a poster's point of view, not poll results that run counter to a poster's ideological or partisan position.

This one kinda makes more sense, or at least is not counter-intuitive. There are exceptions, the people who put on a Facebook news feed some poll that they think shows how dumb people are, but overall I expect to see confirmatory information, which in turn would lead to Hypothesis 1 being supported.

Hypothesis 3: Attempts to shift public opinion via social networking will ultimately fail.

Yeah, a crappily-worded hypothesis, but I'm short of time and didn't want to get all PhDweeb on it, but the above hypo in its various forms has significant meaning for people in politics, public relations, and even journalism. Basically I'm arguing, and need to explore this further, that social networking, even at its most viral, does little to nudge public opinion. It might move perceptions of opinion.

To me, Facebook is the big guy in this test. Twitter, less so. Too ephemeral, too silly, too confined. But Facebook with its updates and news feeds, that's a place ripe for examination by people interested in what moves public opinion, or moves perceptions of that opinion (to me a more interesting theoretical question).

The Borg and Social Networking

I've mentioned it before but there's this great definition of public opinion:

Public opinion is no more than this,
what people think other people think.

It's a line I use in my grad class on public opinion, on a research paper I published a coupla years ago, and probably too often in casual conversation. I've always been fascinated in people's perception of opinion and how they tend to project their own opinions on the public at large. In other words, if I think this way, most people think this way (false consensus).

Yeah yea, but so what? Well, I was in a doctoral meeting the other day and we were talking about social networking (Twitter, Facebook, et al.) and it struck me that we now have, thanks to technology, access to a "group mind" of sorts -- we know what other people think. This kinda changes the dynamics of spiral of silence, of pluralistic ignorance, of false consensus, and all those other great theories that rest on the notion of people and their perception of opinion.

Someone needs to study this stuff.

It's kinda borg like, if you remember Star Trek Next Generation. The borg operated on a linked group mind and warned our heroes: "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." Tweets and Facebook posts and all the rest, are they a potential groupmind, a creator of consensus, or are they merely shouting into the dark to people who really aren't reading the posts in the first place?

My own hunch is we're going to see some influence on people's perception of public opinion if they happen to use these social networking tools -- but not in the way you might think. Selective exposure to similar others, hanging out with people like yourself, is one reason we tend to project our own opinion (or of a handful of others) on the public at large. If our various social networking links resemble our real world interpersonal relationships (people a lot like us) then this actually increases our likelihood to project our own opinions on the world at large. If our social digital networks are broader (I hope so, but not sure, again to be studied) then perhaps this will mediate this tendency in people.

Sunday morning thoughts after too much coffee, I admit, so enough of the theoretical, unless of course later today something about this comes to mind and I have to shout it out to the darkness.

Oh, on a historical note, that great quote is from a book entitled Prince Lucifer by Alfred Austin. Lucifer is one who says it, which is kinda neat. Came across it in graduate school and have used it, off and on, many times since.

Helluva POQ

A great new issue of Public Opinion Quarterly touches on many of my favorite topics: political knowledge, false consensus, innumeracy, trust in government. I've blogged about several of these already and so I'll top off my week with false consensus.

I love false consensus, always have. It's the idea that people project their own opinions and behaviors on the public at large. In other words, if I enjoy police procedural novels, I am more likely to overestimate how many people out there also enjoy police procedurals. Magdalena Wojcieszak takes the false consensus concept on the road and online to examine neo-Nazis and environmental extremists (what lovely groups) to see if the concept holds up.

It does.

For example, those participating in neo-Nazi online discussion boards overestimated how much people dislike progress in equal rights.

Part of this is due to the fragmenting media environment in which crazy people, or mildly nutso people, can group together in common cause and this selective exposure to similar others makes participants more likely to overestimate how much people agree with them. If I hang out on a discussion board of police procedural fans, my sense of the climate of opinion out there will be skewed and I'll think more people like them than really do.
(as an aside, read Ian Rankin's John Rebus novels. Bloody brilliant)

So it's a good issue of POQ for me. Good blogging material, and stuff I like to read and think about. If they'd only included a research article on the best Christmas gifts to get your wife I'd be really really happy.