What is Spiral of Silence?
The spiral of silence was brought up by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann who is a political scientist.
It is the study of human communication and peoples opinion.
The idea that people's propensity to voice their thoughts on contentious matters is influenced by their mainly unconscious impression of those thoughts as being either popular or unpopular.
Political science and communication both employ the spiral of Silence.
There are four major steps in the spiral of silence model.
1. The approach starts with people's basic desire to fit in with society. The spiral cannot happen without the fear of social isolation.
2. People will confidently express their personal opinions in public once they perceive that they are becoming more widely held. People will, however, be prone to take a more cautious stance when expressing their thoughts in public if they notice that they are losing ground.
3. The spokespersons for the dominant position speak quite a bit, whereas the spokespersons for the opposing viewpoint are silent. When a viewpoint is supported in this way, it appears stronger than it actually is, whereas when an opinion is suppressed, it appears weaker than it actually is.
4. The end consequence is a spiral process that causes other people to notice the shifts in viewpoint and imitate them until one viewpoint has established itself as the dominant attitude and the other viewpoint is resisted and rejected by the majority. The amount of people who are keeping their ideas to themselves out of concern for rejection is the point at which the spiral comes to a stop.
Key Elements
According to the spiral of silence theory, the majority of individuals have an innate, and largely unconscious, fear of social isolation, which causes them to continually watch other people's behavior for indications of approval or disapproval.
People can also "threaten" isolation by acting in ways like criticizing, ignoring, scowling at, laughing at, and other actions, most of the time unintentionally.
People prefer to hold back from openly expressing their opinions on contentious issues when they believe doing so will result in criticism, derision, laughter, or other expressions of disapproval in order to avoid being alone.
Also time and location have a limit on public opinion.
A spiral of silence typically reigns over just one society for a brief amount of time.
It can be challenging to understand the agitation and emotional fervor that can accompany a spiral of silence in retrospect or from an outsider's point of view.
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