EOTO 2 - Class Terms
Our class spent time looking into different concepts and presenting them. I was invested in all the speeches but was particularly interested in the spiral of silence and confirmation bias presentations.
The spiral of silence is when people stop themselves from saying things that may be met with disapproval. The perception that people have of public opinion influences their willingness to speak their own opinions. For instance, if a person thinks that a certain policy should be implemented by the government but believes that the majority of other people disagree, they may refrain from voicing their thoughts. This turns into a "spiral" because the perceived dominant opinion becomes louder since those who support it aren't afraid to speak up. This only reinforces the silence of the "minority" as they keep thinking that their opinion is becoming less and less accepted.
Mass media plays a large role in the perception of public opinion. News channels often use words like "a lot" or "most," causing it to seem like the opinion they are covering is the popular opinion. This reminds me of how toothpaste tubes often claim that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend their toothpaste brand. Statistics like these lead us to believe that most dentists agree, but that statistic may not be true for various reasons. Their sample size of surveys could have been very small. It also may not have been representative of all dentists. One New York Post writer even points out that if 9 out of 10 dentists recommend a brand,
there are still 1 out of 10 dentists that don't recommend that brand. This means that out of the thousands of practicing dentists, there are actually hundreds of dentists who don't recommend that brand.
Confirmation bias is another concept that relates to public opinion being drowned out. When someone confirms their bias, they have a tendency to search for data that validates their own beliefs rather than challenges their beliefs.
Peter Cathcart Wason's number sequence experiment was the first instance that tested this concept and coined the name of it. I found it interesting how Wason himself faced confirmation bias in his own study, as he focused on the findings/trials that supported the existence of confirmation bias and ignored those that didn't. I think this concept is especially scary because we don't know what we don't know. There is more context to every belief and study, but we don't always know what context we're missing.
It's ideas like the spiral of silence and other false media beliefs that stress the importance of the general public needing to conduct their own research and truly look into the credibility of their sources. People are often too quick to believe what they hear or see. Rather than blindly following mass media, we as a society need to educate ourselves on the truth and take the time to consider what we truly believe as individuals. Fact-checking and getting various opinions is necessary. When someone sits at home and watches the new, there is nobody to question their interpretation or thinking. It's important to turn to a variety of sources and expert opinions to make a decision on one's own.
