The Spiral of Silence and It's Effect on Public Opinion

    The spiral of silence was a theory devised by a German scientist named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann back in 1974. The theory itself tries to make sense of why people speak up in certain situations, and why they don't. The general consensus was that people talk more when they are in more comfortable situations. The less comfortable they are, the less likely they are to talk or speak up. This interested Dr. Noelle-Neumann but she was interested in another aspect of this effect, the way it affected how people would voice an unpopular opinion.

    Though the original experiment pretty much tells Dr. Noelle-Neumann actually what she's looking for, it's how she views that information that makes this model so interesting. She looked at it from a different lens, a political point of view. She took a look at the data and realized that this says something about how people express their opinions, and most of all, their unpopular ones. She noticed that this means that the more uncomfortable one is, the less likely they are to express their unpopular opinion, thus hindering free speech subconsciously.

    This says a lot about how political science is run and how powerful a "herd mindset" can be. People usually trust what they hear from news sources and from the government, so going against the viewpoints of these massive entities can be seen as being an unpopular opinion. Because of this, by default, people already are too scared to speak their mind up against the media or the government in fear of being pushed into isolation. I guess it really makes one think about how much power the government really has, and how much media influence can play a part in their control of the people.