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How public opinion is formed
Edward M. Bloek
HowPublic Opinion IsFormed Public opinion is not a "thing, " but rather "the classification of a number of somethings." The "somethings'' include variables such as psychological history, sociological influences, and direct experience. The psychological and sociological elements can contribute to image-building, but the image-building "goes down the drain" when direct experience is to the contrary. A Consequence is that publics become divided into fixed positions, with a large group of "undecideds." The author of this article proposes a two-pronged strategy for corporate public relations: 1) a "very large dose of patience ;" and 2) directing PR programs toward the undecideds rather than to those with settled opinions. Edward M . Block is Vice President - Public Relations and Employee Information for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, New York City, N . Y.
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here is no final answer to the question of how public opinion is formed. The problem is that there are too many answers, and many aspects of the Problem which, quite frankly, are unknown to us. . Much of the uncertainty arises because the core-substance of public opinion IS people, and among the absolute certainties about human beings is that they he.immensely variable and endlessly complex. A single explanation of any of t. elf behaviors-particularly mass behavior, such as public opinion Formahan-seems out-of-step with common sense. Furthennore, people persist in being individuals who vary and change in ~~eir reactions to the exact same events, and whose consistency is the thinnest tnd of thread. Nietzsche said man is "the most interesting chaos, perhaps, that has existed to date." Most psychologists believe there is an inner logic to each person's chaos; unfortunately, the order seldom is easily seen from the Outside. 1 f But the disorder and diversity in human beings, their willingness to be diftrent occasionally, that eagerness to try a new idea for the sake of varietyese are manifestations of the human chaos which defy science and make Public relations a practical art.
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Publle Relations Review An example may help us. Some three-dozen psychologists combined their considerable talents a few years ago to produce an authoritative textbook for their students, and devoted more than 12-thousand words to explaining attitudes and their change. I At the end they concluded: "... despite considerable ...advance, the attitude-ehange area has not come to a set of mechanically applicable principles... about effective persuasion in concrete situations.'" To bring about any change in attitudes and public opinion in real life-in the "concrete situations"-the scientists made two recommendations: • first, an "insightful analysis" of the problem, and • second, "artistic judgement."! Obviously, when we get down to insightfulness and artistry in coping with an opinion problem, we are talking more about the art of public relations than we are about some scientific formula. Artistry, insightfulness, research, and scientific principles all go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, there is no science of public opinion with the preciseness of two-plustwo-equals-four. That lack of certainty about how to inform and influence public opinion has allowed a thousand flowers to bloom; there being no one approved method, we have devised lots of methods. Some brilliant, and some not so shiny, but all of them reflecting some implied assumptions about the nature of publiC opinion and how it is formed. It is time, in any case, to look more closely at what we call "public opinion." This article will do that in this way : • by a cursory glance at how we got the idea of public opinion and what it seems to mean; • examining some of the cultural and personal determinants of public opinion; and • outlining some of the functions of communications and opinion-makers in forming public opinion. Finally, there will be some conclusions and some recommendations. Background and Meaning The concept of a public opinion has a long past and a short history. The ide
1-..bUe Opinion After Louie's experience, one would guess that the study of public opinion would get considerably more attention, and, indeed, it has. The study has by ~ow spanned so many academic disciplines and practical arts, that just gathermg together the known information is a mammoth chore [1,831 entries in the Review's bibliography for last year's output] . We are crossing ground wellchumed by hordes of sociologists, political theorists, social psychologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, public relations thinkers, and assorted others. Anything which attracts that array of investigators and practitioners cannot be a simple matter. Indeed, definitions and explanations of public opinion remind one of the elephant and the blind men ; their description of the beast depended on the part they touched. We are very much in the same situation. We have an embarrassment of riches. Research and facts are overflowing the tin kazoo. At this point in time, the suggestion of the psychologist Kurt LeWin that nothing is so useful as a good theory sounds like common sense. We do need a framework to link all the data together. The absence of a unified theory of public opinion calls for some pioneering. Problem number one is simply arriving at a reasonably precise description of what we are talking about. Harwood Childs of Princeton tackled that problem some years ago, and he ended up with more than 40 definitions of public opinion. Childs concluded: "Public opinion is not the name of a something, but the classification of a number of somethings." As one reads over those 40 definitions a word keeps popping into mind: "consensus." It is clear that public opinion is not a "thing," such as a doorknob. For most of us, our opinions are relatively firm in a few limited areas, probably in the sense of what's right, most likely in religion, sometimes as to politics, and JEten in a general style in which we view the world. What remains is a very arge gray area of give-and-take; immensely impressionable, contradictory, nd endlessly variable. It is as though the gray area were a huge desert swept Y the winds of information, with ideas anchored loosely here and there, with no Certainty that anyone of them will remain rooted tomorrow. It is at one and the same time, a land of opportunity and of treacherous terrain. That bit of analogy suggests the fluidity of opinion on most public issues, and the uncertainty which has to attach to any claims as to what public OPinion may be at a given point in time. Yet it is plain that in every nation \Vhere polling has been conducted without interference, there are trend lines, COntinuities, consensus on some issues-and this consensus may be called Public opinion. ~e.rhaps we can modemize Childs' definition. We can agree that public ~Plnlon is not a thing, but rather that public opinion is a number of classifica~o~s of the consensus which is reached by various people , at various times, on r aflous issues. And, in the area of public matters, always subject to sudden eVision.
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Underlying the Consensus h The basic feelings and understandings we have as to what is true are not, o\Vever, subject to easy revision-indeed, those fundamental concepts seem
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'·ubUe Relations Review resistant to almost all persuasion other than new experience. Some exploration of these basic opinions may be helpful. Obviously, every society, every culture transmits to its new members a heritage which encompasses the totality of what the elders of the culture believe to be true-whether that has to do with mathematics or the dangers of eating tomatoes. The British anthropologist E. B. Tylor once spoke of everY generation giving birth to a new horde of savages who have to be civilized. In effect, to be taught the society's beliefs as to rightness and its accumulated learning. We can see some of this socialization process and its effect on opinion in our own country. After some 200 years as a nation, most people continue to believe that "free enterprise" is a good thing. They hold similar feelings about "competition," even though it is demonstrable that in some general services"for example, gas and electricity and, I think, some piece parts of the telephone business-competition makes no economic sense. Some opinions we seem to absorb with our pores, which is a way of saying the culture teaches us plainly and clearly, although sometimes subtly over time, what is expected of us. Where we live also hands us a set of ready-made opinions. They are likely to differ some whether the locale is Manhattan, NeVI York, or Manhattan, Kansas, but in an era of mass media the differences are much less than they once were. Another set of elementals arises out of individual psychology. While aftl' tudes may be derived from many sources, some of the determinants are plain. Heritage has something to do with opinions, at least insofar as passing on a general level of hostility from generation to generation. It is possible to bre~~ aggressive or passive strains of animals, and it is hard to skip the likelihoou that the same phenomenon can occur in the human variety. . Chronological ages seem to be related to opinions. For example, up unt tl recently adolescence was associated with optimism and altruism. Also, as people get older they seem to become more tolerant and understanding. We have had the interesting experience in the telephone industry of a high positive correlation between age and approval of the telephone company; there are, 1'10 doubt, many reasons why that was so. Psychological states-sickness or health, attitude toward the future, expec' tations, and so forth-affect opinions. Public opinion seems to flow, too, from a curious "bundle of relation' ships" -which includes communication, the views of authority, the interestS of the group, the opinions of various influentials, and numerous other factors, Knownand unknown. lastly, we all have been sensitized in the last decade to the pervasive influ' ence of institutions. All kinds. Home, church, school, military, business, government-the whole parade. Each requires a set of attitudes simply to get get along with its environment. Each institutional setting establishes a framework of beliefs which must be taken into account as publics form their views. However, direct experience can override all that has gone before. Voltai~ said it nicely: 'What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you sayExample again: we know in the telephone industry that our standing is lesS
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Public Opinion am~ng customers who have recently had contact with a telephone employee,
~hlch sounds worse than it is. Overwhelmingly, the contact was initiated ecause the customer was having telephone problems, and once he gets mad
a~out his service, that anger seems to generalize to everything else associated
With the company. One bad experience sometimes totally overrides previously Positiveattitudes. A modem logo, a smash television show, an articulate chairman, ~Iossy house organs, all of these may do a world of good for the image of the Y-Z Corporation" working off in the wilderness and whose daily operahons directly touch very few people. All of the image-building goes down the ~ain ~or the telephone industry the very first time the customer starts having a ard hme with his telephone service. Still talking about experience, one of my friends told me recently: "I ~elieVed that airline commercial about how expert they are in handling my aggage, but the last time I flew I waited 40 minutes for my bag and that's the last time I believe him." It is possible to peddle an attitude and an aura about a COmpany-but none of that is likely to stand up for five seconds against contrary experience. The sociological and psychological backgrounds convince us that public opinion does not begin from a vacuum. The danger is, of course, that we sometimes forget that there are antecedents to an opinion climate. PR people a~t sometimes as though all human beings should set aside the past and deal With problems rationally in terms of the specific issues. The energy industries are an example . The company ads tell us America needs an energy policy. That the oil companies are doing everything possible tO eleviate the shortages... that vertical integration benefits the consumer... that there is no monopoly that's manipulating supply and price and thereby ripping off the consumer. But the fact is, all of this rhetoric, however rational, implies that the consumer should forget the inconvenience of the recent shortages, that Waiting in long lines at gas stations was of little moment, and that sudden, enormous price increases are irrevelent to the real issues. Or, to use the telephone business as an example : We are asking the Con~ess to specify a national communication policy . We argue that competition In the long distance business will hurt the average consumer. We assert that we ~a\Te behaved responsibly for a hundred years and by enterprise and innovahon we have provided America with the world's best phone system, and at a bargain . All very rational. But, as with the energy companies, less than 100% Persuasive because the arguments ignore our thousands of well kept (read prosperous) vehicles people see daily on the streets, our billion dollar per quarter profits, our society's inbred suspicions about monopoly and concentrations of power, and the consumer's daily experiences-good, bad indifferent-with phone service. Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out that we live not by bread alone, b~t chiefly by catch phrases. Those phrases are handed to us by our sociolor1,cal heritage, our psychological construction and our experience or lack of it. t s a lot easier to hang on to the catch phrase "monopoly," than it is to make sense out of the structure of the oil industry or the communication industry.
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p .. bUe Relatlon§ Review Communication One of the "sornethings" which affect opinion is communication. That word communication has become such a cliche that the mere mention of it may tum you off totally. There cannot be an intelligent person left who does not cringe when communication is put forth as the solution to our problems. All too often, the remedy of communication is proposed as a means of avoidance, a misnomer for more fundamental problems which no one wants to name aloud or cope with. My own PR department will tell you that "to communicate is the beginning of understanding." Maybe. My conditional belief is forced on me by a huge stack of research evidence which says : • the public demonstrates an astounding ability to ignore very material facts when those facts don't interest them', and • increasing the supply of information does not necessarily increase public knowledge. 7 Raising the level of information about public issues is a very difficult matter, and gets even tougher when people suspect they are being manipulated. How tough it is to raise public knowledge can be illustrated by a few examples. As of 1959, about one out of four Americans said they had not heard of Fidel Castro. In 1964, one out of four Americans did not know there is a communist government on the mainland of China. At one critical point in American history, when the secretary of state was accused of close association with a communist agent, about 80 percent of the American people could not name the secretary. And after all the hoopla about space exploration, a sizeable number of people still are convinced that man's walk on the moon was strictly showbiz staged on earth. Despite the massive media barrages which bombard US endlessly with information. very large numbers of the public are immune to new data. We can have the facts and we can try to communicate them, but that doesn't mean folks want to hear those answers. Where the facts create an internal conflict in the person, the odds are very high that the data is going to have a rough time getting across. Festinger described the conflict with the phrase "cognitive dissonance ."• I'll define that for our purpose here simply as where some reality-the data, for example-run afoul of a person's preconceived "picture" of the world or his idea of what is or isn't true. But, perhaps we can go at least part way on this matter of the importance of communications and say this: yes, to communicate may be the beginning of understanding. Provided that the receiver can or is willing to pluck your messsage out of a very clogged channel. You'll recall that Bernays argued that the function of public relations was to "crystalize" public opinion, to bring together as a unified force the latent attitudes of individuals.' There's not much hope of crystalization if you can't be heard above the noise. As difficult as mass communication has become, it is the master key for unlocking mass attitudes. For a corporation of national or international scope it is nonsense to hope to build a network of one-to-one communications to crystalize opinion. Public opinion, in the sense of mass attitudes, just doesn't
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Pllbllc Opinion happen that way. The facts of industrial society will not go away, as much as some of us might like to return to an era of country villages and small towns. A modern society is dependent for its basic information on mass communications-newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, books and so forth. As Max Lerner said: "Those who control the media come to hold the strategic passes to many American minds."!" Those media have a technology of appeal, perhaps more entertainment than information, but nonetheless are the fundamental apparatus for shaping belief and opinion in this country. Between the um-pah-pah and the cheesecake, the messages somehow get through to a public of the opinion elite, at least. At the same time, we would be well advised to recognize that opinion changes easier-not faster, just easier-when the existing networks of opinionmakers in each community become acquainted with what we have to say. Those opinion-makers are part of what used to be called the two-step hypothesis in communications. II Briefly, that says that mass media are read by one group of people who digest, summarize, and evaluate what they're reading . They then are presumed to talk about their facts and opinions to a network of friends, business associates, club groups, and so forth . The second group, in effect, is heavily influenced by the influentials, the opinion-makers. It is true that a relatively small number of people touch off the interest of the mass. Joseph Kraft, in a survey as to who reads the New York Times, showed that 60 per cent of American news editors did, 46 per cent of utility executives, 28 per cent of bank officers, and 30 per cent of college presidents. n Obviously, a small group of people at the Times, and in the other major media, have a profound effect in determining what will be a public issue. But there is some evidence that the two-step hypothesis is not quite explanatory of the details of influences on opinion. Some observers believe we ought to distinguish between at least four kinds of opinion publics: • a general public, which does not have much interest in the facts of public issues, or indeed, the issues themselves; • the attentive public, which at least knows that certain issues are before the people; • an informed public, which takes part in the discussion of public matters; and, finally, the elite public, which initiates and defines the issues, and which touches off the public discussion. IS Some comments on that elite public may be in order. First of all, it is not blo~e an "eastern liberal establishment," if such a thing exists. The incidence of rams is randomly distributed across all geographic sectors of the country, and among those of varied political persuasions. Second, the elites do not ?lone make the decisions in this country. Third, a function of the various elites IS to place the alternatives before the other publics. But, finally, it is segments of each of the publics who coalesce into a consensus. The opinion elites are a very broad fraternity. Certainly all of you are cardcarrying members. We could say that's so by virtue of your role or rank in our largest corporations, in academic institutions, or in government. But it would also be correct to think of membership in the opinion elite as a result of many other traits.
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'·"blle Relations Ilevlew The qualifications are a certain cast of intelligence, a fund of information acquired by wide reading, an ability to absorb detail, the unusual capability of abstracting order and meaning from seemingly unrelated facts, the need to communicate viewpoints and, finally, the willingness to defend them. People who meet these qualifications exist in every community in this land. Some years ago we at AT&T made the theoretical error of thinking they would be community leaders, in the sense of holding high posts in labor unions, colleges, business, and so forth. The Bell System companies did quite a bit of research among leaders, and discovered, to the surprise of some of us, that people in positions of community leadership are vastly different from the kinds of opinion-makers I'm talking about. There is some overlap between the two, as you might guess, but there was considerable evidence that the community leaders trailed the opinions of the opinion elite. It is also true that some opinion-makers may never have gotten near a book. Authority, social class and power also determine opinions. But in this society, all opinions must, in the long run, stand the test of public acceptance and experience. "Communication" is a whole lot more complicated than the cliche aspects would suggest. Communication is part of the web of relationships which brings public opinion into being and which helps it to develop. Our part of that communication process normally is providing information, which seems to flow through various publics, with a loss of detail as it goes from group to to group. Also, while mass media are our first battleline, we are limiting ourselves if we ignore the other networks of communication which involve opinion-makers of various kinds. Conclusions and Recommendations You will recall that we began with Professor Childs' description of public opinion as a "number of somethings." And while it isn't clear what all the sornethings are, they are heavily influenced at least by the social structure and beliefs of the society and the individual psychology of the person...and, in a mass society, by mass communications. That communication, as we said in talking about opinion elites, gets cast into several versions through several layers of publics. Now some conclusions: First, we badly need in our corporate public relations a very large dose of patience. The fundamental opinions and beliefs of a society ordinarily are acquired over decades, and tested by long experience, and, hence, are not subject to overnight revision. If we are serious about having a part in the formation of public opinion, we are advised to dig-in for the long struggle. That advice is a little out of step, sometimes , with what we in fact do. AU public relations departments are geared to produce programs to "fix" perceived breakdowns in communications or problems with the public. What's more, we're usually committed to do it within a specific budget period. The long range usually is not practical. Yet what we know about the formation of public opinion suggests very strongly the long term approach.
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I-lihUe Opinion That is reasonable advice in simply an historical sense. Without warming old chestnuts, perhaps we can simply agree that American industry has been recovering slowly from about seventy-five years of almost continuous attackbeginning with the onslaughts of the trust busters near the tum of the century. W . e had a respite after World War II, but it didn't last long. The power and Influence of public opinion in those 75 years has made our factories safer ~laces to work, has forced the building of a floor under wages and hours, lunited the work force as to age, and enlarged it as to color and sex, and constructed a foundation of economic supports to protect against hardship during temporary unemployment or on-the-job injury. As hard as it is to say, I have in candor to admit that we in industry make Inanyof our own problems with the public. This is easy to spell out from A-toZ by looking back over the years, but perhaps one recent incident will illustrate my meaning. Ralph Nader and his book on the auto industry were virtually unknown among the general public until a vast sympathy accidentally Was created for him and his work. Not Mr. Nader or any other critic can be created in a vacuum-there are Conditions precedent when a public reaches a consensus about a company or an industry. When the consensus is reached , public opinion is going to have the last WO~d. We are well advised to get in step with what we can determine to be the InaJor trends of the society, and work toward making those trends as reasonabll e as we can while recognizing that the public interest will eventually steamro ler those with narrow, private interests who stand in the way. . We need, or course, to concern ourselves with today's legislation , and there ISn't much corporate mileage in trying to interest businessmen in some longange future . But in the arena of social opinion, the battles of the 1980s and eYond are in fact being won or lost today. The second conclusion is that our concern has to be the individual in our SO~iety. It is easy to lose track of him, to bury him in the percentage saying no ~tPlfnion. to ignore his complaints and hold rigidly to our rules. One of my a f recently left an umbrella on a PATH train, the subway that hauls comJll~ers between lower Manhattan and New Jersey. He discovered that the lost h~ found department was open only from 9 a.m, to 5 p.m., which seemed to hlIn a little unreasonable, considering that most people work during those i~urs. He wrote to the chairman of the PATH, and within a short time was to armed that the hours of the lost and found department were being changed t more fully accommodate people who worked for a living. That seems to me ;. be the exact way to treat an individual with a reasonable complaint, and IthOutletting corporate inertia get in the way. pI ~lso, we are noting the growth of an institutionalized structure for comna~~nt, the consumer movements. We count at least 3000 county, state and tall~onal consumer organizations across the country, and I'm sure we haven't tio le~ them all by a long shot. They have top grade legal advice, representabaln In Washington, and they are, I think, going to be an effective counterlance to many businesses and their practicies. n brief, the individual has a place to go to get action on his complaints.
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Publle Relations Review His personal experience with us now can go beyond frustration; he is gradually building the mechanisms to be able to fight even the largest corporations without bankrupting himself. This would suggest a great deal more concern in the executive suite with the individual psychology of the consumer and what he wants, what fits his lifestyle and his sense of propriety, and not alone what we would like him to have. And, or course, all of this applies to the "shes" as well. A third summary point is this matter of communication. There are twO prime dangers. First, that they're not hearing us and we're not hearing them. And second, that they're hearing all right but that they have more important things to do. Not many people go to bed nightly with a silent prayer that the Justice Department will be fair to AT&T, IBM or General Motors. Sometimes not even shareownersl Adam Smith would have it that each man places his own economic interest before the public interest. Apparently that notion has been amended, if not repealed. Furthermore, John Q. may have resigned himself to paying higher prices provided that there is a curb on what he sees as the power of big corporations. Clearly, a major problem in talking with the public is that we in corporate America tend to communicate our own values, the overriding dictatorship of the bottom line, rather than beginning from the society's and the person's sense of rightness and fairness. Many years ago, Theodore Vail, the father of the Bell System, welcomed utility regulation, perceiving that this was what the public preferred and that such a step would be in everyone's interest. Mr. Vail was correct. Today, however, there is a growing public preference for some competition in the communication business and the descendents .of Mr. Vail are seeking ways to accommodate this tendency without compromJS" ing the public's best interests in the long run. Beyond what we communicate is the matter of how we communicate. In corporate public relations we too often put the beginners in charge of our communication media. Our seasoned people are busy with administrative meetings, budgets, personnel, and so forth, and that is the way to disaster. The job of PR is understanding opinion, reinforcing or informing it, and, hopefully, helping it to be reasonable. All other chores are mere background, henc~ it is important that our most competent people should be among the "doers and not always burdened with administrative responsibilities to the exclusion of all else. Another difficulty in influencing public opinion is the increasing difficultY in gaining reasonable access to the mass media, the press. A writer with a set of prejudices as long as your arm can get his page length column opposite the editorial page, but we're fortunate to get 300-words of reply in the letters column. It seems to me that the pendulum has once again swung too far. T~e time has come to find a way to forcefully remind our peers in the news media that the first amendment also implies reasonable access for all of us to the means of mass communication. 14 Lastly, there is the matter of influencing public opinion, which is crucial to everything said here. A simple question from the Gallup poll is an example of a
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·-..hllc Opinion radical revision in public thinking in connection with the Vietnam war. The question was: whether or not "the United States made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam." Now, that question calls merely for an opinion evaluating an event, and says nothing about the legitimacy of the conflict or the necessity to fight or not to fight. But the responses to the question of mistake changed radically over a six Year period. In 1965, about 25 per cent of the respondents thought we had made a mistake... in 1967 it went to 37 per cent ... in 1969 to 55 per cent ... and in 1971 to 61 per cent. 16 If we don't try to make too much out of the questions, the results are more than interesting. What had happened in those six years is that a small group of people in the universities led the way in helping America to change its mind about a key event in our history. What began as "teach-ins" escalated into media happenings in the streets, and the opposition to the conflict finally sueNeded in commandering much of the mass media as supporters of the action. o doubt there were many more reasons for the shift in opinions. In any case, what all of that says is that the social training of the society in ~n~Uestioning patriotism was overridden, the individual's strong tendency to eheve in and obey authority was set aside, and the mass media were forced ultimately to take account of the rebellious views . Amazing results, but a good example of what can happen with long-range efforts to change public op inion. As to what all of us in PR would like to do over time, I doubt that we have Yet the know-how to "sell" any significant opinions to the public. We also av.e not yet latched onto the key questions which give us insight into the gut eehngs of the American people. . As I have said, there are not few and simple answers to how public opinion IS formed. There are, however, many clues as to what convinces people that ~ew thinking is called for. Those clues suggest at least sustained efforts over time to affect public opinion... due regard for the society's sense of rightness... a ~oncern for the individual's view...and appropriate measurement to deter!l\lneboth what to do and how well we're doing. In closing I would leave you with some words from the late Learned Hand. ~ter a lifetime of the law his conclusion was: "In the long run, we are depenent on the rationality of men. " t It is true that men think with their emotions, and it is good sense not to rub hern raw . But it is also true that our appeals to emotion must be supported by lllorerational approaches if we are to succeed in our objectives. t Public opinion is not necessarily logical; it is amorphous, ambivalent, conradictory, volatile. Consequently, those of us who would hope to influence PUblic opinion can only expect that our efforts, over time, may nudge the ~hnsensus toward some reasonable perception of the issues. Even in terms of f at rather limited prospect, we might do well to do as the politicians do : Deus our best efforts on the undecideds. b Civen that the "somethings" of which public opinion is made is a bubbling srew of cultural biases, informed as well as uninformed preconceptions, perkonal experiences, shifting contexts of self-interest and a host of other unnOWns, it would seem to me that anyone among us who embraces a more am-
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Public Relations Review bitious view of what can be accomplished is foredoomed to constant dis-appointment.
Footnotes 'Karl Menninger, et al, The Vital Balance in Mental Health and lllness (New York: Vikjng Press, 1967). An excellent argument, written in everyday English, that even very disturbed people seek the "best order" which they can muster. 'Psychology Today (Del Mar, Cal. : CRM BOOKS, 1970), pp. 613-633.
'Ib id, p. 633. %id, p.633 . 'Harwood L. Childs, Public Opinion: Nature, Formation and Role (Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1965), pp . 12-28. 'Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, "Some Reasons Why Information Campaigns Fail," Public Opinion Quarterly (11) , pp . 412-423. 'Shirley A. Star and Helen M. Hughes, "Report on an Educational Campaign: The Cincinnati Plan for the United Nations," American Journal of Sociology (55), pp. 389-400. 'Leon A. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (New York. Harper &: Row, 1957). 'Edward L. Bemays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York : Boni to: Uveright, 1923). lOMax Lerner, America AS a Civilization (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 765. IIPaul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice, (New york : Columbia University Press, 1948) 2nd ed., p. 151. Elihu Katz, "The Twa-Step Flow of Communication : An Up-to-Date Report on a Hypothesis," Public Opinion Quarterly (1957). 21 :1. "Joseph A. Kraft , 'T he Future of the Neu: York Times, " Esquire, 55 :4, p. 121. "Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1960), p, 138. We utilize Almond's concept, but expand the number of publics and define them somewhat differently. I'Richard A. Schwarzlose, "For Journalists Only1", Columbia Journalism Reuieus, July/August. 1977, pp . 32-33. Offers the interesting suggestion that a series of "right to know" decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court may lead to a reader's "right to demand" necessary information from the media . "Charles W. Roll, Jr. and Albert H. Cantril, Polls: Their Use and Misuse in Politics (NeVI York: Basic BOOKS, 1972), p. 109. Table 5-5 reports the data by months; this article reports the annual averages.
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HowPublic Opinion IsFormed Public opinion is not a "thing, " but rather "the classification of a number of somethings." The "somethings'' include variables such as psychological history, sociological influences, and direct experience. The psychological and sociological elements can contribute to image-building, but the image-building "goes down the drain" when direct experience is to the contrary. A Consequence is that publics become divided into fixed positions, with a large group of "undecideds." The author of this article proposes a two-pronged strategy for corporate public relations: 1) a "very large dose of patience ;" and 2) directing PR programs toward the undecideds rather than to those with settled opinions. Edward M . Block is Vice President - Public Relations and Employee Information for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, New York City, N . Y.
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here is no final answer to the question of how public opinion is formed. The problem is that there are too many answers, and many aspects of the Problem which, quite frankly, are unknown to us. . Much of the uncertainty arises because the core-substance of public opinion IS people, and among the absolute certainties about human beings is that they he.immensely variable and endlessly complex. A single explanation of any of t. elf behaviors-particularly mass behavior, such as public opinion Formahan-seems out-of-step with common sense. Furthennore, people persist in being individuals who vary and change in ~~eir reactions to the exact same events, and whose consistency is the thinnest tnd of thread. Nietzsche said man is "the most interesting chaos, perhaps, that has existed to date." Most psychologists believe there is an inner logic to each person's chaos; unfortunately, the order seldom is easily seen from the Outside. 1 f But the disorder and diversity in human beings, their willingness to be diftrent occasionally, that eagerness to try a new idea for the sake of varietyese are manifestations of the human chaos which defy science and make Public relations a practical art.
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Publle Relations Review An example may help us. Some three-dozen psychologists combined their considerable talents a few years ago to produce an authoritative textbook for their students, and devoted more than 12-thousand words to explaining attitudes and their change. I At the end they concluded: "... despite considerable ...advance, the attitude-ehange area has not come to a set of mechanically applicable principles... about effective persuasion in concrete situations.'" To bring about any change in attitudes and public opinion in real life-in the "concrete situations"-the scientists made two recommendations: • first, an "insightful analysis" of the problem, and • second, "artistic judgement."! Obviously, when we get down to insightfulness and artistry in coping with an opinion problem, we are talking more about the art of public relations than we are about some scientific formula. Artistry, insightfulness, research, and scientific principles all go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, there is no science of public opinion with the preciseness of two-plustwo-equals-four. That lack of certainty about how to inform and influence public opinion has allowed a thousand flowers to bloom; there being no one approved method, we have devised lots of methods. Some brilliant, and some not so shiny, but all of them reflecting some implied assumptions about the nature of publiC opinion and how it is formed. It is time, in any case, to look more closely at what we call "public opinion." This article will do that in this way : • by a cursory glance at how we got the idea of public opinion and what it seems to mean; • examining some of the cultural and personal determinants of public opinion; and • outlining some of the functions of communications and opinion-makers in forming public opinion. Finally, there will be some conclusions and some recommendations. Background and Meaning The concept of a public opinion has a long past and a short history. The ide
1-..bUe Opinion After Louie's experience, one would guess that the study of public opinion would get considerably more attention, and, indeed, it has. The study has by ~ow spanned so many academic disciplines and practical arts, that just gathermg together the known information is a mammoth chore [1,831 entries in the Review's bibliography for last year's output] . We are crossing ground wellchumed by hordes of sociologists, political theorists, social psychologists, economists, anthropologists, historians, public relations thinkers, and assorted others. Anything which attracts that array of investigators and practitioners cannot be a simple matter. Indeed, definitions and explanations of public opinion remind one of the elephant and the blind men ; their description of the beast depended on the part they touched. We are very much in the same situation. We have an embarrassment of riches. Research and facts are overflowing the tin kazoo. At this point in time, the suggestion of the psychologist Kurt LeWin that nothing is so useful as a good theory sounds like common sense. We do need a framework to link all the data together. The absence of a unified theory of public opinion calls for some pioneering. Problem number one is simply arriving at a reasonably precise description of what we are talking about. Harwood Childs of Princeton tackled that problem some years ago, and he ended up with more than 40 definitions of public opinion. Childs concluded: "Public opinion is not the name of a something, but the classification of a number of somethings." As one reads over those 40 definitions a word keeps popping into mind: "consensus." It is clear that public opinion is not a "thing," such as a doorknob. For most of us, our opinions are relatively firm in a few limited areas, probably in the sense of what's right, most likely in religion, sometimes as to politics, and JEten in a general style in which we view the world. What remains is a very arge gray area of give-and-take; immensely impressionable, contradictory, nd endlessly variable. It is as though the gray area were a huge desert swept Y the winds of information, with ideas anchored loosely here and there, with no Certainty that anyone of them will remain rooted tomorrow. It is at one and the same time, a land of opportunity and of treacherous terrain. That bit of analogy suggests the fluidity of opinion on most public issues, and the uncertainty which has to attach to any claims as to what public OPinion may be at a given point in time. Yet it is plain that in every nation \Vhere polling has been conducted without interference, there are trend lines, COntinuities, consensus on some issues-and this consensus may be called Public opinion. ~e.rhaps we can modemize Childs' definition. We can agree that public ~Plnlon is not a thing, but rather that public opinion is a number of classifica~o~s of the consensus which is reached by various people , at various times, on r aflous issues. And, in the area of public matters, always subject to sudden eVision.
b
Underlying the Consensus h The basic feelings and understandings we have as to what is true are not, o\Vever, subject to easy revision-indeed, those fundamental concepts seem
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'·ubUe Relations Review resistant to almost all persuasion other than new experience. Some exploration of these basic opinions may be helpful. Obviously, every society, every culture transmits to its new members a heritage which encompasses the totality of what the elders of the culture believe to be true-whether that has to do with mathematics or the dangers of eating tomatoes. The British anthropologist E. B. Tylor once spoke of everY generation giving birth to a new horde of savages who have to be civilized. In effect, to be taught the society's beliefs as to rightness and its accumulated learning. We can see some of this socialization process and its effect on opinion in our own country. After some 200 years as a nation, most people continue to believe that "free enterprise" is a good thing. They hold similar feelings about "competition," even though it is demonstrable that in some general services"for example, gas and electricity and, I think, some piece parts of the telephone business-competition makes no economic sense. Some opinions we seem to absorb with our pores, which is a way of saying the culture teaches us plainly and clearly, although sometimes subtly over time, what is expected of us. Where we live also hands us a set of ready-made opinions. They are likely to differ some whether the locale is Manhattan, NeVI York, or Manhattan, Kansas, but in an era of mass media the differences are much less than they once were. Another set of elementals arises out of individual psychology. While aftl' tudes may be derived from many sources, some of the determinants are plain. Heritage has something to do with opinions, at least insofar as passing on a general level of hostility from generation to generation. It is possible to bre~~ aggressive or passive strains of animals, and it is hard to skip the likelihoou that the same phenomenon can occur in the human variety. . Chronological ages seem to be related to opinions. For example, up unt tl recently adolescence was associated with optimism and altruism. Also, as people get older they seem to become more tolerant and understanding. We have had the interesting experience in the telephone industry of a high positive correlation between age and approval of the telephone company; there are, 1'10 doubt, many reasons why that was so. Psychological states-sickness or health, attitude toward the future, expec' tations, and so forth-affect opinions. Public opinion seems to flow, too, from a curious "bundle of relation' ships" -which includes communication, the views of authority, the interestS of the group, the opinions of various influentials, and numerous other factors, Knownand unknown. lastly, we all have been sensitized in the last decade to the pervasive influ' ence of institutions. All kinds. Home, church, school, military, business, government-the whole parade. Each requires a set of attitudes simply to get get along with its environment. Each institutional setting establishes a framework of beliefs which must be taken into account as publics form their views. However, direct experience can override all that has gone before. Voltai~ said it nicely: 'What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you sayExample again: we know in the telephone industry that our standing is lesS
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Public Opinion am~ng customers who have recently had contact with a telephone employee,
~hlch sounds worse than it is. Overwhelmingly, the contact was initiated ecause the customer was having telephone problems, and once he gets mad
a~out his service, that anger seems to generalize to everything else associated
With the company. One bad experience sometimes totally overrides previously Positiveattitudes. A modem logo, a smash television show, an articulate chairman, ~Iossy house organs, all of these may do a world of good for the image of the Y-Z Corporation" working off in the wilderness and whose daily operahons directly touch very few people. All of the image-building goes down the ~ain ~or the telephone industry the very first time the customer starts having a ard hme with his telephone service. Still talking about experience, one of my friends told me recently: "I ~elieVed that airline commercial about how expert they are in handling my aggage, but the last time I flew I waited 40 minutes for my bag and that's the last time I believe him." It is possible to peddle an attitude and an aura about a COmpany-but none of that is likely to stand up for five seconds against contrary experience. The sociological and psychological backgrounds convince us that public opinion does not begin from a vacuum. The danger is, of course, that we sometimes forget that there are antecedents to an opinion climate. PR people a~t sometimes as though all human beings should set aside the past and deal With problems rationally in terms of the specific issues. The energy industries are an example . The company ads tell us America needs an energy policy. That the oil companies are doing everything possible tO eleviate the shortages... that vertical integration benefits the consumer... that there is no monopoly that's manipulating supply and price and thereby ripping off the consumer. But the fact is, all of this rhetoric, however rational, implies that the consumer should forget the inconvenience of the recent shortages, that Waiting in long lines at gas stations was of little moment, and that sudden, enormous price increases are irrevelent to the real issues. Or, to use the telephone business as an example : We are asking the Con~ess to specify a national communication policy . We argue that competition In the long distance business will hurt the average consumer. We assert that we ~a\Te behaved responsibly for a hundred years and by enterprise and innovahon we have provided America with the world's best phone system, and at a bargain . All very rational. But, as with the energy companies, less than 100% Persuasive because the arguments ignore our thousands of well kept (read prosperous) vehicles people see daily on the streets, our billion dollar per quarter profits, our society's inbred suspicions about monopoly and concentrations of power, and the consumer's daily experiences-good, bad indifferent-with phone service. Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out that we live not by bread alone, b~t chiefly by catch phrases. Those phrases are handed to us by our sociolor1,cal heritage, our psychological construction and our experience or lack of it. t s a lot easier to hang on to the catch phrase "monopoly," than it is to make sense out of the structure of the oil industry or the communication industry.
:<-
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p .. bUe Relatlon§ Review Communication One of the "sornethings" which affect opinion is communication. That word communication has become such a cliche that the mere mention of it may tum you off totally. There cannot be an intelligent person left who does not cringe when communication is put forth as the solution to our problems. All too often, the remedy of communication is proposed as a means of avoidance, a misnomer for more fundamental problems which no one wants to name aloud or cope with. My own PR department will tell you that "to communicate is the beginning of understanding." Maybe. My conditional belief is forced on me by a huge stack of research evidence which says : • the public demonstrates an astounding ability to ignore very material facts when those facts don't interest them', and • increasing the supply of information does not necessarily increase public knowledge. 7 Raising the level of information about public issues is a very difficult matter, and gets even tougher when people suspect they are being manipulated. How tough it is to raise public knowledge can be illustrated by a few examples. As of 1959, about one out of four Americans said they had not heard of Fidel Castro. In 1964, one out of four Americans did not know there is a communist government on the mainland of China. At one critical point in American history, when the secretary of state was accused of close association with a communist agent, about 80 percent of the American people could not name the secretary. And after all the hoopla about space exploration, a sizeable number of people still are convinced that man's walk on the moon was strictly showbiz staged on earth. Despite the massive media barrages which bombard US endlessly with information. very large numbers of the public are immune to new data. We can have the facts and we can try to communicate them, but that doesn't mean folks want to hear those answers. Where the facts create an internal conflict in the person, the odds are very high that the data is going to have a rough time getting across. Festinger described the conflict with the phrase "cognitive dissonance ."• I'll define that for our purpose here simply as where some reality-the data, for example-run afoul of a person's preconceived "picture" of the world or his idea of what is or isn't true. But, perhaps we can go at least part way on this matter of the importance of communications and say this: yes, to communicate may be the beginning of understanding. Provided that the receiver can or is willing to pluck your messsage out of a very clogged channel. You'll recall that Bernays argued that the function of public relations was to "crystalize" public opinion, to bring together as a unified force the latent attitudes of individuals.' There's not much hope of crystalization if you can't be heard above the noise. As difficult as mass communication has become, it is the master key for unlocking mass attitudes. For a corporation of national or international scope it is nonsense to hope to build a network of one-to-one communications to crystalize opinion. Public opinion, in the sense of mass attitudes, just doesn't
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Pllbllc Opinion happen that way. The facts of industrial society will not go away, as much as some of us might like to return to an era of country villages and small towns. A modern society is dependent for its basic information on mass communications-newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, books and so forth. As Max Lerner said: "Those who control the media come to hold the strategic passes to many American minds."!" Those media have a technology of appeal, perhaps more entertainment than information, but nonetheless are the fundamental apparatus for shaping belief and opinion in this country. Between the um-pah-pah and the cheesecake, the messages somehow get through to a public of the opinion elite, at least. At the same time, we would be well advised to recognize that opinion changes easier-not faster, just easier-when the existing networks of opinionmakers in each community become acquainted with what we have to say. Those opinion-makers are part of what used to be called the two-step hypothesis in communications. II Briefly, that says that mass media are read by one group of people who digest, summarize, and evaluate what they're reading . They then are presumed to talk about their facts and opinions to a network of friends, business associates, club groups, and so forth . The second group, in effect, is heavily influenced by the influentials, the opinion-makers. It is true that a relatively small number of people touch off the interest of the mass. Joseph Kraft, in a survey as to who reads the New York Times, showed that 60 per cent of American news editors did, 46 per cent of utility executives, 28 per cent of bank officers, and 30 per cent of college presidents. n Obviously, a small group of people at the Times, and in the other major media, have a profound effect in determining what will be a public issue. But there is some evidence that the two-step hypothesis is not quite explanatory of the details of influences on opinion. Some observers believe we ought to distinguish between at least four kinds of opinion publics: • a general public, which does not have much interest in the facts of public issues, or indeed, the issues themselves; • the attentive public, which at least knows that certain issues are before the people; • an informed public, which takes part in the discussion of public matters; and, finally, the elite public, which initiates and defines the issues, and which touches off the public discussion. IS Some comments on that elite public may be in order. First of all, it is not blo~e an "eastern liberal establishment," if such a thing exists. The incidence of rams is randomly distributed across all geographic sectors of the country, and among those of varied political persuasions. Second, the elites do not ?lone make the decisions in this country. Third, a function of the various elites IS to place the alternatives before the other publics. But, finally, it is segments of each of the publics who coalesce into a consensus. The opinion elites are a very broad fraternity. Certainly all of you are cardcarrying members. We could say that's so by virtue of your role or rank in our largest corporations, in academic institutions, or in government. But it would also be correct to think of membership in the opinion elite as a result of many other traits.
1.1.
'·"blle Relations Ilevlew The qualifications are a certain cast of intelligence, a fund of information acquired by wide reading, an ability to absorb detail, the unusual capability of abstracting order and meaning from seemingly unrelated facts, the need to communicate viewpoints and, finally, the willingness to defend them. People who meet these qualifications exist in every community in this land. Some years ago we at AT&T made the theoretical error of thinking they would be community leaders, in the sense of holding high posts in labor unions, colleges, business, and so forth. The Bell System companies did quite a bit of research among leaders, and discovered, to the surprise of some of us, that people in positions of community leadership are vastly different from the kinds of opinion-makers I'm talking about. There is some overlap between the two, as you might guess, but there was considerable evidence that the community leaders trailed the opinions of the opinion elite. It is also true that some opinion-makers may never have gotten near a book. Authority, social class and power also determine opinions. But in this society, all opinions must, in the long run, stand the test of public acceptance and experience. "Communication" is a whole lot more complicated than the cliche aspects would suggest. Communication is part of the web of relationships which brings public opinion into being and which helps it to develop. Our part of that communication process normally is providing information, which seems to flow through various publics, with a loss of detail as it goes from group to to group. Also, while mass media are our first battleline, we are limiting ourselves if we ignore the other networks of communication which involve opinion-makers of various kinds. Conclusions and Recommendations You will recall that we began with Professor Childs' description of public opinion as a "number of somethings." And while it isn't clear what all the sornethings are, they are heavily influenced at least by the social structure and beliefs of the society and the individual psychology of the person...and, in a mass society, by mass communications. That communication, as we said in talking about opinion elites, gets cast into several versions through several layers of publics. Now some conclusions: First, we badly need in our corporate public relations a very large dose of patience. The fundamental opinions and beliefs of a society ordinarily are acquired over decades, and tested by long experience, and, hence, are not subject to overnight revision. If we are serious about having a part in the formation of public opinion, we are advised to dig-in for the long struggle. That advice is a little out of step, sometimes , with what we in fact do. AU public relations departments are geared to produce programs to "fix" perceived breakdowns in communications or problems with the public. What's more, we're usually committed to do it within a specific budget period. The long range usually is not practical. Yet what we know about the formation of public opinion suggests very strongly the long term approach.
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I-lihUe Opinion That is reasonable advice in simply an historical sense. Without warming old chestnuts, perhaps we can simply agree that American industry has been recovering slowly from about seventy-five years of almost continuous attackbeginning with the onslaughts of the trust busters near the tum of the century. W . e had a respite after World War II, but it didn't last long. The power and Influence of public opinion in those 75 years has made our factories safer ~laces to work, has forced the building of a floor under wages and hours, lunited the work force as to age, and enlarged it as to color and sex, and constructed a foundation of economic supports to protect against hardship during temporary unemployment or on-the-job injury. As hard as it is to say, I have in candor to admit that we in industry make Inanyof our own problems with the public. This is easy to spell out from A-toZ by looking back over the years, but perhaps one recent incident will illustrate my meaning. Ralph Nader and his book on the auto industry were virtually unknown among the general public until a vast sympathy accidentally Was created for him and his work. Not Mr. Nader or any other critic can be created in a vacuum-there are Conditions precedent when a public reaches a consensus about a company or an industry. When the consensus is reached , public opinion is going to have the last WO~d. We are well advised to get in step with what we can determine to be the InaJor trends of the society, and work toward making those trends as reasonabll e as we can while recognizing that the public interest will eventually steamro ler those with narrow, private interests who stand in the way. . We need, or course, to concern ourselves with today's legislation , and there ISn't much corporate mileage in trying to interest businessmen in some longange future . But in the arena of social opinion, the battles of the 1980s and eYond are in fact being won or lost today. The second conclusion is that our concern has to be the individual in our SO~iety. It is easy to lose track of him, to bury him in the percentage saying no ~tPlfnion. to ignore his complaints and hold rigidly to our rules. One of my a f recently left an umbrella on a PATH train, the subway that hauls comJll~ers between lower Manhattan and New Jersey. He discovered that the lost h~ found department was open only from 9 a.m, to 5 p.m., which seemed to hlIn a little unreasonable, considering that most people work during those i~urs. He wrote to the chairman of the PATH, and within a short time was to armed that the hours of the lost and found department were being changed t more fully accommodate people who worked for a living. That seems to me ;. be the exact way to treat an individual with a reasonable complaint, and IthOutletting corporate inertia get in the way. pI ~lso, we are noting the growth of an institutionalized structure for comna~~nt, the consumer movements. We count at least 3000 county, state and tall~onal consumer organizations across the country, and I'm sure we haven't tio le~ them all by a long shot. They have top grade legal advice, representabaln In Washington, and they are, I think, going to be an effective counterlance to many businesses and their practicies. n brief, the individual has a place to go to get action on his complaints.
b
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Publle Relations Review His personal experience with us now can go beyond frustration; he is gradually building the mechanisms to be able to fight even the largest corporations without bankrupting himself. This would suggest a great deal more concern in the executive suite with the individual psychology of the consumer and what he wants, what fits his lifestyle and his sense of propriety, and not alone what we would like him to have. And, or course, all of this applies to the "shes" as well. A third summary point is this matter of communication. There are twO prime dangers. First, that they're not hearing us and we're not hearing them. And second, that they're hearing all right but that they have more important things to do. Not many people go to bed nightly with a silent prayer that the Justice Department will be fair to AT&T, IBM or General Motors. Sometimes not even shareownersl Adam Smith would have it that each man places his own economic interest before the public interest. Apparently that notion has been amended, if not repealed. Furthermore, John Q. may have resigned himself to paying higher prices provided that there is a curb on what he sees as the power of big corporations. Clearly, a major problem in talking with the public is that we in corporate America tend to communicate our own values, the overriding dictatorship of the bottom line, rather than beginning from the society's and the person's sense of rightness and fairness. Many years ago, Theodore Vail, the father of the Bell System, welcomed utility regulation, perceiving that this was what the public preferred and that such a step would be in everyone's interest. Mr. Vail was correct. Today, however, there is a growing public preference for some competition in the communication business and the descendents .of Mr. Vail are seeking ways to accommodate this tendency without compromJS" ing the public's best interests in the long run. Beyond what we communicate is the matter of how we communicate. In corporate public relations we too often put the beginners in charge of our communication media. Our seasoned people are busy with administrative meetings, budgets, personnel, and so forth, and that is the way to disaster. The job of PR is understanding opinion, reinforcing or informing it, and, hopefully, helping it to be reasonable. All other chores are mere background, henc~ it is important that our most competent people should be among the "doers and not always burdened with administrative responsibilities to the exclusion of all else. Another difficulty in influencing public opinion is the increasing difficultY in gaining reasonable access to the mass media, the press. A writer with a set of prejudices as long as your arm can get his page length column opposite the editorial page, but we're fortunate to get 300-words of reply in the letters column. It seems to me that the pendulum has once again swung too far. T~e time has come to find a way to forcefully remind our peers in the news media that the first amendment also implies reasonable access for all of us to the means of mass communication. 14 Lastly, there is the matter of influencing public opinion, which is crucial to everything said here. A simple question from the Gallup poll is an example of a
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·-..hllc Opinion radical revision in public thinking in connection with the Vietnam war. The question was: whether or not "the United States made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam." Now, that question calls merely for an opinion evaluating an event, and says nothing about the legitimacy of the conflict or the necessity to fight or not to fight. But the responses to the question of mistake changed radically over a six Year period. In 1965, about 25 per cent of the respondents thought we had made a mistake... in 1967 it went to 37 per cent ... in 1969 to 55 per cent ... and in 1971 to 61 per cent. 16 If we don't try to make too much out of the questions, the results are more than interesting. What had happened in those six years is that a small group of people in the universities led the way in helping America to change its mind about a key event in our history. What began as "teach-ins" escalated into media happenings in the streets, and the opposition to the conflict finally sueNeded in commandering much of the mass media as supporters of the action. o doubt there were many more reasons for the shift in opinions. In any case, what all of that says is that the social training of the society in ~n~Uestioning patriotism was overridden, the individual's strong tendency to eheve in and obey authority was set aside, and the mass media were forced ultimately to take account of the rebellious views . Amazing results, but a good example of what can happen with long-range efforts to change public op inion. As to what all of us in PR would like to do over time, I doubt that we have Yet the know-how to "sell" any significant opinions to the public. We also av.e not yet latched onto the key questions which give us insight into the gut eehngs of the American people. . As I have said, there are not few and simple answers to how public opinion IS formed. There are, however, many clues as to what convinces people that ~ew thinking is called for. Those clues suggest at least sustained efforts over time to affect public opinion... due regard for the society's sense of rightness... a ~oncern for the individual's view...and appropriate measurement to deter!l\lneboth what to do and how well we're doing. In closing I would leave you with some words from the late Learned Hand. ~ter a lifetime of the law his conclusion was: "In the long run, we are depenent on the rationality of men. " t It is true that men think with their emotions, and it is good sense not to rub hern raw . But it is also true that our appeals to emotion must be supported by lllorerational approaches if we are to succeed in our objectives. t Public opinion is not necessarily logical; it is amorphous, ambivalent, conradictory, volatile. Consequently, those of us who would hope to influence PUblic opinion can only expect that our efforts, over time, may nudge the ~hnsensus toward some reasonable perception of the issues. Even in terms of f at rather limited prospect, we might do well to do as the politicians do : Deus our best efforts on the undecideds. b Civen that the "somethings" of which public opinion is made is a bubbling srew of cultural biases, informed as well as uninformed preconceptions, perkonal experiences, shifting contexts of self-interest and a host of other unnOWns, it would seem to me that anyone among us who embraces a more am-
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Public Relations Review bitious view of what can be accomplished is foredoomed to constant dis-appointment.
Footnotes 'Karl Menninger, et al, The Vital Balance in Mental Health and lllness (New York: Vikjng Press, 1967). An excellent argument, written in everyday English, that even very disturbed people seek the "best order" which they can muster. 'Psychology Today (Del Mar, Cal. : CRM BOOKS, 1970), pp. 613-633.
'Ib id, p. 633. %id, p.633 . 'Harwood L. Childs, Public Opinion: Nature, Formation and Role (Princeton, N. J.: Van Nostrand, 1965), pp . 12-28. 'Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley, "Some Reasons Why Information Campaigns Fail," Public Opinion Quarterly (11) , pp . 412-423. 'Shirley A. Star and Helen M. Hughes, "Report on an Educational Campaign: The Cincinnati Plan for the United Nations," American Journal of Sociology (55), pp. 389-400. 'Leon A. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (New York. Harper &: Row, 1957). 'Edward L. Bemays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York : Boni to: Uveright, 1923). lOMax Lerner, America AS a Civilization (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 765. IIPaul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice, (New york : Columbia University Press, 1948) 2nd ed., p. 151. Elihu Katz, "The Twa-Step Flow of Communication : An Up-to-Date Report on a Hypothesis," Public Opinion Quarterly (1957). 21 :1. "Joseph A. Kraft , 'T he Future of the Neu: York Times, " Esquire, 55 :4, p. 121. "Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1960), p, 138. We utilize Almond's concept, but expand the number of publics and define them somewhat differently. I'Richard A. Schwarzlose, "For Journalists Only1", Columbia Journalism Reuieus, July/August. 1977, pp . 32-33. Offers the interesting suggestion that a series of "right to know" decisions by the U. S. Supreme Court may lead to a reader's "right to demand" necessary information from the media . "Charles W. Roll, Jr. and Albert H. Cantril, Polls: Their Use and Misuse in Politics (NeVI York: Basic BOOKS, 1972), p. 109. Table 5-5 reports the data by months; this article reports the annual averages.
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