The Spiral of Silence

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion. Journal of Communication, 24(2), 43-51.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1974

DOI

10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00367.x

Link

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00367.x

Cited from

behavioral_economics, communication_media_studies, psychology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Herding Behavior
  • Noelle-Neumann's 1974 Journal of Communication paper The Spiral of Silence describes the mechanism by which perceived majority opinion silences minority voices, accelerating apparent consensus formation in political discourse.

    This sourceFoundational theory of how perceived majority opinion silences dissenting voices, accelerating apparent consensus formation in political and social discourse.

• Private-Public Preference Divergence
  • Falsification can occur with everyone aware that everyone falsifies (shared strategic silence, no misperception) — the parent's full object adds the divergence and its self-sustaining misreading. Not its child spiral_of_silence. spiral_of_silence is the dynamic feedback loop in which suppression steepens an apparent consensus that raises the cost of dissent, deepening the gap over time.
• Spiral Of Silence In Publics
  • First, the loop runs on expressed rather than held opinion: the input is what is publicly visible, not what is privately believed, and the cost falls on the act of expression rather than on disagreement itself — the spiral can run with no belief change at all, only suppression.

    This sourceThe originating statement of the theory — individuals infer the climate of opinion from visible expression and suppress perceived-minority views out of fear of isolation, steepening apparent consensus.

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