Public opinion as a form of organization

Long before techniques for systematically measuring opinions were developed, it was noted that public opinion seemed to have qualities that made it something more than the sum of individual opinions on an issue. It was presumed to have a force and vitality unconnected with any specific individual. The German poet Wieland (1799) spoke of it as “an opinion that without being noticed takes possession of most heads,” and the sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies ([1887] 1957, p. 256) observed that “whatever may come to be considered a public opinion, it confronts the individual with an opinion which is in part an extraneous power.” Some scholars postulated the existence of a “group mind” with a will of its own, and observation of crowd behavior seemed to confirm the existence of some psychic entity that could seize hold of many individuals at once and lead them to behave in ways that no one of them would have behaved under other circumstances [SeeCollective Behavior].

The concept of a group mind was soon discarded, since no empirical referent for it could be found, but the search continued for an explanation of the way public opinion differed from a simple summation of individual opinions. One explanation that has been advanced by a number of twentieth-century social scientists is that individual opinions are sometimes related to each other in such a way as to form a kind of organization. Charles Horton Cooley described public opinion as “no mere aggregate of separate individual judgments, but an organization, a cooperative product of communication and reciprocal influence” ([1909] 1956, p. 121). Ideas such as these have resulted in the abandonment of the search for an entity or content labeled “public opinion” that can be discovered and then analyzed; emphasis has been placed instead on the study of multi-individual situations and of the relationships among the opinions held by various people in these situations (Allport 1937, p. 23).

If public opinion is viewed as a species of organization or as a bundle of relationships, questions arise as to what the nature of these relationships is, how they are formed, how they persist, and why they dissolve. The relationship most frequently examined is that between leaders and followers— that is, between political influentials and the mass of the people. A number of writers have analyzed the techniques by which politicians and statesmen are able to develop a common will among masses of disparate individuals by manipulating concepts and symbols (Lippmann 1922; Lasswell 1927; 1935). Woodrow Wilson, for instance, used his Fourteen Points to mobilize a common opinion out of the wide varieties of opinions churned up by World War I. Later investigations have found that opinion leaders, or those who are influential in determining what others think about current issues, are not concentrated only at the top of the social and political pyramids but can be found throughout the population. Each socioeconomic group has its own opinion leaders, who play an important part in determining the attitudes of other members of their group. The same leaders are not necessarily influential in all subject areas, however; one may be considered an authority on political questions, another on economic questions, and so on (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955). Studies of the way in which group membership influences individual opinions have contributed substantially to understanding the relationships involved in public opinion. For example, researchers have found that soldiers transferred from one unit to another during World War II adopted attitudes prevalent in the unit to which they had been transferred (M. B. Smith 1949).

Knowledge about the internal structure of public opinions, nevertheless, is still limited and lags far behind measurement. This is largely because of the difficulties involved in this type of research, both in conducting experiments that enable the investigator to make systematic observations of the relationships among those holding individual opinions and in quantifying such observations as can be made about these relationships in real-life situations, outside the laboratory. Despite the relatively undeveloped state of our knowledge about the internal relationships among opinions, some of the implications of this approach have found recognition among practitioners engaged in trying to influence popular thinking. It is common for public-relations specialists or propagandists to compile lists of “influentials,” often on the basis of sociological criteria, on the assumption that ideas reaching people on these lists will spread to a wider public. Some public-relations practitioners have spoken of their task as the “crystallization” of public opinion —that is, the transformation of individual attitudes into a collectivity that can exert influence (Bernays 1923).

People concerned with building viable democratic polities in new nations may also find it useful to think of public opinion as a form of organization. Students of developing areas have noted that private citizens who take an interest in political questions in emerging nations are frequently out of touch with each other and unable to interact constructively (Shils 1963). There is thus no infrastructure of private organizations and public opinion between the government and the population masses, and this lack tends to facilitate sudden and radical shifts in governments and policies. These shifts, it is hypothesized, would be less extreme if a way could be found to engage all those with political interests, both in and out of government, in a dialogue that would lead to an increasing degree of consensus on important national issues. The problem is thus to relate individual opinions to each other in such a way that fairly stable bodies of opinion, capable of exerting political influence on each other and on the government, will be formed.