Journalism 614:Cognitive Perspectives on theNature of Mass Opinion

Limits of Past Approaches

Behavioral Theories – Try to explain opinion expression as automatic, reactive.

Attitudinal Theories – Counter this view with evidence of active processing, cognitive consistency, and limits of predicting behaviors with attitudes.

Yet attitudinal theories can’t account for most low-effort information processing.

Most of the time, people do not put much cognitive effort into

information processing, cognitive consistency, or planning behavior

The Cognitive Revolution

Dramatic shift in focus of research– Away from attitudes and toward cognitive

processes that underlie judgments– Away from persuasion and toward a focus on

less directed processes like message framing

Shift from outcomes to process– Not just the “black box” of the mind, but inside

the process of opinion formation and change

Shifting Assumptions

Irrational vs rational respondents– Ex. Anchor points determine responses

Subjective vs objective nature of cognition– Heuristics, errors, and biases

Dynamic vs static nature of perception– Shifts in perception under different contexts

Errors in judgments of influence– Social attribution and impersonal influence

Would you accept the following deal?– If you give me a penny today, double that

tomorrow (2¢), double that the next day (4¢), and so on for a total of 30 days, I will pay you a $10,000,000 dollars on the 30th day!!!

– It’s the deal of a lifetime!!!

Anchoring

Insufficient adjustment up or down from an original starting value

– A penny doubled every day for a month• Worth over a $10,000,000• People begin by imagining the first few

doublings (a very low anchor) and do not adjust their estimate upward sufficiently for later values.

1 0.012 0.023 0.044 0.085 0.166 0.327 0.648 1.289 2.56

10 5.1211 10.2412 20.4813 40.9614 81.9215 163.8416 327.6817 655.3618 1310.7219 2621.4420 5242.8821 10485.7622 20971.5223 41943.0424 83886.0825 167772.1626 335544.3227 671088.6428 1342177.2829 2684354.5630 5368709.12

10737418.20

Anchoring in Survey Response

• What percent of African nations are members of the UN? • Follow this with: Is your estimate it

more or less than 10%? OR Is your estimate more or less than 65%?

• Anchoring by intervening question changes the estimate.• 25% vs. 45% on average, respectively

Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts

Apply a fast, simple decision rule that generally produced a desirable outcome– Use a subset of available information

– Form a “reasonably accurate” decision

Help explain “low information rationality”– People think about their opinion but not very much

– Just try to arrive at a satisfactory, not optimal decision

For each pair, circle the cause of death that is more common in the United States:

a. Shark attack – Falling airplane parts

b. Tornados - Lightening strikes

c. Car accidents – Stomach cancer

Availability Heuristic

A decision rule in which people make judgments based on the ease with which instances/occurrences can be brought to mind.

– Tversky & Kahneman, 1974– Shark attacks (tornados; car accidents) receive

more publicity than do deaths from falling airplane parts (lightening; stomach cancer) and thus are far easier to imagine, even though the latter are more prevalent

Selective Processing/Perception

People engage in biased processing depending on existing cognitions and goals

Verb Mean Speed

Smashed 40.8

Collided 39.3

Bumped 38.1

Hit 34.0

Contacted 31.8

How fast were the cars going when they…

Source: Loftus & Palmer (1974).

Response Experimental condition

“Smashed” “Hit” Control group

Yes 16 7 6

No 34 43 44

Did you see any broken glass?

Source: Loftus & Palmer (1974).

Judgmental Errors

Judging the reasons for behaviors– Situational attributions - all causes are external to the person.

(pressure from others, money, the situation, etc.)

– Dispositional attributions - all causes are internal to the person

(moods, attitudes, personality traits, abilities, etc.)

Fundamental Attribution Error – The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences

and overestimate dispositional influences on others’ behavior

Implications for third person perceptions

Biases in Perception

Pro-Israeli

Students

Pro-Arab Students

Favorable to Israel

16% 42%

Unfavorable to Israel

57% 26%

Source: Vallone, Ross, & Lepper (1985).

Partisans are shown media content previously judged to beneutral and both groups judge it to be biased against them

Context Effects

Question Wording Effects Question Order Effects Response Alternatives and Ordering Interviewer Effects

Development of Survey Experiments

Class Exercise Form an impromptu group of four to five people Try to draft survey questions to tap opinions about a topic

of your choosing: Iraq, Environment, Consumption… Task #1: Write a “unbiased” question and then modify the

wording in a way that you believe would produce a substantially different response - Explain why.

Task #2: Write a question that would appear either before or after this question that you believe would change the expression of opinion among respondents - Explain why.

15 minutes

Currently Dominant Construct

To most, public opinion is simply “the aggregate of responses to nationally representative surveys”

So, scholars stress that they…– Sample citizens with equal probability of inclusion

– Ask unbiased and universally intelligible questions

Easy to systematically measure and report Fits with the ideal of democratic, capitalist society

– Each citizen has an opinion on every issue

– Each consumer’s opinion shapes their choices

Alternates to the Dominant View

Do citizens meet the basic prerequisites?– Do they have opinions to be measured?

– Can surveys pose questions in a neutral manner?

Two alternative constructs– Estimate what the public would want if fully informed

and rational - “enlightened or informed opinion”

– Examine the opinion of private persons which governments / corporations find it prudent to heed

Problems with Dominant View

Converse (1964) “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”– Extends argument advanced in Campbell et al. (1960)

– Presidential elections are not ideological mandates • Only a small percent view elections in ideological terms

• Most think in more mundane terms - “good for farmers”

– Converse developed notion of “attitude consistency”• The tendency of individuals to take consistently liberal,

conservative or moderate positions across issues

• Robust among elites, but weak among members of public

Converse & Non-Attitudes

Attitude inconsistency across and within issues

When same people are asked same questions at

two points in time, responses vary greatly

– Not true for all attitudes (i.e., racial attitudes)

– Still, for most issues, tremendous instability

– How could such randomly fluctuating “attitudes” be the

basis of any ideology, conventional or private?

• Non-attitudes = absence of overtime response stability

“Large portions of an electorate simply do not have meaningful beliefs, even

on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among

elites for a substantial period of time”

Converse, 1964

The Measurement Error Response

Achen (1975) challenged the view that stability or instability is what qualifies a response as an attitude or non-attitude.

Measurement error explains change– No attitude can be measured without error– Even people with real attitudes display change– Due to vagueness of natural language and difficulties of

mapping opinions onto arbitrary response scales Statistical estimates that account for measurement

error find that underlying attitudes are stable

The Question-Answering Critique

Seemingly innocuous features of survey design affect expressed “public opinions” – Order in which questions were asked– Order in which response alternatives are listed– Inclusion of certain words and phrases

The Nature of Mass Opinion

People do not possess fixed attitudes Instead, they possess a jumble of frequently

conflicting “considerations”– Each predisposes them in a particular direction

– No one of these constitutes a “true attitude”

Question answering is a function of what is at the “top of the head” at the moment of response

Most people for most issue have a fairly wide range within which they are ambivalent

Opinion Ambivalence Which pole of their ambivalence gets expressed

depends on the considerations made salient by…– Question wording– Question order– Response Options– Interpersonal Discussion– News of the Day

Explains response instability and context effects– Not simply non-attitudes– Not simply measurement error

“A great deal of uncertainty, tentativeness, and incomprehension

marks the typical mass survey response… the question-answering

model make opinion measurement in a poll difficult to defend as a completely

neutral act.”

Zaller, 1994

Implications of this View

No public opinion poll questions are politically neutral - always involve framing

This framing often comes from larger political community, whose discourse anchors the debate and question wording

Thus, there may be no independent, unified opinion that exists separate from politics, but multiple possible opinions to be activated

Enlightened Opinion

The political ignorance of the American votes is well documented - Bartels– Do heuristics allow for good decisions? Sometimes

– What would the public want if fully informed?• Focus Groups and Deliberative Polling

• Estimates of Informed Opinion

Gap between expressed and enlightened opinion

Latent Opinion

Opinion that might exist at the time of the next election and result in incumbent politicians being thrown out of office - Key

No connection to data, immeasurable Theoretical construct to answer the question

of what particular form of public opinion affects what the government does