Fear of Isolation: Conformity Drives The Spiral
Noelle-Neumann asserts that the fear of being in isolation is what initiates the spiral. People have a tendency to conform as demonstrated by psychologist Solomon Asch in which he passed out sheets of paper that contained 4 lines. The lines were labeled A, B, C and X. The question was to choose which line was the same length as X. If an entire room of individuals answered that line B was correct, but you thought line A was correct, would you stick up for your opinion? Or would you conform to the rest of the room's opinion? It turns out, one individual would receive a different sheet of paper than the rest of the class in which the answer wouldn't coincide. The study showed that the majority of the time, the individual with the oddball paper would conform to the idea of the rest of the class. This person feared being isolated from the majority, and therefore, silenced their own opinion and decided to go with the flow. Not only is this the theory in a nut-shell, but it clearly shows what causes the theories correctness.
Read more about this topic: Spiral Of Silence
Famous quotes containing the words fear of, fear, conformity, drives and/or spiral:
“Before anything else [Numa] decided that he must instill in his subjects the fear of the gods, this being the most effective measure with an ignorant, and at that time uncultured, people.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“It is a base thing for a man among the people not to obey those in command. Never in a state can the laws be well administered when fear does not stand firm.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)
“Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)