Journalism 614: Cognitive Perspectives on the Nature of Mass Opinion

1. Journalism 614:Cognitive Perspectives on theNature of Mass Opinion

2. 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.

3. Most of the time, people do not put much cognitive effort into information processing, cognitive consistency, or planning behavior

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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!!!

7. 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.

9. 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

10. 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

11. For each pair, circle the cause of death that is more common in the United States: • Shark attack – Falling airplane parts • Tornados - Lightening strikes • Car accidents – Stomach cancer

12. 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

13. Selective Processing/Perception • People engage in biased processing depending on existing cognitions and goals

14. How fast were the cars going when they… Source: Loftus & Palmer (1974).

15. Did you see any broken glass? Source: Loftus & Palmer (1974).

16. 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

17. Biases in Perception Partisans are shown media content previously judged to be neutral and both groups judge it to be biased against them Source: Vallone, Ross, & Lepper (1985).

18. Context Effects • Question Wording Effects • Question Order Effects • Response Alternatives and Ordering • Interviewer Effects Development of Survey Experiments

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. “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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. “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

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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