Concept
fear of isolation
Fear of being excluded, of falling out of one’s surroundings’ favour. In the spiral of silence, the engine that drives people to probe the climate of opinion and to fall silent when they sense they are in the minority.
Fear of isolation (in Turkish sources “izolasyon korkusu” also occurs, next to the usual “dışlanma korkusu”) is the engine of the spiral of silence theory. According to Noelle-Neumann, people are social beings and shrink from falling out of their surroundings’ favour, from being left alone. The community in turn threatens the person seen as deviant (departing from the majority) with exclusion: frowning, turning one’s back and mocking are everyday forms of this threat. Both Turkish course books also count this fear as the second of the theory’s five assumptions: individuals constantly feel fear of isolation.
The theory claims that this fear works largely unconsciously: people mostly do not think that their behaviour is being adjusted to public opinion. As support for the reality of the fear, Noelle-Neumann turns to Asch’s line experiments.
According to critics, the problem is that the fear is assumed rather than measured in most studies: do those who stay silent really feel more fear, or is it shyness or indifference that silences them? That is why fear is the most debated and hardest-to-test link of the theory.
Example
In Asch’s 1956 line experiment, subjects in a room where everyone but themselves united on a wrong answer went along with the majority’s mistake in about a third of their estimates in the critical trials; some later described how uncomfortable it felt to be left alone against the group.