Concept
pseudo-environment
Lippmann’s term: the simplified representation that comes between people and the real environment, and to which behaviour actually responds. It does not mean a lie; its consequences appear in the real environment.
The pseudo-environment is a concept Walter Lippmann builds in the first chapter of Public Opinion (1922). For him the real environment is too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance; so people reconstruct it on a simpler model and build their behaviour as a response to that model . Lippmann calls this representation, inserted between a person and his environment, a “pseudo-environment”.
Two details of the concept are often missed. First: “pseudo” does not mean a lie. Lippmann defines a fiction as a representation of the environment made by people themselves, and writes that fictions range from complete hallucination to a scientist’s self-conscious use of a model . Second: the consequences of behaviour appear not in the pseudo-environment but in the real one; the mismatch between the two ends in the sensation of butting one’s head against a stone wall .
Agenda-setting researchers returned to the term later: McCombs and Shaw (1972) write that the pseudo-environment reflected in the media is not a perfect representation of the actual campaign ; Iyengar, Peters and Kinder (1982) report that their experiments sustain Lippmann’s suspicion of half a century earlier . For more see Agenda-Setting.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) A local paper reports a distant factory strike in two paragraphs, relying only on the employer’s statement. Readers form an opinion from those two paragraphs and sign petitions accordingly; the strike’s real environment is a factory yard the readers never see.