The Spiral of Silence

Story

Equal polls, unequal result

West Germany, 1965. The election is months away, and for months the polls have been saying the same thing: the governing CDU/CSU and the opposition SPD are neck and neck.

The pollsters of the Allensbach Institute ask two questions. The first: “Which party will you vote for?” The answers hardly budge for nine months. The second: “Who do you think will win the election?” These answers do move: as the months go by, more and more people expect the CDU/CSU to win. Then, just before the election, what is called a “last-minute swing” happens and the gap opens up.

On 19 September 1965 the CDU/CSU got 47.6 percent and the SPD 39.3 percent. So a race that had looked “neck and neck” for months ended with a clearly visible margin at the ballot box.

Here is the puzzle: while what people would vote for stayed put, what they believed about who would win changed, and in the end the votes followed that belief. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann set out to chase this puzzle. Her answer became the subject of this lesson, the spiral of silence theory: you will see where it came from, what it says, how it was tested, where it stumbled, and what it looks like on today’s social media.

Now stop and guess: why do people keep saying “I’ll vote for the same party” while starting to say “that one will win”? The rest of the lesson is the answer to this question.

Card

Two ideas of public opinion and a bold break

Noelle-Neumann approaches this puzzle as a pollster, but her question is really a philosophical one: what exactly is this thing we call public opinion?

According to one view, public opinion is the shared reason that comes out of rational debate among informed citizens. According to Wilke, its best-known defender in Germany was Jürgen Habermas. According to the other view, public opinion is an invisible form of social control that binds the individual to the community. On 9 December 1965, Noelle-Neumann devoted her inaugural lecture at the University of Mainz to the second view: “Public Opinion as Social Control”. Polat likewise reports that she divides approaches to public opinion into two: “rationality” and “social control”. (For Habermas’s side, see the lesson Habermas: The Public Sphere and Communicative Action.)

The second background is the media effects debate. Since the 1940s the idea that “the media mostly reinforce existing attitudes” had been well established (The Voting Studies and Limited Effects, Selective Exposure, Perception and Retention). Noelle-Neumann objected: in 1972, at an international psychology congress in Tokyo, she gave a talk titled “Return to the concept of powerful mass media”, and pointed to cumulation, consonance across media outlets and the climate-of-opinion effect as her grounds. In the same years, Gerbner’s cultivation line is also counted as the other big name in the return to powerful effects.

The spiral of silence was born where these two ideas cross: public opinion is a pressure, and the media shape how that pressure is perceived.

Card

Who is Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann?

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was born in Berlin in 1916 and died in 2010. She wanted to be a journalist; in 1937, on a DAAD scholarship, she went to the University of Missouri School of Journalism in the United States. There she met George Gallup’s new mass polls and wrote her doctoral thesis on American public opinion polls. Wilke reports that she did not much like the pressure to conform in American society.

In 1947, with her husband Erich Peter Neumann, she founded the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy; the institute is described as Germany’s first public opinion research institute. In the mid-1960s she became a professor of journalism and publishing science (Publizistik) at the University of Mainz but stayed at the head of Allensbach; this double identity fed her theory from both the field and the university. She named Lazarsfeld as her scientific model. At Mainz she taught her students empirical methods such as surveys, content analysis and experiments; in this respect she is regarded as a pioneer of the turn of German journalism studies toward the social sciences.

Her biography also has a contested part: from 1940 to 1945, in the Nazi period, she worked as a journalist and editor; the publications she worked for included Das Reich and Frankfurter Zeitung. Her role in this period was later debated for a long time; she rejected the accusations. We will deal with this in the “Criticism and limits” section, separately from the scientific evaluation of her work.

Step by step

The theory’s timeline

Following the theory’s story year by year helps you keep apart the dates that get mixed up in exams:

1. 1937: Noelle-Neumann goes to Missouri and meets Gallup’s polls.
2. 1947: The Allensbach Institute is founded.
3. 1965: In the German election, expectation shifts while voting intention stays steady (the “last-minute swing”); in December, the Mainz inaugural lecture.
4. 1972: The Tokyo talk: a call to return to “powerful mass media”.
5. 1974: The theory’s first publications: the English article in the Journal of Communication and a chapter in a German tribute volume (Festschrift).
6. 1980: The German book: Die Schweigespirale.
7. 1984: The English edition: The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin.
8. 1998: The Turkish translation: Kamuoyu: Suskunluk Sarmalının Keşfi (“Public Opinion: The Discovery of the Spiral of Silence”; Dost Kitabevi).

A short memory rule: election (1965) → article (1974) → German book (1980) → English book (1984). The English book comes after the German one, because the book was German and the English edition is its translation.

One more hint: the fifteen years between 1965 and 1980 are the theory’s time of maturing. The 1974 article is its first door opening to English; the 1980 book is its full form. In the exam, watch the words ‘first’ and ‘full’.

Card

The theory in one sentence

The backbone of the theory: people constantly monitor which opinion is gaining strength around them. Those who think their opinion is gaining ground speak up openly; those who think it is losing ground withdraw. The speakers seem stronger than they are, the silent seem weaker than they are; this appearance creates a fresh push in the same direction in the next round, and the process feeds itself like a spiral.

Three details to watch:

• What drives the spiral is not the actual distribution of opinions but the perceived distribution.
• The spiral changes people’s public behaviour: who says what, who wears what, what they share. It does not have to mean that opinions have changed inside.
• The engine is fear of isolation: those who think they are in the minority fall silent because they shrink from being excluded.

The name says it too: “spiral”, because the process is a self-accelerating loop; “silence”, because the losing side often loses not by being defeated but by going quiet.

(Hypothetical example.) In a break room, two people loudly defend the same view on a contested issue; the others in the room look away and say nothing. Perhaps half of the silent ones actually think differently; but someone who walks in later may conclude “so everyone thinks like this.”

Myth check

Four common misreadings

What people assume: “Someone who finds themselves in the minority changes their mind straight away.” What the theory says: The theory predicts silence, not a change of mind. In Griffin’s summary people are not weathervanes; but in a headwind they may bow their heads and say nothing. Polat likewise writes that not voicing an opinion does not mean changing it.

What people assume: “It works on every topic.” What the theory says: The theory is for contested issues that carry emotional or moral weight; no spiral is expected on issues where society agrees.

What people assume: “What silences people is the real majority.” What the theory says: A real majority is not required. A minority view defended loudly and resolutely can look like the majority.

What people assume: “It is another name for state censorship.” What the theory says: The theory describes social pressure: frowning, turning your back, mocking. Legal bans and censorship are a different mechanism; the two can work together, but they must not be confused.

The common root of the four misreadings is taking the theory for a theory of ‘persuasion’ or ‘pressure’. The spiral of silence is really a theory of visibility: who is heard in the public sphere, and how that changes other people’s perceptions.

Card

Fear of isolation, public opinion and the “social skin”

Fear of isolation is the theory’s engine (some Turkish sources call it “izolasyon korkusu” instead of the usual “dışlanma korkusu”). According to Noelle-Neumann, as a social being a person shrinks from falling out of the community’s favour; and the community threatens the person seen as deviant with exclusion, by frowning and turning its back. This threat and this fear mostly work without conscious thought.

From here comes an original definition of public opinion. On contested issues, public opinion is the opinions a person can express openly without risking isolation; in established traditions and norms, it is the opinions and behaviours you must openly adopt if you do not want to be excluded. In other words, public opinion is not a voting result but a means of social control.

The subtitle of the 1980 book calls public opinion “our social skin”: the surface of contact between us and society (English social skin; German soziale Haut). (In Turkish this phrase has no established equivalent; the Turkish version of this lesson uses its own rendering, “sosyal derimiz”.)

The idea is not new: Noelle-Neumann counts John Locke’s “law of opinion”, and Tocqueville’s remarks about those clinging to the old faith before the French Revolution joining the majority out of fear of being alone, as ancestors of the theory.

If you see words like “engine”, “driving force” or “what sets the spiral in motion” in an exam, the answer is fear of isolation.

Card

Quasi-statistical sense and the climate of opinion

How does a person know what the majority thinks? Noelle-Neumann’s answer is bold: a kind of sixth sense. According to her, people sense the distribution of opinions around them, without running a poll, almost like statisticians: the quasi-statistical sense (in the book she also calls it a “quasi-statistical organ”). This sense is especially good at catching the direction of travel: which opinion is growing and which is shrinking. According to Noelle-Neumann, even when people misread the present state, they generally sense the trend correctly.

What is sensed is called the climate of opinion (Turkish sources also use “kanaat iklimi”, “düşünce iklimi” and “görüş iklimi” next to the main Turkish term “fikir iklimi”). Two questions are proposed to measure it:

1. Present climate: “Whatever your own opinion, what do you think most people think?”
2. Future forecast: “In a year’s time, will more or fewer people share this opinion?”

People mostly do not say “I don’t know”; they answer. The 1965 puzzle was hiding here too: the answer to “who will win?” moved before voting intention did. According to Polat there are two ways of learning the climate: direct observation in one’s surroundings and indirect observation through the eyes of the media. The second route builds the media leg of the theory.

That is why the ‘climate’ metaphor fits: not something personal like the weather, but a shared atmosphere everyone breathes at the same time; it changes over time, not in a day.

Card

Willingness to speak out, the hard core and the avant-garde

The theory’s dependent variable is willingness to speak out: will a person voice their opinion in a public setting, or not? How they measured it (the train test) you will see in the “Evidence and studies” section.

But not everyone is caught in the spiral. Noelle-Neumann treats two groups as exceptions.

• The hard core (hard core): people who have already been pushed into a defensive position in public, excluded because of their opinion, with nothing left to lose. They do not fall silent. Noelle-Neumann gives Don Quixote as the example of this figure. Polat too writes that on the opposing side of the spiral people fall silent “except for a certain hard core”.
• The avant-garde: intellectuals, artists and reformers who see themselves as ahead of their time. They risk exclusion because they believe public opinion will catch up with them.

According to Noelle-Neumann, the chance to change public opinion belongs to these minorities who do not fear exclusion. Griffin interprets these two groups as boundary conditions that the theory did not predict but that show when the theory does not work.

One more distinction: the wish to join the winner (the bandwagon effect) is not the same as the spiral. Noelle-Neumann also discusses people’s wish to identify with the winning side, but she locates the spiral’s engine not there but in the fear of being alone. Bandwagon explains joining the majority; the spiral explains the minority’s silence.

Step by step

The theory’s five assumptions

Turkish course books present the theory through five assumptions, and in exams these are what is usually asked. Both Polat and Yaylagül give the same five; Özer and Yıldıran Önk report the same list too, citing the Turkish translation of Noelle-Neumann’s book. In my own words:

1. Threat: Society threatens the deviant individual (one who departs from the majority) with exclusion.
2. Fear: Individuals constantly feel this fear of isolation.
3. Probing: Because of this fear, individuals are always trying to assess the climate of opinion.
4. Behaviour: The result of this assessment affects their public behaviour, especially whether they voice or hide their opinion.
5. Combination: The four assumptions together explain the formation, maintenance and change of public opinion.

Two hints in this list. First: the theory has a mental chain (fear → probing → decision) and a social outcome (public opinion). Second: the media are not part of the five; they come in separately, as a source for learning the climate of opinion (a second source next to direct observation).

Even if page numbers and years vary from book to book, the five stay the same; in an exam they may swap one of them out and ask “which is NOT an assumption?”.

Story

Asch in the background: lines and the pressure to conform

To show that fear really does shake a person, Noelle-Neumann looked to psychology and often turned to the line experiments of Solomon Asch.

What Asch did: one subject believes they are taking part in an ordinary visual comparison experiment. Everyone else in the room (in fact confederates who know the experiment) says out loud, in turn, which line is the same length as a given line, but in the critical trials they all unite on a clearly wrong answer. The subject’s turn comes. About a third of the answers slid to the majority’s mistake.

Noelle-Neumann reads this as follows: people find it hard to stand alone before a group even against a plain fact they see with their own eyes; so fear of isolation is real and strong. Griffin reports that she also used Milgram’s France–Norway comparison to show that this tendency is not specific to one culture.

The link is useful but limited. Griffin’s criticism: in Asch’s experiment the subject could resist when they found a single true supporter at their side. Asch himself also stressed independence alongside conformity: most of the answers in the critical trials remained independent. So Asch did not say “people are sheep”; nor does Noelle-Neumann predict conformity to the majority on every issue. The numerical details are in the deep card below.

Card

The spiral doesn’t turn on every issue

The theory is not a “theory of everything”. There are conditions for the spiral to work:

• A contested issue with emotional or moral weight. On an issue everyone agrees on, there is no minority opinion; the spiral does not start.
• Time. The spiral is a process: the “trend” matters as much as the “present moment”. A Turkish review reports that Noelle-Neumann highlights three things in the formation of the spiral: the moral content of the issue, time, and the role of the media.
• The media’s stance. According to Griffin, Noelle-Neumann says she never saw a spiral running against the media’s line: it is hard to speak an opinion the media do not back.
• Culture and community. Scheufele and Moy note that studies in different cultures did not account for culture-specific variables. Critics also stress the climate of the immediate circle (family, friends) more than the country’s general climate; you will see this in the “Criticism and limits” section.

There is also a mental point: the theory says fear and threat mostly work unconsciously. People do not think “I am acting according to the majority”. This is one of the reasons the theory is hard to measure.

In short, the theory asks both ‘why’ and ‘when’. Someone who does not know the conditions sticks the theory onto everything; that is a common mistake in exams and in papers.

Step by step

The spiral, step by step

Let’s put the parts above into a single flow:

1. An issue becomes contested in public opinion; it carries an emotional or moral charge.
2. Everyone probes the climate with the quasi-statistical sense and by looking at the media: which opinion is rising, which is falling?
3. Those who think their opinion is rising find courage; those who think it is falling hold back.
4. One side speaks openly (wears the badge, argues, shares); the other side falls silent. A visibility gap opens between them.
5. This gap is a new signal about the climate: the speaking camp looks bigger than its real strength, the silent camp looks small. In Polat’s account the silent camp falls further behind, and the speaking camp wins new supporters.
6. The new signal goes back to step 2. Each round is stronger and faster than the last: a spiral.
7. Outcome: one opinion becomes “established”, the other moves close to vanishing from the public sphere. Until the hard core, the avant-garde or a changing media environment disrupts the flow.

The key point: the spiral turns visibility, not numbers. A view’s visibility in the public sphere can collapse without its real number of supporters falling at all.

Card

The media: the climate’s second eye

The question that makes Noelle-Neumann a media theorist is this: where do we learn the climate from? There are two sources: direct observation in your own surroundings and indirect observation through the media’s eyes. On most public issues the second source dominates, because your personal circle does not represent the country.

By the criteria Wilke gives, the media’s power comes from three things: cumulation (the constant repetition of the same message), consonance (different media reporting in a similar frame) and the climate-of-opinion effect. This makes selective perception harder: it weakens the idea, which you met in the lesson Selective Exposure, Perception and Retention, that ‘people choose only the messages that suit them’. In some accounts the third item appears as ubiquity (being everywhere).

According to Griffin, Noelle-Neumann says she has not seen a spiral running against the media’s line. Yaylagül summarises: if the majority opinion gets the backing of powerful media it is stronger; if the media side with the minority, the majority camp turns into a silent majority.

You can sum up the difference from agenda-setting (the line of McCombs and Shaw) like this: agenda-setting says the media influence what we think about, that is, which issue seems important. The spiral of silence says the media influence which opinion seems speakable. That is why Polat presents the spiral as the “negative mirror image” of agenda-setting.

Lab

Imagine: a visibility game in the class group chat

This is a thought experiment; not real research or a real group.

In the class’s 10-person messaging group, a contested campus issue is opened. In reality the group is split exactly in two: 5 people hold view A, 5 hold view B. Nobody knows what the others think.

Round 1. From side A, 4 people write; from side B, only 1. There are 5 messages on screen, 4 of them from A. The 4 silent B’s think: “Everyone is on A, I’m in the minority.”

Round 2. This time nobody writes from side B, and 3 people write from side A. Now the A’s think “there’s no such thing as a B.” The B’s think “I’m alone on this.”

Round 3. When the issue is reopened a few days later, one of the B’s thinks of writing, but the group’s tone is even louder than before. They don’t write.

In the end the group believes A is “everyone’s opinion”. Yet nobody changed their mind. The real split is still 5 to 5. The only things that changed are visibility and the resulting perception.

If it were you, at which step would you break this cycle? A B who acts like the hard core, or something else that could change the climate over time?

Story

1972: the same puzzle, in reverse

The film ran backwards seven years later. Going into the 1972 election the SPD and CDU/CSU were neck and neck again, but this time people increasingly thought the SPD would win; and underneath this expectation there was no change in the parties’ real strength.

Then came Allensbach’s extra questions. According to Petersen, these showed that CDU/CSU voters, though equal in number to SPD voters, were almost invisible in public: SPD supporters wore badges, stuck stickers on their cars and openly defended their views in arguments; CDU/CSU supporters were silent.

Placing 1965 and 1972 side by side gives a striking symmetry: in both elections the expectation of who will win got ahead of the measure of who supports which party. Wilke writes that Noelle-Neumann and her students found their evidence of strong media effects especially in 1965 and 1969, but more in the television election campaigns of 1972 and 1976. For 1976, it is reported that Noelle-Neumann’s thesis at the time was that, because of a climate of opinion shaped by the media, some voters adapted to the SPD–FDP coalition, and that this caused a big political controversy.

A warning: these accounts come from Allensbach or its close circle. You will see independent researchers’ tests in the “Criticism and limits” section.

Lab

The train test: a long ride with a stranger

How do you measure willingness to speak out? Noelle-Neumann developed a scenario: the train test (German Eisenbahntest).

In the version Griffin reports, the scenario goes like this: you face a five-hour train or plane journey, and the person next to you starts talking about a contested issue such as abortion. Would you want to talk to them, or would you rather not? The version the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) ran in Germany in 1989 is a little different: there are four more passengers in the compartment, politics is being discussed and someone defends a particular view; “how likely are you to say your own view?”

The logic is the same: first the person’s own opinion and their perception of “what the majority thinks” are measured, then willingness to speak in the imaginary situation is asked. If the theory is right, those who think they are in the majority are more willing. In Griffin’s summary there are other patterns too: forecasts of the future can outweigh the present climate, people prefer to talk to someone who thinks like them, and those with low self-confidence fall silent.

Its strength: cheap, quick, applicable to large samples. Its weakness: the situation is imaginary; it measures not what a person will really do but what they say they will do. And it does not measure fear of isolation directly; it assumes it. We will discuss these in the criticism section.

Card

Three solid criticisms

The theory has been tested as much as it is famous. Griffin summarises the criticisms; Scheufele and Moy review a quarter-century of literature in a broad conceptual assessment. Three main headings:

1. Fear was assumed, not measured. Studies mostly did not look at whether those who stay silent really carry more fear of isolation; silence can also come from shyness, indifference, or the wish not to offend the other person. The link made through Asch is limited too: in Asch a single supporter made resistance easier.
2. The train test is imaginary. It measures not real speech but declared willingness. Glynn, Hayes and Shanahan’s meta-analysis, which brought together 17 studies, found a very small but significant relationship between perceived support and willingness to speak, and recommended that future work focus on real, not imaginary, willingness to speak.
3. National climate or immediate circle? Noelle-Neumann’s public opinion is the anonymous general public. Critics argue that the influence of reference groups such as family and friends may be stronger.

Scheufele and Moy also say that concepts are defined differently from study to study, that measurements are inconsistent, and that studies in different cultures leave out culture-specific variables. They recommend that ‘speaking’ really be measured as speaking and that research return to a more macroscopic view.

The defenders’ reply: the theory itself is a process theory; testing it fully with one-time, individual surveys is hard anyway. And indeed better designs have been tried (next card).

Myth check

“Proven” or “refuted”?

What people assume: “The theory is a proven law.” Or the opposite: “The theory has been refuted.”

What the evidence says: Neither.

• The 17-study meta-analysis (1997): The relationship between perceived support and willingness to speak is very small (the mean Griffin reports is about .05), but not zero.
• The later meta-analysis (Matthes and colleagues, 2018): 66 studies, over 27,000 participants; the relationship is about r = .10; no weaker online than offline.
• Better designs: Scheufele, Shanahan and Lee (2001), instead of an imaginary question, invited participants to a real focus-group discussion (on biotechnology). According to Griffin, perceived public opinion predicted willingness to speak better than in earlier studies.

One more frame: the studies in these reviews were all at the individual (micro) level. Studies tracking the spiral’s social cycle over time were very few.

An honest summary (my own interpretation): The theory found small but consistent support for the tendency that “the perception of the majority affects speaking”; meanwhile the theory’s distinctive mechanism (fear of isolation and the spiral over time) is still only limitedly tested. So in academic language it would be right to say “a partly supported, conditional theory”.

Card

Separating the theory from the theorist

When Noelle-Neumann’s theory is evaluated, a second debate often cuts in: her own past. From 1940 to 1945, in the Nazi period, she worked as a journalist; she worked for several publications including Das Reich and Frankfurter Zeitung. The sources describe this period with different emphases:

• Her successor at Mainz, Jürgen Wilke, in his 2010 memorial speech says that her writings that disturbed the Nazi propaganda apparatus are documented, that she was not part of organised resistance, but that after the war she was repeatedly accused of adapting to the system.
• The entry in the Biografisches Lexikon der Kommunikationswissenschaft (Manuel Wendelin) reports that recent historical research (including Jörg Becker’s 2013 biography) shows her ties to the regime went beyond mere “going along”; it adds that she always rejected the accusations and that there was also a legal dispute around Becker’s book.

The debate entered the international literature too (for example Simpson’s 1996 article in the Journal of Communication).

Academically, two questions must be kept apart: Do the theory’s empirical claims hold up against data? (the earlier cards) and What does the theorist’s biography say? (historical research). One does not automatically refute or clear the other. But the biography can shed light on the question of what worldview and experience the theory was written from: Wendelin’s entry also takes these elements into account when placing the theory in terms of sociology of knowledge. This lesson only reports what the sources say; it leaves the judgement to historians.

Story

Snowden, Facebook and silent rooms

In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed US surveillance programmes. The Pew Research Center asked a question: would you talk about this issue? In a survey of 1,801 American adults (7 August–16 September 2013), 86 percent said they were willing to discuss the issue face to face. But only 42 percent of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to share the same issue on those platforms.

More interesting from the spiral’s point of view: those who thought their surroundings did not agree with them were less willing to speak; those who thought their Facebook network agreed with them were about twice as willing as those who thought otherwise. People who used Facebook every day were less inclined to voice opinions even in face-to-face settings.

Note: this survey does not prove the spiral. One issue, one moment, a declared willingness. But it is a clue that social media can change the feeling of “the majority is watching me”, and so the perception of the climate. That is, the theory’s two links (perception of the climate and willingness to speak) seem to move together online too.

We do not go into detail in this lesson; the deeper discussion of the online spiral is in the lesson Testing the Spiral of Silence, Online and Offline, and its relation to echo chambers and filter bubbles in the lesson Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers.

Myth check

“Has the internet ended silencing?”

What people assume: “Everyone can speak online; therefore the spiral of silence is over.”

The evidence is mixed:

• In Matthes and colleagues’ review the relationship is no weaker online than offline.
• In Stoycheff’s experiment (US), when users were reminded of surveillance, willingness to speak online was lower among those who thought their opinion differed from the majority; this effect was especially strong among those who found surveillance justified.
• In Turkey, in a survey of 404 Facebook users in İstanbul (Kutlu, 2019), among those who thought their political opinion was in the minority, positive relationships were found with frequently changing privacy settings, holding back from commenting, and thinking they could express their political thoughts more easily than in real life. So both holding back and freer expression are present together.

In short: the internet did not abolish the spiral; it changed the stage, the audience and visibility. Who sees whom (algorithms, echo chambers, fear of surveillance) reshapes the perception of the climate. It is useful to think about this together with the network logic in the lesson The Network Society.

You can bring it to your own life too: on which topics have you paused before writing something and asked yourself “what happens if I write this?” How much does that pause resemble what the theory describes, and how much does it differ?

Card

The spiral of silence in Turkey: the book and the studies

The theory came to Turkey in two ways: translation and course books. Noelle-Neumann’s book Kamuoyu: Suskunluk Sarmalının Keşfi (“Public Opinion: The Discovery of the Spiral of Silence”) came out in Murat Özkök’s translation from Dost Kitabevi in 1998. In course books, Yaylagül and Polat present the theory.

Two examples on the research side:

• Kutlu (2019): A survey of 404 Facebook users living in İstanbul (snowball sampling). Positive relationships were found between thinking one’s political opinion is in the minority and frequently changing privacy settings, holding back from commenting, and thinking one can express political thoughts more easily than in real life. The author concludes that a spiral of silence has formed on Facebook. Because a snowball sample is not representative, the result does not mean “this is how Turkey is”.
• Özer and Yıldıran Önk (2021): A critical discourse analysis of the Cumhuriyet newspaper’s reports on Cem Karaca’s stripping of citizenship and his return. In the next card.

Özer and Yıldıran Önk also note that there are few academic studies on this theory in the Turkish communication literature. So this field is still an open field of work for you. A comparison is instructive too: Kutlu examines individuals’ declarations, Özer and Yıldıran Önk examine newspaper texts; the same theory is tested with very different data.

Story

One newspaper, two periods: the Cem Karaca reports

Cem Karaca, one of the key names of Anatolian rock, was also known for his left-wing political stance. Legal proceedings had been started against him on the allegation of making communist propaganda in his songs; he was abroad when the 12 September 1980 military coup happened. He was summoned back to complete the trial, refused, and in 1983 was stripped of Turkish citizenship. In 1987, in the political climate that softened during the Motherland Party (ANAP) era, he was able to return to Turkey.

Özer and Yıldıran Önk examined the reports of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, which presents itself as oppositional, on both events. According to their findings, although the tone of the reports differed between the two periods, both were in line with the official discourse; according to the authors, this shows agreement with the dominant view and therefore the existence of a spiral of silence.

Now it is time for critical thinking. The spiral rests on social fear of isolation. The legal bans and censorship of the coup period could produce a similar result. A newspaper writing in line with the dominant view does not by itself tell these two explanations apart. The authors themselves say that the repressive regime of the 1980s overlaps with the theory. (This paragraph is not a criticism of the study but a general question to ask when applying the theory to real events: a similar outcome does not mean the same mechanism.)

What do you say: does this study show the spiral, or does it only paint a picture that is consistent with the spiral?

Card

This is how exams ask it

In university exam-style questions, the patterns are these. Knowing the answer is not enough; you must also recognise the trap options:

• Who developed the theory? Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (German). Traps: Asch (experiment, background), Gerbner (cultivation), McCombs–Shaw (agenda-setting), Lazarsfeld (Noelle-Neumann’s scientific model, but not the theory’s owner).
• What is the engine? Fear of isolation (in Turkish “dışlanma korkusu”, also “izolasyon korkusu”). Traps: the power of the media, cognitive dissonance, selective perception.
• Case example? The 1965 German election and the “last-minute swing”. Polat’s text gives this as its case example (section 10.2.1). Some foreign textbooks open the chapter with the 1980 US election instead; that is a trap.
• The five assumptions: threat, constant fear, probing the climate, affecting behaviour, combination.
• Terms: climate of opinion, hard core, avant-garde, quasi-statistical sense, last-minute swing.
• Dates: 1965 (election), 1974 (article), 1980 (German book), 1984 (English), 1998 (Turkish translation).

Different names in the books: The Turkish course books do not all use one name. In Polat’s book the unit title is “Sihirli Mermi ve Sessizlik Sarmalı” (“Magic Bullet and the Silence Spiral”) and the text says “sessizlik sarmalı”, while “Sessizlik Kuramı” (“Silence Theory”) appears among the key concepts; the section title, however, is “Suskunluk Sarmalı Kuramı” (“Silence Spiral Theory”). Yaylagül says “Suskunluk Sarmalı”. (“Sessizlik” and “suskunluk” are two Turkish words for “silence”.) All are the same theory; however it is named in an exam, remember Noelle-Neumann. In this lesson, for consistency, we use “spiral of silence” throughout.

Two common mistakes: confusing the bandwagon effect (joining the winner) with the spiral; confusing agenda-setting with the spiral (agenda-setting influences what we think about, the spiral which opinion seems speakable).

Lab

Mixed-up pairs: who, what, when?

Mixing up the name and date pairs in this lesson is a common mistake. Ask yourself:

• Noelle-Neumann ↔ the 1974 Journal of Communication article, the 1980 German book, the 1984 English edition.
• Asch ↔ the 1950s line (conformity) experiments; not part of the theory but its background.
• Glynn, Hayes and Shanahan ↔ the 1997 meta-analysis.
• Scheufele and Moy ↔ the 2000 conceptual review (“Twenty-five years of the spiral of silence”).
• Allensbach ↔ the institute Noelle-Neumann founded with her husband in 1947.

Two memory techniques: (1) Order of roles: Asch ran the experiment, Noelle-Neumann built the theory, Glynn and colleagues pooled the studies on the theory, Scheufele and Moy assessed the whole. (2) Order of years: 74–80–84 (article, German book, English book) and 97–2000 (meta-analysis, conceptual review).

The natural question form of this card in an exam is: “Which of the following is NOT part of Noelle-Neumann’s theory?” The answer is often a detail belonging to Asch or a concept from another theory.

Test yourself: match the description on the right to the left. Don’t move on without solving the question below once more; especially tell Asch apart from Noelle-Neumann, and Glynn from Scheufele.

Summary

Summary card

• Puzzle: In the 1965 German election, while voting intention stayed steady for months, the expectation of “who will win?” shifted and the votes in the end shifted the same way.
• Theory: People sense which opinion is gaining strength; those who think they are in the minority fall silent out of fear of isolation; this visibility gap accelerates like a spiral.
• Concepts: fear of isolation, quasi-statistical sense, climate of opinion, willingness to speak out, hard core, avant-garde.
• Assumptions: threat, constant fear, probing the climate, affecting behaviour, combination.
• Evidence: the 1965 and 1972 election observations; the train test; Asch in the background.
• Criticism: fear was not measured, an imaginary test, the immediate circle; in meta-analyses a small but consistent effect.
• Today: the relationship persists online too; perceived surveillance and echo chambers shape the perception of the climate.
• Exam: the 1965 German election, the 1974 article, the 1980 German and 1984 English books, the five assumptions.

In one sentence: The spiral of silence says that because people voice or hide their opinions on the basis of the climate around them, an opinion’s appearance in the public sphere can drift away from its real strength, and this can turn into a self-amplifying loop.

Next: Testing the Spiral of Silence, Online and Offline and Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers.