Perceptions of Morality as a Pre-Requisite for Spiral of Silence Effects

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Jule Scheper, who again highlights both the Spiral of Silence theory, but also the limited effects of such dynamics that have been observed empirically. Under what circumstances, then, might there be more significant effects? The present paper explores this for health communication in the context of COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

Perceptions of being in a minority negatively affect people’s willingness to public express their opinions. Further, the present project assumes that the higher the morality of the topic, the stronger the silencing effect; but also, the greater a person’s interest in the topic, the weaker the silencing effect. Additionally, people’s self-confidence and opinion certainty might also lessen the silencing effect.

The project conducted an online experiment in July 2021, which assessed participants’ pre-existing attitudes and then asked them to imagine a social situation in which they were confronted with opinions on COVID-19 mitigation measures that did or did not align with their personal views, and asked them whether they would be willing to speak out in such a situation. The results were broadly as expected, but willingness to speak out publicly was significant greater when there was a high perception of morality and people felt in the majority. However, personal interest, self-confidence, and opinion certainty did not show any effects.

This may explain the lack of Spiral of Silence effects in a great many cases: perceptions of the high morality of a topic appear to be a pre-requisite of substantial Spiral of Silence effects.