The Spiral of Silence

It happens every so often. The atmosphere is relaxed, we’re within a small group of people, including friends and acquaintances. Theoreteically, everything is set up for an easy conversation where each and everyone expresses their views about a topic. But that one day, I am not talking. I am not expressing myself, because there is more to gain by censoring my arguments to hear the others’. Sometimes, I encounter individuals who truly stand out, with a mixture of expertise and charisma, and communicate their trains of thought with unparalleled grandeur. This has happened to me a few times already, and as every social scientist having found interest in their field, I have wondered whether there was a pattern somewhere, whether it was a logical reaction to certain stimuli.

Having studied a bachelor of communication, and a master of political communication, I have become acustomed to public opinion theories, the various ways in which people receive and interpret messages, whether persuasive or not, and the potential effects at work during these situations. So I started to wonder whether a certain form of spiral of silence was occuring in my situation. The Spiral of Silence theory was originally defined by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1974¹. Noelle-Neumann asserted that in public settings, some people might prefer to censor themselves because they sense that the majority of the group holds an opposite view. Concretely, imagine a group of friends discussing politics at a bar. One of them is a Clinton supporter but realizes that the other five people are in fact Trump sympathizers. Instead of entering an argument that could potentially become conflicting and result in isolation, the Clinton supporter might choose not to express herself or himself.

Why does it happen?

According to Noelle-Neumann it can occur because of:

1. Fear of isolation
2. Fear of reprisal

Just like I illustrated it earlier, the main threat for people experiencing the spiral of silence is exclusion, or more precisely their perceived potential exclusion. It is key to understand this difference as we often anticipate certain reactions from peers and their implications as more aggravating as they might be. This is a natural risk-aversion reaction where as humans, we attempt to minimize hurt, physical and psychological. People’s general self-confidence, the way in which they perceive the majority of opinions (rather than how opinions are actually distributed), or their perception of the future climate of opinions are all elements that will play a role in whether someone decides to voice out an opinion or not.

Cultural Capital

While it is rather straightforward to understand indicators such as one’s fear of isolation and their perceived opinion majority as predictive of the spiral of silence, I t believe that there are situations in which a more complex, intangible concept is at work. To get back to my inital story, I might fear isolation in a certain way because I find the expertise and quality of my friend’s argument superior to mine and would therefore appear ignorant on the topic, changing others’ opinion of me for the worse. However, I think that it can also be more complex. Some people might enjoy a certain “potential” to voice out their opinions on certain topics simply because they grew up in a certain setting that predisposed them to act in such a way.

This is something that most sociologists would agree with and that communication theorists will not reject, despite not solely focusing on it. Primary socialization, the social process of childhood during which children are making sense of the world and of their social encounters, is a definitive game changer in regards to a person’s personality. The renown French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose legacy has profoundly impacted the field of sociology, talks of different forms of capital (e.g. economic capital, social capital and cultural capital) to make sense of human relations. He argues that for culutural capital, another layer consisting of institutional, objectified and embodied capital coexist. These sub categories can be traded for one another in various way.

Objectified cultural capital

This is the most tangible type of cultural capital, consisting of material posessions that pertain to a higher cultural capital. For instance, the amount of books in a house, classical instruments and maybe paintings are possible indicators that differentiate certain groups of people with varying levels of capital.

Institutional cultural capital

In this case, Bourdieu talks about the important role of the educational system in asserting one’s cultural capital. The school and the university act as respected agents who distribute the symbolic piece of paper that is recognized as a degree and confers to its owner a certain cultural capital. In short, someone with a PhD will often be distinguishing herself from another person with a masters and a third with a bachelor.

Embodied cultural capital

This third and more complex form of capital is the one that is the least tangible yet the most interesting of the three. Embodied capital can be seen as a natural continuation of the habitus, a fundamental concept of the sociology of Bourdieu. He himself described it as

a set of internal dispositions and attitudes derived from social class that provide an orientation to the world and ultimately shape one’s expectations and aspirations²

Habitus is vague because it is complex. It is improtant to understand that it derives from primary socialization, as it is when a child’s earlier “internal dispositions” are created, reflecting the social class from which she or he might come from. Imagine how the child of a working class family might develop a taste for activities such as watching the local football team on sunday night while the son of a minister might be used to visit the latest art exhibitions on that same day. Both children will develop their cultural capital in a different way, and we could argue that our society paints one of the two scenarios as more valuable.

Embodied cultural capital is therefore shaped across a person’s childhood through primary socialization but also potentially during their secondary socialization, when they are young adults. While at university for instance, they will be exposed to a new set of cultural values, often diverging from their own, and exposed to a wider array of opinions about various topics. This might influence one’s personal cultural capital more or less depending on the specific conditions.

At the same time, society values certain skills as “superior” to others. If you look at political debates, you notice that most of the politicians express themselves in an eloquent, rhetorical way that makes them stand out from the citizenry. Whether their ideas and proposals are more fit to improve society is definitely not always the case but their capacity to express themselves using the language of power is at least a defining factor. The vocabulary used in parliament is, for instance, an exclusionary one, as it isolates those who cannot speak in such a manner from politics. In the same vein, a more concrete and worrying example is that of education. When entering high school, some children have been equipped better than others to express their ideas and speak in the way teachers expect them to. Bourdieu paid particular attention to this specific pattern and defined it as symbolic violence

In the long term, we can imagine that a person that was lucky enough to grow up in a family that mirrors the uses and habits of the higher class will be predisposed to fit into it in a more natural way. Malin Sveningsson, a professor at the University of Gothenburg researching political participation, realized that her respondents valued skills such as being knowledgeable and passionate about the polity, as well as being intelligible and good orators to assert their status³. This set of necessary skills identified by the young Swedes relates to the prestige that, according to Bourdieu, derives from one’s cultural capital. The same group of young people believed that they “would not have what it takes” to express themselves in the same context. Symbolic violence at work.

Does Cultural Capital Predict the Spiral of Silence?

So there it is, in a nutshell, the reason why I decided to investigate this within my master thesis. There were some more distinctions to be taken into account while talking about cultural capital (e.g. cultural taste vs. cultural participation, highbrow vs. lowbrow culture) but the essence of the reflection has been presented above. But did I find something? Well, as often in social sciences, I did find some encouraging things. It seems that there is indeed a certain predisposition for those participating in lowbrow activities such as attending football and basketball games to believe that their voice matters and ultimately to express themselves. It is counterintuitive as I would have expected the ones participating in more classical forms of culture such as the opera to believe they had a greater say and to express themselves more freely. Clearly, the last few years have to be taken into account with an increasingly polarized US electorate, the rise of social networks and filter bubbles and many other media effects that deserve additional attention.

And for those brave enough, or simply the fools, you can also view the whole thesis here