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Stephen Garcia on popular opinion

"What we think others think greatly influences our own personal thoughts, feelings and behavior."

You knew that, right?  But here's something that you may not know.  According to Professor Garcia, "An opinion is likely to be more widely shared the more different people express it. But surprisingly, hearing one person express an opinion repeatedly also leads to the conclusion that the opinion is more widespread relative to hearing the same opinion expressed only once."

In a study recently published in The Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, Garcia and other researchers at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Virginia Tech had about 1,000 students read fake opinions on various subjects.  The studies found that an opinion is more likely to be assumed to be the majority opinion when multiple group members express their opinion. However, they also showed that hearing just one person express the same opinion multiple times had nearly the same effect on a listener's perception of the opinion being popular as hearing multiple people state the same opinion.

The researchers also found that when people have prior knowledge about where a specific group stands on an issue, they initially are able to discount the effects of repetition. However, after a time delay, an opinion repeated often enough by just one individual may cause others to believe it's true, even when they know the prevailing opinion may be contrary.

The bottom line is that we're interested in knowing what others like us think and believe.  And we often assume wide spread belief based on an insignificant amount of information. But, we need to receive that information multiple times during different occasions for it to have an effect.

Posted February 6, 2008
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