{"id":6897,"date":"2011-11-02T16:15:38","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T23:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=6897"},"modified":"2011-11-02T16:15:38","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T23:15:38","slug":"the-emperors-new-clothes-breaking-the-spiral-of-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/the-emperors-new-clothes-breaking-the-spiral-of-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Emperor’s New Clothes, Breaking the Spiral of Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chuck<\/a>
Chuck Colson<\/figcaption><\/figure> by Chuck Colson –
\nInspired by Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s \u201cThe Emperor\u2019s New Clothes,\u201d researchers Rob Willer, Ko Kuwabara and Michael Macy devised a set of ingenious experiments that showed how distressingly easy it is to make people go against what they believe to be true.<\/p>\n

One of the experiments involved wine-tasting, in which participants evaluate both the wine and one another\u2019s wine-tasting skills. The participants were given three samples of wine. In reality, all three samples were from the same bottle. One had even been tainted with vinegar!<\/p>\n

Before they delivered their evaluation, they listened to other participants, who were plants, who praised the vinegar-laced wine as the best. Half of the participants went against their own taste buds and joined in praising the vinegary concoction. <\/p>\n

Even more interesting is what happened next. Another participant, who was also a plant, told the truth about the wines. But when it came time for the participants to evaluate each other, some of them were permitted to do so confidentially, and the others had to do so publicly.<\/p>\n

The ones who gave their evaluations confidentially praised the truth-teller. But those who had to evaluate the truth-teller publicly actually turned on him and gave him low marks.<\/p>\n

The researchers call this phenomenon \u201cfalse enforcement,\u201d which they define as \u201cthe public enforcement of a norm that is not privately endorsed.\u201d<\/p>\n

What sustains the norm isn\u2019t its popularity, much less its validity but, instead, the desire to \u201cavoid a negative social judgment from one\u2019s peers,\u201d according to the report. Important words.<\/p>\n

And the desire to \u201cavoid a negative social judgment\u201d feeds what German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the \u201cSpiral of Silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simply stated, out of a desire to avoid reprisal or isolation, people go along with what they think is the popular opinion \u2014 even if they object to that opinion personally. Instead of voicing their objections, they remain silent.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s precisely what\u2019s happening in the debate over so-called same-sex \u201cmarriage.\u201d Actually, \u201cdebate\u201d is a misnomer. There\u2019s no lack of evidence indicating that most Americans oppose it: Every time the question has been put on the ballot, voters have upheld the traditional definition of marriage.<\/p>\n

Yet to voice that private opinion in public is to be subjected to a real-life version of what happened to the wine-tasters: an almost-universal chorus of people telling you that any \u201cright-thinking\u201d person favors so-called same-sex \u201cmarriage,\u201d and that those who don\u2019t are homophobes and \u201cbigots.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result is the \u201cspiral of silence.\u201d People keep their supposedly \u201cwrong-thinking\u201d opinions to themselves, which, in turn, reinforces the impression that same-sex \u201cmarriage\u201d is inevitable.<\/p>\n

The good news is these kinds of spirals are fragile: Once exposed, they unravel. All it takes is someone like the little boy in Andersen\u2019s fable to pipe up and say, \u201cHey, the emperor has no clothes!\u201d<\/p>\n

I talk more about the spiral of silence on today\u2019s “Two-Minute Warning,” which I urge you to go watch at Colson Center.org.<\/p>\n

Folks, listen, we have got to speak up. We have got to break the spiral of silence.<\/p>\n

HT: Break Point<\/a> (read full article)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Chuck Colson – Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s \u201cThe Emperor\u2019s New Clothes,\u201d researchers Rob Willer, Ko Kuwabara and Michael Macy devised a set of ingenious experiments that showed how distressingly easy it is to make people go against what they believe to be true. One of the experiments involved wine-tasting, in which participants evaluate … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,43,15,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-family","category-moral-issues","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}