7.3: Opinion Dynamics

Opinions, political or otherwise, shift frequently. When asked the same or similar questions at different times, we often change our answers, whether those times are months, days, hours, or even just minutes apart. Attitude change is one possible explanation for opinion change, but opinions can also vary even if the attitudes on which they are based remain constant.

This instability is rooted in human psychology. Generally, we don’t store preformed opinions in our minds. Instead, we generate opinions on demand, based on information stored in our memory. This is why you can encounter totally novel decisions—whether to try an unusual food, what to tell a friend about his or her new outfit, how impressive an artistic or athletic performance was—and make snap judgments with no preparation. You won’t always be satisfied with these snap judgments, but your ability to make them at all instead of being paralyzed with indecision demonstrates that opinion formation can be instantaneous.

When people generate opinions on the fly, they rarely consider all the relevant information in their minds. You would likely think about only a handful of reasons to approve or disapprove of the president before stating your opinion, even though you might be able to list a hundred reasons with enough time. Your attitude toward the president may consist of many factors, but only a few will influence your opinion. The salience of the information in your memory—how likely each piece of information is to come to mind—determines which factors you consider when forming an opinion. The more salient a factor, the likelier you are to consider it.

Information salience changes over time due to priming. Events and experiences can prime certain thoughts, making them temporarily easier to recall and therefore more influential on opinions. This is why Americans generally sound more patriotic if they are asked in July than if they are asked in April. In July, Americans are primed by Independence Day celebrations to think about the benefits of their citizenship. In April they are primed by the deadline for paying their income tax to think about its costs. Primes don’t necessarily change attitudes, but they do change which parts of those attitudes come to mind most readily, enough to change opinions.

Primes can be surprisingly effective at changing opinions, but it’s important to not overstate their impact. They tend to be most influential at the point of exposure, after which their potency declines rapidly. One reason for this phenomenon is that people are constantly exposed to so many primes that the effect of any one prime is quickly superseded by others, unless the initial prime is particularly powerful or repeatedly reinforced.

How opinions are solicited can influence the salience of information, thereby influencing the opinions themselves. Framing is a special category of priming which stems from how questions or issues are presented. For example, supporters of abortion often refer to “reproductive rights” when describing the issue, whereas opponents of abortion often mention “the right to life.” These expressions frame the issue of abortion by emphasizing different factors—the rights of the mother versus the rights of the child – with the goal of making those factors more salient. Most public opinion researchers try to avoid biased framing when designing survey questions. Nevertheless, unintentional framing often produces noticeable effects on opinions, even if it has no lasting impact on attitudes.

Primes and frames do not sway all people equally. The same prime or frame might impact one person strongly, a second weakly, and a third not at all. It is impossible to know from a single survey response how much primes or frames shaped that response. Still, primes and frames can influence enough people to cause substantial shifts in public opinion overall. Understanding how and in what contexts opinions are solicited is therefore crucial for interpreting public opinion data.