Public opinion is a state of mind where a certain idea that people as a whole, as a group, think together is expressed. This statement is what I set out to prove or disprove by participating in gathering information for this survey. My conclusion however is not what I expected and I believe there isn’t any simple way of explaining public opinion because the public bases its opinions on misrepresented information. As people are influenced by other people their opinion may be slightly altered however most people have a good moral understanding of their own beliefs and tend to base their opinions on those beliefs. I believe there are three things that make up a persons opinion, the first of those is political apathy, the second is personal motivation, and the third is provisional knowledge. I believe that the average middle-class American is very ostentatious towards issues that affect them everyday.
People in big groups, because of a desire to fit in, will usually tend to pretend they know what is going on even if they don’t. It’s been said that in a group of ten people having a conversation, two people are actually knowledgeable in that conversation. When it comes to political information most people won’t take the tim
Most of the information that someone gains in one day is forgotten because most people intermingle bits of all the information pertaining to a certain topic and skew it together combining it with their own opinions to create a story that doesn’t coincide with the true story. This is referred to as the telephone effect, which is study mostly in high school classrooms, where one person tells another person a story then that person has to relay the story to a third person and so on. By the twentieth person the story is nothing like the original and has become a completely new story. Psychologists study this as provisional knowledge, or knowledge that you temporarily obtain and usually distort to fit your own belief system. In everyday settings provisional knowledge is used for 60%, concentrated knowledge is used for 25%, and actual knowledge is used for 15% of a thought or an idea you may have at any given time.
In conclusion public opinion is just that an opinion. It’s hard to justify why an opinion is the way it is because we as individuals are all different and we are influenced by many different things. Bill Clinton was a great leader but was looked down upon because of his personal agenda; however people probabl
Example Essays Home
