Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts

Of any public event that has wide effects, we see at best only a phase and an aspect. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe.

For the most part, we do not first see and then define, instead we define first and then see. We imagine most things before we experience them, and those preconceptions govern deeply the whole process of perception. We pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock images.

The identical story is not the same story to all who hear it. Each will enter it at a slightly different point, since no two experiences are exactly alike; he will reenact it in his own way, and transfuse it with his own feelings. The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications, according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the individual, his facilities, his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on the board in any of the games of life that he is playing.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by him or given to him. The way in which the world is imagined at any particular moment determines what men will do. It determines their efforts, their feelings, and their hopes. The only feeling that anyone can have about an event they do not experience is the feeling aroused by their mental image of that event.

The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment.

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.

Our public opinion is in intermittent contact with complexes of all sorts; with ambition and economic interest, personal animosity, racial prejudice, class feeling and what not. The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine. We have to summarize and generalize. We have to pick out samples, and treat them as typical.

Opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, a National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose.