Fear of Social Isolation: Testing an Assumption from the Spiral of Silence

Abstract

An untested assumption of the Spiral of Silence has been whether people’s fear of social isolation affects their willingness to voice their opinions in public, especially if their opinions are in the minority. It has also been unclear whether this should be antecedent to opinion formation or intervening between opinions and willingness to voice the opinions. This study is intended to explicate and operationalize fear of social isolation and, through the use of path analysis, to determine whether it is more logically antecedent or intervening. The results were mixed, with limited support for the Spiral of Silence theory. The path diagrams show that fear of negative evaluation (the operationalization of fear of social isolation) is negatively related to the individual’s opinion, whether the concept is antecedent or intervening. But the fear variable is not related to willingness to voice one’s opinion, suggesting that it may not therefore be an intervening variable.