Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In contemporary usage, public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by a population (e.g., a city, state, or country), while consumer opinion is the similar aggregate collected as part of marketing research (e.g., opinions of users of a particular product or service).
Courtesy bias, the tendency to give an opinion that is more socially correct than one's true opinion, so as to avoid offending anyone. [ 136 ] Groupthink , the psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.
The term "public opinion" was derived from the French opinion publique, which was first used in 1588 by Michel de Montaigne, one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, in the second edition of his famous Essays (ch. XXII). [2] The French term also appears in the 1761 work Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election), is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or ...
The president-elect's housing policy is hard to predict, but California could be disproportionately affected by his proposal to open up federal land to development.
This is especially problematic when there are complex or multiple issues involved. Establishing consensus requires expressing that opinion in terms other than a choice between discrete options, and expanding the reasoning behind it, addressing the points that others have left, until all come to a mutually agreeable solution.
The Middle East is an artificial construct created by British and French diplomats after World War I, and the recent collapse of Syria has led to calls for the region to be divided according to ...
Joel Kotkin is a contributing writer to Opinion, the presidential fellow for urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin.