VALIDATING THE WILLINGNESS TO SELF-CENSOR SCALE: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN THE EFFECT OF THE CLIMATE OF OPINION ON OPINION EXPRESSION

Hayes, Glynn, and Shanahan (2005) defined self-censorship as the withholding of one’s opinion around an audience perceived to disagree with that opinion. They argued that people differ in their willingness to self-censor and introduced an 8-item self-report instrument, the Willingness to Self-Censor scale, to measure this individual difference. The results of an experimental study presented here provide further evidence of the construct validity of the scale. Each participant in the study was presented with a hypothetical scenario that contained information suggesting a group of people the participant was conversing with about a controversial topic held opinions that were either uniformly similar to or different from the participant’s own opinion. Four weeks prior, each participant had responded to the Willingness to Self-Censor scale and a measure of dispositional shyness. As expected, the manipulation of the climate of opinion affected willingness to express an opinion to the group, but more so among those who scored relatively high on the Willingness to Self-Censor scale. These results support the notion that some people rely on information about the climate of opinion more so than do others when they decide whether or not to voice their opinion publicly, and they suggest that the Willingness to Self-Censor scale measures this individual difference. After more than 30 years, Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence theory (NoelleNeumann, 1974, 1993) continues to motivate research and debate about the dynamics of public opinion evolution, the role of the social context in our decisions to express opinions publicly, and the pros and cons of self-censorship over This article was first submitted to IJPOR June 1, 2004. Upon reviewers’ advice, it was split in two, both received October 14, 2004, and then accepted. This is the second of the two. 444 I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P U B L I C O P I N I O N R E S E A R C H self-expression. Some argue that the theory is overly simplistic, in that it fails to acknowledge the multitude of factors that influence a person’s choice to express an opinion or remain silent (e.g. Price & Allen, 1990; Salmon & Kline, 1985). Furthermore, a meta-analysis of survey studies examining the relationship between perceptions of support for one’s opinion and willingness to express that opinion publicly shows that the relation is weak at best (Glynn, Hayes, & Shahanan, 1997). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that a spiral of silence can occur when social conditions are right, and the theory is and will likely continue to be one of the more influential and research inspiring theories of self-censorship in the field of public opinion. Hayes, Glynn, and Shanahan (2005) defined ‘self-censorship’ as the withholding of one’s true opinion from an audience perceived to disagree with that opinion. They distinguished self-censorship from ‘opinion expression inhibition’, defined as a more general reticence to voice an opinion publicly. Unlike general opinion expression inhibition, self-censorship requires an active consideration of the climate of opinion prior to deciding whether to speak that opinion in a public forum. Motivated by the (typically) weak relationship between perceptions of support for one’s opinion and willingness to speak out found in the spiral of silence literature (Glynn et al., 1997), Hayes et al. (2005) argue that a failure to consider individual differences in people’s willingness to self-censor may make a relationship that intuitively should be strong appear relatively weak or nonexistent. According to their argument, there exist ‘facilitators’ of silence spirals, who use information about the climate of opinion when deciding to speak an opinion, as well as ‘inhibitors’ of silence spirals, who say what they think regardless of the climate of opinion and the potential negative costs of appearing to support a minority viewpoint. By assuming that people are equally susceptible to the forces of the climate of opinion, analyses to date fail to capture what may be a more sizeable relationship between perceptions of the climate of opinion and opinion expression, at least among some people. Hayes et al. (2005) presented a case for conceptualizing willingness to selfcensor as an individual difference and introduced a self-report instrument to measure it: the Willingness to Self-Censor scale. This scale contains eight statements requiring a response on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) Likert-type scale. Example statements include ‘There have been many times when I thought others around me were wrong but I didn’t let them know’ and ‘I’d feel uncomfortable if someone asked my opinion and I knew he or she wouldn’t agree with me’. Local, statewide, and national probability samples show that the instrument yields reliable data, typically in the .7 to .8 range. They established the validity of the instrument by providing evidence that, as would be expected from theoretical arguments, self-censorers (i.e. those who score relatively high on the scale) tend to worry more about other people thinking negatively of them, are higher in public self-consciousness, are less argumentative, have relatively lower T H E W I L L I N G N E S S T O S E L F C E N S O R S C A L E 445 self-esteem, and are generally more shy or anxious about communication relative to ‘self-expressors’ (i.e. people who score relatively low on the scale). In spite of moderate to strong correlations with some of these constructs, Hayes et al. (2005) established through confirmatory factor analysis that the Willingness to SelfCensor scale yields data that are nevertheless statistically distinguishable from data resulting from the measurement of these related constructs. They propose that there is much to be gained by considering the interaction between personality and social contexts in the study of public opinion expression and suggest several lines of public opinion research that could be pursued using this measure. The evidence presented by Hayes et al. (2005) is suggestive of the construct validity of the Willingness to Self-Censor scale and therefore its potential as a public opinion research tool, but it is not compelling. Although the Willingness to Self-Censor scale predicts other individual differences and is statistically distinguishable from them, the question lingers as to whether it predicts the behavior it is intended to predict, whether it does so better in the conditions in which it should better predict that behavior, and whether it does so independently of conceptually and statistically related constructs. Furthermore, their data do not inform the question as to whether this individual difference actually moderates the relationship between the climate of opinion and opinion expression. The study reported here attempts to answer these questions. Participants in this study were presented with a hypothetical ‘train-test’ like scenario commonly used in spiral of silence research and were subsequently asked how willing they would be to express their opinion in the situation they were given. Half of the participants were given a scenario in which the climate of opinion was described as hostile to their opinion, whereas the other half were told that the climate of opinion was friendly. Four weeks prior, the participants were administered the Willingness to Self-Censor scale and a measure of dispositional shyness. The key test of construct validity is whether willingness to self-censor and the climate of opinion interact in predicting a person’s willingness to express their true opinion in this situation. If the Willingness to Self-Censor scale is measuring a person’s willingness or reticence to express his or her opinion in a hostile opinion climate, then the interaction should be consistent with the following patterns. First, the relationship between willingness to express one’s true opinion and Willingness to Self-Censor should be more negative for participants assigned to the hostile climate than the friendly climate condition. That is, people who are higher in their willingness to self-censor should be less willing to express their true opinion, but this relationship should be stronger in the hostile opinion climate than in the friendly climate condition. This prediction stems from the fact that the Willingness to Self-Censor scale is explicitly designed to predict behavior in a specific situation (namely, a hostile opinion climate) and should be more predictive of behavior in that situation than in a different situation (a friendly climate). Second, the effect of the climate of opinion should be larger among those who 446 I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P U B L I C O P I N I O N R E S E A R C H score relatively higher on the Willingness to Self-Censor scale. This pattern is expected because people high on the scale should be more sensitive to the climate of opinion than people lower on the scale if it is indeed measuring something more than just general reticence to express one’s opinion regardless of the climate of opinion. Third, these patterns should exist independent of competing constructs. Finally, the interaction should be specific to Willingness to Self-Censor. There should be no similar interaction between dispositional shyness and the climate of opinion if the Willingness to Self-Censor scale is measuring something other than dispositional shyness. We pit the Willingness to Self-Censor scale against dispositional shyness in this study because it is the competing construct most strongly correlated with Willingness to Self-Censor in the data reported by Hayes et al. (2005).