Outline: Public Opinion

Amal El Yahcoubi
Com 4310 Public Relations
Dr. Ibahrine

Chapter4: Public Opinion

I. What is Public Opinion?
“It is the aggregate of many individual opinions on a particular issue that affects a group of people”

II. What are Attitudes?
Attitudes are based on a number of characteristics:
Personal
Cultural
Educational
Familial
Religious
Social class
Race

III. How are Attitudes Influenced?
-Strictly speaking, attitudes are positive, negative, or nonexistent.
-A person is for something, against it, or neutral.

IV. Motivating Attitude Change:
-Maslow postulated a five-level hierarchy that helps define the origins of motivation:
The lowest order is physiological needs
The second level is safety needs
The third level is love needs
The fourth level is esteem
The highest order is self-actualization

V. Power of Persuasion
“According to classic persuasion theory, people may be f two minds in order to be persuaded to believe in a particular position”:
- “Systemeyic” mode
- “Heuristic” mode.

What kinds of “evidence” will persuade?
Facts
Emotions
Personalizing
Appealing to “you”

VI. Influencing Public Opinion:
- Opinion is highly sensitive to important events
-Opinion is generally determined more by events that by words, unless those words are themselves interpreted as an event
-Ay critical times, people become more sensitive to the adequacy of their leadership.
-Once self-interest is involved, opinions are slow t change
-People have more opinions and are able to form opinions more easily on goals than on methods to reach those goals
-By and large, if people in a democracy are provided with educational opportunities and ready access to information, public opinion reveals a hard headed common sense.

VII. Polishing the Corporate Image:
Most organizations today understand:
- Corporate image is a fragil commodity
-To improve the image they must operate with the “implicit trust”

VIII. Managing Reputation:
Its value to an organization is indisputable.