The Spiral of Silence

who are who are unfamiliar with the term. Um. It's usually you'll you'll find it kind of like a Buddhist retreat in which you go and it's usually like a woodsy environment and you and your other retreaters sit in absolute silence, usually in meditation. But the point is is

whether or not you're eating, walking, meditating, silence prevails. Okay, so it for like ten days, why not just go by yourself on a trip somewhere and then you can have as much silence as you want, because apparently the deafening silence is so maddening that a lot of people struggle with it the first couple of days, and that even in that contained environment. So can you imagine just trying to do this on your own and you're like, hey, I'll just go to San Francisco and have my own

silent retreat. You're going to break out of that. You're gonna belly up to the bar and be like, I can't, I gotta talk to someone. So you need the communal support to remain silent, to drown out the maddening thoughts. You know, this reminds me of The Leftovers. I don't know if you've been watching this or read the book upon which was based, but there's not ready there's there's a cult in the in the in the book, and in the and in the TV show, and they remain silent.

They also wear white and they smoke all the time. I'm not finished with the first season, so I don't know what their deal is yet completely, but but it's but certainly it's something to keep in mind as we go through this episode. That'd be something, you know, a smoking Buddhist silent retreat. Yeah, I mean, certainly you have monasteries. There's a long tradition of of nks taking a vow of silence in the Western tradition, So so you have the idea that there is something to be found, something

holy about silence, something therapeutic about silence. Is a is a very old concept but also something very uncomfortable about silence. And we all have had that before. We have experienced that awkward moment and conversation. And apparently this is actually like a thing that people have tried to fit into a phenomenon, right, this idea that if you are in a group, that a hush will fall over the room after about twenty minutes or so, yeah, twenty minutes after

the hour. Even is is this specific version of this which was news to me, the idea that you're hanging out with a bunch of people, it's going to suddenly be uh, you know, one twenty and everyone's going to go silent. And there's some crazy ideas for why this crazy thing could possibly be happening. And you know, this interesting thing about that is I bet that everybody listening

has experienced that. You know, you've been in a group situation, everybody's talking, chatting, and then then that hush falls over. But you probably have never set yourself, ah, it's twenty minutes after the hour. It must be because one of two crazy superstitions. Yes, now that the first one is the one that I'm I'm more into, And that's the

idea that. Okay, first of all, buy into the idea that there are angels in the world, Okay, supernatural beings that do God's will, or perhaps don't do God's will because they fall from grace and live in hell. Now it depends on which version of the story you go with, but there are angels. Maybe we can't see them, maybe we can. And they like to sing. And when they sing, their otherworldly voices are so beautiful, even if we're only hearing them with the with the the subconscious mind, it

just forces us to be silent. It just it just chills us to silence. What I love about this is that apparently they start their heavenly do wopping like twenty minutes after the hour, and that's why we would instinctively falls silence that we could hear. Are the clocks in

heaven like twenty men? It's slower than they're singing at the top of the hour, or do they they They're they're being patient, you know, waiting for us to be quiet so they can sing, and then they give up and they're like, all right, let's just start the show, right. Is there a heavenly course of angels for each time zone? How is this working. Yeah, and I never I don't know when I think of the angels, I mean, when do they have time to sing? They have a lot

of death instruction to lay out on mankind. It seems like it's a pretty busy work schedule. Why are there enough angels just to stand around in sting. I like to imagine it's the cherubic um, like fat baby angels that are doing this. Oh well, okay, I can imagine that that the bones that are in stein Mart. You know, they're like a wooden cut out with their hands underneath their their chins because the original cherubs and uh and when you really go back into the mythology, they're terrifying.

They're they're beastual human hybrids that that are there to lay waste. So and but who's to say they don't have a nice singing voice. I'm talking about the cute version here. Now, another superstition here is that because Abraham Lincoln was killed at seven twenty pm, that we again, somehow instinctively will commemorate the death of Lincoln at twenty past the hour, which this one has all sorts of wholely logic in it. And if you if I had

not heard this yesterday. If I had not read about this online yesterday, I would think you were making this up right now, because this is even crazier to me than the angel idea. Because for the angel idea to work, Okay, I have to I have to accept that there are angels. I have to buy into the supernatural and admit that their supernatural beings out there that are singing and causing people to go silent, and they're beying some sort of crazy schedule. Okay, I can buy into that on some level.

I can buy into that. But to say that Abraham Lincoln's death resonated so strongly in human culture that it causes everyone to fall silent twenty minutes after the hour every hour apparently, And and then you have to ask questions, well, then does it is it only in the in the United States? What happens if you were pro slavery? You know what happens if you're just you just don't have a good understanding of history. Or is it something so

powerful that it moves forward and backward in time. Well, that that was the thing I was going to say. In a linear way like that also supposes that before Lincoln died there was no group hush, right, Like there was just a continuum of conversation and no one ever paused. But we were coming up with a different theory here earlier, and I guess you could call it the theory, yes, because that's another twenty minute after um trope that comes up, right,

is the time to to consume cannabis? Right, And so the idea there maybe is that after the consumption, it takes about twenty minutes for the wall of stone ery to set in, in which the group hush becomes apparent. So people are actually lighting up at four as opposed to four. They lit up at four, and at four

twenty is when the crushing silence of stonerism set in. Okay, all right, I could see that that possibly being so as you think it could be the cause of the phenomenon, because another read would be that it stems from the phenomenon, like suddenly everybody's quiet, and so out of that social anxiety they light up. You know, these are just amusing,

These are mid morning musings over coffee. Probably the better explanation is that it's just a natural arc to our narratives, and maybe twenty minutes into a conversation we've kind of plumb the depths of a joke or a topic. Um. There is another explanation, however, that is called the protection postulate. Yeah,

and this one is pretty good. This one is significantly less crazy though also, uh, you know, not completely proven out, but this is the idea that you know, again, take who're going to travel back in time to primordial age.

We're out there around the fire, around the fire, yeah, and we're talking about our day at work, killing animals and foraging for food and uh, and then a hush falls over us because we have to stop and listen to for the the sound of approaching predators coming to eat us at our fire, or the the or approaching rival tribes people coming to slay us in the night. You know what, I think there may be something to that. I have to say. I think there's something to an

arc of a conversation. And I think there's something to a group falling silent as a sort of instinctive measure to gauge what's going on outside that environment, because because you know, we've all had those conversations that are so good, you're just completely wrapped up in it, and you're gonna kind of reach the height where you have to fall

down again. You have to realize that I'm just I'm standing here in the room and who's kind of awkward actually because they don't really know this person and I was just really drilling into them with my whole diet tribe of about the Ring movies or something. Yeah, and now they're crouched in a corner and the silence has

fallen over the room. I love that though. I love when the silence falls and everybody's kind of like nervously titters and there's that one person who's like, whoa ye, gotten quiet, and then they call off the awkward silence. In any case, all the silence leaves us, uh with something that feels, you know, very intimate, but sometimes very isolating.

It's like this bubble that surrounds us. And so we're going to talk about this today, this idea that within silence there's a merit to it and then there's also kind of, um, a demerit I guess you could say to it. Yeah. It kind of calls back to our episode A Splendid Isolation that we did back in the day, where we talked about how a little isolation is great, a lot of isolation not so great, you can have the same as the and we encounter a similar situation

with silence. So let's start off by discussing the merits of silence, the benefits of silence, blissful silence. Well, and we see this a lot in terms of education, people exploring the idea of silence and reflection um as tools in the classroom. And if you look at Helen E. Lee's work, she's a research fellow in educational theory at University of Stirling. She posits that classrooms silence really helps college students to consider, retain, and reflect on her lectures.

And she actually brings an egg timer into the classroom with her and sets it for three minute intervals twice during the class. And I thought about that. I was like, you know, that is actually, I think a very helpful concept because anyone who's ever been in a lecture, any sort of situation, well there's a ton of information coming at them. You can't help your but you know, listen to your brain, try to react to that information, draw

conclusions and connections. But if you're just trying to keep up with the material itself, it's hard to really let all of that coalesce. And indeed, I mean just thinking back to say, some of the World Science Festival panels that that we've attended. You know that you're you're being hit with so many great concepts in different ways of looking at history or the scientific world, and you just

need to stop and digest it. But instead you're moving on, You're rolling under the next come and you just like, I really hope that I got my notes down on that one and I can check all this later. Yeah, Philip our Golden, he's a researcher. He says, parents and teachers tell kids a hundred times a day to pay attention,

but we never teach them how. And so what some of these schools have been doing is they've been drawing on the work of John cabot Zen, who is a molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts UH, initially to help medical patients cope with chronic pain and anxiety and depression. So what you see is his mindfulness work beginning to be used in K through twelve schools here in the United States.

And the idea is that those kids have a little bit of time um to focus on what they call a design element, which is solitude and reflection. And even my kid in kindergarten does this in her classroom. But you'll see it at different levels as you go up through the grades. The degree to which some of these

kids will actually engage in mindfulness. Now, it's worth noting when we look at mindfulness and meditation some of the core health benefits that have been proven out in studies to the lowest blood pressure and it lessons agitation, which which even though that those are concepts that definitely have a role in the treatment of ailments, they also have a key role in education and reaching students, particularly students

who may be themselves agitated. Yeah, and um, this is we've kind of touched on this before, that students aren't getting educated in how to live their lives per se. That's largely left up to guardians and parents. Um, so you can't really treat a kid's depression, but you can't give them a couple of tools to work through that anxiety, say in school, and be able to focus themselves better

on schoolwork. There's something called the Mindful Life Projects, a nonprofit that's based out of Richmond, California, and it teaches mindfulness in yoga and therapeutic art and hip hop performing arts to elementary students in underserved schools and communities, and all the schools have seen drops in detention and referrals.

But in one school, eighteen kids eighteen accounted for eighty two per cent of the suspensions, and at the beginning of their mindfulness training, those kids were suspended sixty two times in the first trimester. Now after three trimesters of this mindful practice, that rate had dropped to twenty. Which think about these kids, Um, they obviously are acting out, they're they're exhibiting certain behaviors because they are agitated, because

there are some root problems going on. To know that exty two times down to twenty was the drop and just having these moments of silence and reflection is really powerful stuff. And that's just this really tiny corner of this pocket of the educational world. Yeah, I mean, certainly when you start thinking about I mean really all all ages of children, but especially middle school, high school, there's

so much angst. You know, there's so much to to distract yourself with in the in the even when you're in the classroom. That being able to just stop everything and still everything and then kind of teach in the aftermath, in the wake of that silence, that that would be incredibly beneficial. Yeah, and we've talked about how behavior has

this kind of group contagion quality to it. So if if that's the sort of thing that you're doing in the classroom, that and everybody is stilling themselves, then you began to see that positive ripple effect. Now here's another study that that consent to the use of silence in the classroom and fronment. And this just comes down to, uh, not so much the noise inside the mind mind, but

the noise outside the head and even outside the school. UH. Two thousand five study from the University of London aimed to understand the psychological impact that noise might have, and in this experiment, researcher studied children in eighty nine schools. Now, some of these schools were located next to airports, while others were not. Chill. They found that children exposed to high levels of aircraft noise had much poorer reading skills

than children in quieter neighborhoods. UH and the researchers use the term cognitive fatigue to describe why reading skills might suffer in children living in noisy environments. So in these conditions, their long term memory is interrupted and they simply stopped paying attention. So we see the importance again not only the of some inner silence, some inner peace, so you can actually digest the information coming at you can actually shut out some of the angst and take it in.

But also, you know, we're we're organisms that exists in a world of sensory bombardment. And if you can cut out some of that bombardment, if you can cut out some of the environmental noise coming at you from trains and planes and whatever, then then that can have an effect. You can take just a little bit off of the cognitive load so that you can handle some more of

the concepts. And that's kind of interesting because you can then apply that to what Felicity Miller, who is a senior lecturer in Science, Communication and Imperial College, says when it comes to people in the sciences and their intellectual progress, Because what she's saying is that there is a big initiative to enforce interaction. Yes, and we've talked about this too, and open office spaces trend all over really yeah, and you're just gonna spark and you're just gonna collaborate all

the time, and the genius will arrive. It comes from a good place because we thought we've also talked about the importance of interaction, the importance of collaboration. How the coffee houses of old were, you know, a place that sparked innovation because for drinking coffee and sharing ideas together. But you can't take that to the extreme and say, all right, we're gonna do that everywhere. Every office is going to be a coffee house of ideas, every classroom,

every laboratory. You know, you just can't it. One size is not fit all. Yeah, And that's what Mailer is saying, especially in the academic setting. And she says, hey, you have to have some sort of silence and solitude to really make all of those ideas coalesced into something meaningful. And to make her point, she says, hey, look at

Sir Isaac Newton. She said that he was a proponent of isolated working, shutting himself away in his rooms, publishing reluctantly, and restricting his audience to only those he thought capable of appreciating his work. You know, he also had cat doors so the cats could come in and out without this disrupting him will flaps another reason why he was a genius. And uh. She says that you know, if you look at physicists today, they don't quite have that level of solid two in silence, and that they do

best by striking a balance between silence and communication. And she gives a couple of other examples. Wrener Heisenberg, she says, retreated to the island of legal Land to escape hay fever and the constant chatter of his colleague and mentor, Neils Boor, who knew that that the quantum theorist with such chatter box. And she's not to be confused with Lego Land, of course, the horrible place to go and

try and work. Yes, Heligo Land isn't not Lego Land. Um. She says that it was here that Heisenberg was able to reflect on these discussions that he had with bar and laid down the basic foundation of quantum mechanics. And another great example, Peter Higgs has claimed that he would not have been able to complete his Noble prize winning

work in this current research environment. Uh. You know, he insists that the peace and quiet that he had in the sixties, Uh, in order to to actually tackle his work he just would not be able to have today.

So that's interesting to think of as well. And so the idea is that if all we're doing is engaging and engaging and engaging, which is really easy for us to do in this day and age, particularly with social media, um, then we're missing a key part of reflecting on our experiences and then the formation of new ideas with those novel associations. That we have to have that silence in that time. And you could argue that, hey, you can,

My brain doesn't when I sleep. Yeah, but as we have talked about before, we're like probably less efficient at sleep now in this day and age and we ever have been before. Yeah. Yeah, if you're falling back on sleep alone for your information processing, then you're really welking a fine line. You're gonna fall. All right, we're back. We're talking about silence and the role of silence blaze

in our lives in our world. So far, we've talked about the importance of silence when it comes to u quieting inner turmoil, quieting outer turmoil, its effects on our ability to learn in school, our ability to get things done at work, to tackle new concepts, and turn them around and and ultimately work on an inventive new concepts. But there's a different kind of silence that people experience, and and it's more in a social situation, but it

can actually color um our experiences and cultural experiences. In fact, it can color history. And what I'm talking about is the spiral of silence. This is an interesting theory that comes to us from German political science. Elizabeth Noel Newman UH developus in nineteen seventy four, and basically the idea here is that people have the tendency to remain silent when they feel that their views are in opposition to

the majority of view on a subject. And it's very interesting, of course that this comes out of Germany in nineteen seventy four, you know, definitely coming in in the wake of the Second World War, in the wake of the rise and fall of the Nazis, in the wake of the Holocaust, where you have you know, individuals inside and outside of of of the German people asking the question, know, how how could this have happened? How does how does this extreme UH take on global affairs, and how does

this become the norm? How does all of this rise to power? Right and and so this is in a way an attempt to look at that, you know, just to to say, well, you know, why why didn't people speak out when when there were these extreme opinions in their midst Why did they remain silent instead of saying, you know, that's actually a really dangerous idea. Yeah, and the the the extreme actions that in sued in This is what Newman was predicating her model on. And the

model is based on three premises. One that people have a quasi statistical organ a kind of sixth cents or the ability, I could say, the ability to read the room to figure out what the prevailing in public opinion is. Two that people have a fear of isolation and they know what behaviors will increase their likelihood of being socially isolated. And three, people are reticent to express their minority views

because of that fear of isolation. And she says that the spiral is created or reinforced when someone in the perceived opinion majority speaks out really confidently in support of the majority opinion, and then of course those in the minority kind of recede to the shadows. What I love about this the theory is that we can pretty much everybody can plug their own experiences into this, unless you're one of those individuals that I can scarcely imagine who

is always in the majority. Uh you know who is who's who has never had an opinion that differs from those around you. Um, for instance, you're you're hanging around some people you don't really know, and uh, they're talking about a movie that you really like, except they hate it. You may not feel comfortable saying, hey, actually I really like that movie because of X, Y and Z, because as you are, you're already uh um outnumbered by those

who dislike it. Yeah, And I'm sure everybody has been in a social situation situation before in which your minority view is how old and you don't necessarily want to speak out to the majority, even if you feel like what the those opinions that they're expressing are terrible, you know, because again there is this idea that the majority is there. You might be socially ostracized and you see this like from say, you know, just your cultural taste to something

as terrible as the Holocaust. As Newman was trying to figure out, like how do these what sort of models in place here to to keep people under wraps. And so I think that's why this idea or theory is so powerful, because it sure does show how people tend

to express themselves or not express themselves. And one of the perceived weaknesses of this theory is that you have minority views that are expressed like super exceedingly expressed by some members of the group, which I guess you could say would then become known to the group and then that minority view would be expressed and cancel out this idea of the spiral of silence. So that's that's one

idea here that kind of goes against the model. Another idea is that the Internet, the Great Internet, is leveling the playing field. There's all these different pockets of um opinions out there, and therefore they should all be expressed equally, right, But no, that is not the case. So that is sort of an outmoded idea of one of the criticisms leveled at the spiral of silence, because it turns out that the Internet is actually, at least in one study,

mimicking the model for the spiral of silence. You know, before we get into that, I also have to add it in my own experience when I find myself in a group that's you know, among people that are not my group. You know, Um, I'm often don't engage with them, like first, I feel like some other reasons as well, like and a lot of it comes down to, you know,

me versus other. So it's like, I know that that you guys have a different opinion on things than me, and I am not going to try and convince you because you are the other and why would I. You know, I know that I cannot convince you, and I don't want to convince you because you're basically a different species than me. You know. It's kind of it's like if I hear some people talking about how great football is. I don't particularly like football, but why am I going

to even chime in on that conversation? What's what's my possible agenda and contributing and creating some sort of artificial argument over that. This is why common ground is so incredibly important, this ability for for each of us to find that common ground. So you like wrestling, Yeah, And this is another example, like that's something that I often don't bring up. I generally don't think it up because we are going to look down on me and it's

a it's a it's a long uh. I have a hard time understanding myself why I like it so well, But I guess my point is is that I think in these conversations and the coming common ground, there there's some crossover, and so there's these opportunities for humans to understand one another, which is largely what we try to do, is to find that common ground. But when we don't, again, it's this idea that we're going to be socially ostracized.

And a lot of us don't think much about that. Okay, whatever many socially ostracized, but really think about I mean, the ability of the human species to have existed for as long as it has has largely been because of cooperation,

all right. In cooperation means finding that common ground, but also gauging what the group thinks and choosing your battles, you know, and and sometimes sometimes it is just a matter of choosing your battles and saying, why would I possibly bring up something at the dinner table that I'm going to fight with my in laws about, you know why that that would be silly? But then also they're

getting examples. Why would I bring it up if it could get me ostracized or killed, you know, and certainly there have been countless examples of that throughout history, when someone has a differing religious opinion, differing sexual orientation or gender orientation, etcetera. And that's currently at work in our modern world as well. Right, that's not just the stuff of days gone by. All Right, Let's look at this

Pew Research Center study. They wanted to see how hot button topics were being expressed on the Internet, specifically in social media. So they selected the topic of Edward Snowden revealing mass surveillance by the n s A to look at how opinions are being parsed. And the reports author said, quote, we selected the issue because other surveys at the same

time we're fielding this poll that we're fielding. This poll showed that Americans were divided over whether the n s A contractors leaks about surveillance were justified and whether the surveillance policy itself was a good or bad idea. And so the Pew Research Foundation found that one sort of a percent of people said that the release of classified information harmed public interests, by said it served public interests.

So you have a topic basically here that everybody has an opinion on So the Research Center's Internet Project found that not only were the one thousand, eight hundred one respondent's less willing to discuss the Snowden n s a story in social media than they were in person, face to face, but they also determined that average Facebook or Twitter users were especially less likely to voice their concerns during real life interactions if they felt that their friends

or their followers would not support their viewpoint. So, again, this is just one study and it's relatively small, it's one topic. It would be really interesting to see this in other areas like gun control or abortion or and many other topics that are lightning around topics um. But you do, at least in this instance, see that model at play where people do not want to be socially ostracized even though they have an opinion on this. Yeah, and then the media plays a huge ro on it.

There was another Pew study that looked at Gulf War and US support for that war, and they found that those who watched television and perceived that the public supported the war were more likely to support the war thenselves, um, which which again plays into this idea that that if you know even if we don't agree with something ourselves, if we feel like the majority is directed that way,

then that cons the way our opinion as well. Now Snowdon, I mean the thing about snow Snowdon, though, is that I feel like it at the heart of that, you do have a a difficult figure to get behind, you know, and you have these you have these different polls, like this whole topic is is is is made more complicated to just because you have such a such a polarizing

figure at the center of it. I mean, you have the personality of the individual thrown in there, you have elements of of alleged treason, you have you have you have you know, criticisms of how he handled it, and then but then you still have lots of damning evidence about the use of domestic surveillance and another repelations. Yes, Snowdon is a polarizing figure. And I'm not going to say like Snowdon and Julian Massage or apples apples because

they are not. But here you have another person who is, you know, essentially leaking secrets of governments, who is a very enigmatic character and not polarizing, but polarizing in a more of like a hero anti hero way as opposed to Snowdon is more a little bit like people aren't quite sure I think about his character, and so, um, I think maybe you bring that up because that could certainly color the results of how or why people want to express themselves about the topic. Right, Yeah, and in

the labels we end up putting on those individuals. I mean, we could go on and on just player comparing those two figures that are both problematic in their own right. But but what to do with all of this information? Well, I think it's just to consider again the nature of silence and what it's doing for us as human beings. And um, I think that Susan Santag has a great thought about it. Um. This is from her nineteen sixty nine essay The Aesthetics of Silence. She's rights, silence remains

inescapably a form of speech. So it's sort of one of those things that, yeah, sometimes we feel like and not expressing our opinion that we're removing ourselves from the situation. However, it just means that we're allowing one voice to dampen another. And as Newman tried to explore the ways in which

actions spiral out of the spiral of silence. Indeed, and you know, I wanna advise everyone day to keep this thick in mind when you listen in to our next um episode of Stuff to Build Your Mind, which we'll get into the area of Nasty Stereo, where again we're dealing with how we behave within a community, how we think within a community, and uh, it's like all things human, it gets so so complex and strange. Indeed it does,

especially with yes, yeah, all right. You can find us in a bunch of places, mainly Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right, that's the mother ship. That's where you will find every podcast episode. Occasionally we get an email or a Facebook message where someone says, hey, I was looking for this episode or uh, you know, and it doesn't seem to be on iTunes. Well, all

the episodes are at the website. So if you've ever heard us mentioned of an old an old episode you're just curious what we've covered over the years, that's where you will find all of them. And you also find videos, you'll find blog posts, and you'll find links out to our various social media accounts. And if you have some thoughts about a spiral of silence or even the arrats of silence. You can send those thoughts via email to

blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.