Manufactured consensus
Producing the appearance that a view is generally held, through coordinated statements, selected voices, and suppression of dissent, so that the audience adopts it to avoid standing alone.
People check their views against what they believe others think, and will fall silent, or fall in line, when they believe themselves in a minority. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called it the spiral of silence. Manufactured consensus feeds the check with a false reading: the same conclusion from a dozen apparently independent sources, polls that ask the leading question, a press that carries the approved view and not the other, until the audience believes agreement is universal and keeps its doubts to itself.
Bandwagon is the appeal; this is the machine behind it. Bernays named the practice in 1947, approvingly, as "the engineering of consent," and Herman and Chomsky described its structural version in Manufacturing Consent. It is the output of front groups, message discipline, and media capture working together. Exploits Social Proof and the False Consensus Effect.
Historical examples
Bernays's essay "The Engineering of Consent" set out, as a professional method, how a campaign could plan, coordinate, and stage events and statements so that a public would come to hold a view as its own. The essay is the device's manual, written by its most candid practitioner, and is still assigned in the field.
Bernays, Edward L. "The Engineering of Consent." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (1947): 113–120. Source
Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory, developed from West German election surveys, proposed that people who believe their view is losing ground fall silent, which makes the view appear to lose further ground, and that media that misrepresent the distribution of opinion can set the spiral turning. The theory explains why manufacturing the appearance of consensus produces the reality.
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. "The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion." Journal of Communication 24, no. 2 (1974): 43–51; Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
In advertising and commerce
Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent argued that ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and ideology together filter what the commercial press carries, producing an apparent consensus on major questions without anyone censoring anything. Whatever one makes of the model, it named the structural form of the device and supplied the standard case studies.
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Find a claim that "everyone" or "all experts" agree about something. List the sources that say so. How many are independent of each other? How many are the same source repeated?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"Every economist agrees the tax will pay for itself." The three economists quoted work for the same funded institute.
What to notice. Apparent unanimity manufactured from one source; the count is the deception.
The trade press, the industry's think tank, and its association issued the same conclusion in the same week, and the paper reported "broad agreement."
What to notice. Coordinated statements from linked bodies presented as independent convergence.
Polls show most residents privately oppose the plan, but no one speaks at the meeting because each believes the others support it.
What to notice. The spiral of silence, the mechanism the device sets in motion.
Sources
- Bernays, Edward L. "The Engineering of Consent." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (1947): 113–120. doi:10.1177/000271624725000116
- Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 978-0226589367
- Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon, 1988. ISBN 978-0375714498