Public Opinion (book)
Public Opinion is a book by Walter Lippmann published in 1922. It is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion.[1] The detailed descriptions of the cognitive limitations people face in comprehending their sociopolitical and cultural environments, leading them to apply an evolving catalogue of general stereotypes to a complex reality, rendered Public Opinion a seminal text in the fields of media studies, political science, and social psychology.
Author
United States
English
Nonfiction
1922
Pseudo-environment[edit]
The introduction describes the human inability to interpret the world: "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance"[2] between people and their environment. Instead, people construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones."[3]
Human behavior is stimulated by the person's pseudo-environment and then is acted upon in the real world.[4] The book highlights some general implications of the interactions among one's psychology, environment, and the mass communications media.
More recent research uses the term "social constructionism" or "constructed reality" to describe what Lippmann (1922) called "pseudo-environment".
