A national quantitative survey revealed Americans’ private opinions about sensitive topics from a representative sample of 3,334 American adults. It estimates the gap between Americans’ privately held beliefs and their publicly vocalized opinions. It was conducted by the Boston-based think tank Populace, powered by the research data company YouGov.
American’s private opinions were contrasted against their public opinions on the same sensitive topics by comparing list experience results to those obtained by traditional public opinion polling methods. See full report for a detailed methodological description of list experiments.
Key findings
An overwhelming majority of Americans do not want CEOs taking public stances on controversial social issues.
Only 14% of Americans privately agree that CEOs should take such stances, although twice as many people will say that they support it publicly. Importantly, this view holds broadly in society: there is no demographic where a majority wants CEOs taking public stances on controversial issues.
Everyone is feeling social pressure.
The pressure to misrepresent our private views — to offer answers on politically and socially sensitive questions that are out of sync with our true beliefs — is pervasive in society today. Across all demographics every subgroup had multiple issues with at least a double-digit gap between public and private opinion.
Key excerpts
Social pressure to have the “right” opinion is pervasive in America today. In recent years, polls have consistently found that most Americans, across all demographics, feel they cannot share their honest opinions in public for fear of offending others or incurring retribution. This trend is concerning because of the threat that it poses to individual freedoms, community flourishing, and democratic self-government.
One important, but underappreciated, consequence of a culture of censorship is that it can lead individuals not only to self silence, but also publicly misrepresent their own private views (what scholars call preference falsification). It is essential to understand the extent to which people are misrepresenting their views today, because when preference falsification becomes widespread in a society it can result in collective illusions that drive false polarization, erode trust, and hold back social progress.
In revealing the private opinions of the American public across a range of sensitive topics, and surfacing areas where the misrepresentation of private views has established a false consensus in the public narrative, this report aims to contribute to more open and honest political and social discourse.
