Now that identity politics are raging quite fiercely in many places (yes, I love understatements), there is also plenty of discussion about self-censorship on campus. Often the attention is focused primarily on conservative voices who supposedly do not dare express their opinions on a campus that is predominantly progressive. But who actually remains silent the most often? A new study by Peter Arcidiacono, Cory Dowd, and Matthew Lilley offers a surprising answer: students with more moderate views censor themselves most often.
In their study, the authors surveyed 498 undergraduate students at Duke University on eight politically and socially sensitive topics, including abortion, Black Lives Matter, gun legislation, transgender care, freedom of speech, and equality versus equity. You can already see some of the limitations in this study. It involves only students from one university. And Duke is certainly not a politically neutral environment. About 70 per cent of survey participants described themselves as far left, left, or left-leaning. Twenty per cent said that they were right of centre. Another limitation is the voluntary nature of participation in the survey.
The researchers asked not only what students thought about the themes. They also wanted to know what students thought the average Duke student felt. Which views they would still find acceptable on their ideal campus. How often they shared their own opinions and why they sometimes decided not to.
And what does it show? It is not simply the most conservative students who speak the least. Students with more moderate views most often keep their opinions to themselves. Students with strongly held views on both sides speak out far more often.
The researchers explain this partly by how important students consider a topic and how certain they are of their own opinion. Students with more extreme views consider the topics more important on average and are more certain of their position. Those with a more moderate viewpoint more often consider the topic less important or are less certain of their own judgment. It is therefore not illogical that this group subsequently thinks, ‘never mind’.
As a consequence, someone who relies on voices heard on campus might get a skewed picture of students’ opinions, since moderate opinions are harder to hear. In their conclusion, the authors note that moderate opinions are especially strongly suppressed in the discussion.
All of this can feed upon itself. When only people with strong convictions speak up, it can give the impression that everyone else in the group shares those convictions. People who don’t completely agree are even less likely to speak out afterwards. This is similar to the spiral of silence: people who feel they are in the minority are more likely to stay quiet.
But does that mean conservative voices aren’t heard less often? Not at all. Even after accounting for the pattern among moderates, the researchers find that Duke students express conservative views less often than progressive ones. And then comes the most important insight for me. They were also able to examine this within the same students. A student appears less inclined to share an opinion on a subject the more relatively conservative his or her stance is on that subject! After all, a person is often simply more than just left or right.
There are also indications that this is specifically related to the university environment. According to the researchers, students who lean to the right of centre are about four times more likely to share their political and social views outside the university with people who do not study at Duke than in the classroom. Among left-leaning students, the researchers tend to observe the opposite pattern.
The researchers also asked students which views they would still find acceptable on their ideal campus. They call this their personal Overton window. Here, too, they find an asymmetry. More progressive students, on average, appear to accept a smaller range of dissenting views. More conservative students report, on average, broader Overton windows. I suspect that some conservative thinkers will now say, “I told you so.”
But this insight goes further: self-censorship appears related to how far a person’s opinion falls outside the Overton windows of students to their political left. The researchers did not find the same relationship for the Overton windows of students standing to a person’s right.
This also shows up when students explain why they sometimes stay silent. Students on the left side mention reasons such as insecurity and nervousness relatively more often. On the right side, students more often mention fear of being socially excluded.
Another striking result: groups typically considered marginalised do not appear to remain silent more in this study. Women, Black students, and non-heterosexual students actually report less self-censorship out of fear of social exclusion. This is especially true for topics that may matter to the group in question. For instance, Black students speak out about Black Lives Matter relatively more often.
I think this study begs for more replication.