What are the mechanisms by which groups with certain opinions gain public voice and force others holding a different view into silence? And how does social media play into this? Drawing on recent neuro-scientific insights into the processing of social feedback, we develop a theoretical model that allows to address these questions. The model captures phenomena described by spiral of silence theory of public opinion, provides a mechanism-based foundation for it, and allows in this way more general insight into how different group structures relate to different regimes of collective opinion expression. Even strong majorities can be forced into silence if a minority acts as a cohesive whole. The proposed framework of social feedback theory (SFT) highlights the need for sociological theorising to understand the societal-level implications of findings in social and cognitive neuroscience.

中文翻译：

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大脑中的社会反馈处理如何塑造社交媒体时代的集体意见过程

持有特定观点的群体通过什么机制获得公众声音并迫使持有不同观点的其他人保持沉默？社交媒体如何发挥作用？利用最近对社会反馈处理的神经科学见解，我们开发了一个理论模型来解决这些问题。该模型捕捉了舆论沉默螺旋理论所描述的现象，为其提供了基于机制的基础，并以这种方式允许更一般地了解不同的群体结构如何与不同的集体意见表达制度相关。如果少数人作为一个有凝聚力的整体，即使是强大的多数人也可能被迫沉默。