His profession is in a state of evolution. His future must depend as much upon the growing realization by the public of the responsibility to the public of individuals, institutions and organizations as upon the public relations counsel’s own realization of the importance of his work.
PART II
The Group and Herd
CHAPTER I
WHAT CONSTITUTES PUBLIC OPINION?
The character and origins of public opinion, the factors that make up the individual mind and the group mind must be understood if the profession of public relations counsel is to be intelligently practiced and its functions and possibilities accurately estimated. Society must understand the fundamental character of the work he is doing, if for no other reason than its own welfare.
The public relations counsel works with that vague, little-understood, indefinite material called public opinion.
Public opinion is a term describing an ill-defined, mercurial and changeable group of individual judgments. Public opinion is the aggregate result of individual opinions—now uniform, now conflicting—of the men and women who make up society or any group of society. In order to understand public opinion, one must go back to the individual who makes up the group.
The mental equipment of the average individual consists of a mass of judgments on most of the subjects which touch his daily physical or mental life. These judgments are the tools of his daily being and yet they are his judgments, not on a basis of research and logical deduction, but for the most part dogmatic expressions accepted on the authority of his parents, his teachers, his church, and of his social, his economic and other leaders.
The public relations counsel must understand the social implications of an individual’s thoughts and actions. Is it, for example, purely an accident that a man belongs to one church rather than another or to any church at all? Is it an accident that makes Boston women prefer brown eggs and New York women white eggs? What are the factors that work in favor of conversion of a man from one political party to another or from one type of food to another?
Why do certain communities resist the prohibition law—why do others abide by it? Why is it difficult to start a new party movement—or to fight cancer? Why is it difficult to fight for sex education? Why does the free trader denounce protectionism, and vice versa?