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Was Walter Lippmann interested in stereotyping? Public Opinion

and cognitive social psychology

Article  in  History of Psychology · March 2009

DOI: 10.1037/a0015230 · Source: PubMed

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History of Psychology © 2009 American Psychological Association
2009, Vol. 12, No. 1, 7–18 1093-4510/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0015230

WAS WALTER LIPPMANN INTERESTED

IN STEREOTYPING?:
Public Opinion and Cognitive Social Psychology
Leonard S. Newman
Syracuse University

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion is much cited but little read. A review of
references to Public Opinion by social psychologists over the last 20 years reveals
the widespread beliefs that (1) the book focuses primarily on group stereotypes and
prejudice, and (2) the concept of stereotyping originated with Lippmann. However,
stereotypes, as currently conceived—as opposed to schemata more generally— do
not play a central role in the book, and Lippmann did not introduce the concept
(although he may have broadened it). In addition, throughout his long and distin-
guished career, he showed little interest in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimina-
tion. Nonetheless, Public Opinion is a seminal work in the area of cognitive social
psychology and (like other little read citation classics) still deserves to be
read—including, ironically, by students of stereotyping and prejudice.

Keywords: stereotyping, cognitive social psychology, Walter Lippmann

All social scientists want their work to be read and cited. More to the point,
they want their work to influence others’ thinking and research. Most, however,
will never produce a paper or book so widely recognized that it merits being
identified as a “citation classic.” Although some sources arbitrarily specify 400
references as being a magic number, there are no hard and fast criteria for
identifying a publication as a citation classic (Garfield, 1989). By any standard,
though, Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion (Lippmann, 1922) makes the
grade. In July of 2007, a cited reference search of the Social Science Citation
Index on the Web of Knowledge revealed over 700 references to it. That number
will come as no surprise to most students of social interaction, especially those
familiar with the literature on stereotyping and prejudice (Fiske, 1998; Schneider,
2005).
In this paper, I will argue that the way in which Public Opinion is cited has
created a curiously distorted impression of the actual contents of the book (and of
Lippmann himself). Furthermore, I discuss why this is unfortunate, because
Public Opinion (like other citation classics that have been boiled down to stock
phrases but are rarely read) is still a rich source of ideas.

Leonard S. Newman, Department of Psychology, Syracuse University.

Thanks to Aaron Rudnicki and Will Hernandez for help with the literature search. A version of this
paper was presented as part of a symposium (“‘It ain’t necessarily so’: Revisiting some of social
psychology’s citation classics”) at the 2003 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Leonard Newman, Department of
Psychology, Syracuse University, 430 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-2340. E-mail:
lsnewman@syr.edu

7
8 NEWMAN

Often Cited, Rarely Read

According to legend, New York Yankees baseball great Yogi Berra, when
asked if he wanted to eat at a particular restaurant, replied “Nobody goes there
anymore, it’s too crowded.” One could arguably make a similar comment about
many citation classics: Nobody reads them anymore, they are cited too much. At
the very least, it is often the case that the extent to which they are cited
dramatically overestimates the extent to which they are actually read. Because
these books and papers are citation classics, virtually everyone knows what they
say. In addition, what everyone knows can be—and often is— boiled down to a
pithy phrase or slogan. The text of Mischel’s (1968) Personality and Assessment
runs to 300 pages, but “traits do not predict behavior well” does the trick for most
people. Arendt’s (1963) book Eichmann in Jerusalem is a sophisticated analysis
of the nature of evil, but the phrase “the banality of evil” is all most people
remember or mention. As for Public Opinion, no one needs to plow through its 28
chapters to know that Lippmann introduced the idea that social stereotypes
(national, ethnic, racial, etc.) are important mental representations, and that he
memorably referred to them as “pictures in our heads.”
Unfortunately, these slogans, because of their brevity, can be ambiguous. As
a result, their meanings can become distorted over time. Thus, Mischel’s (1968)
argument has been paraphrased as being that people have “no personalities”
(Goldberg, 1993, p. 26), although it would be hard to argue that is an accurate
summation of his thinking (Shadel & Cervone, 1993). Indeed, Mischel’s subse-
quent career and work are a testament to his deep interest in personality dynamics
and coherence (Mishel & Shoda, 1995, 1998). In addition, summaries of Hanna
Arendt’s (1963) analysis of Adolph Eichmann in secondary sources typically
claim that she portrayed Eichmann (the general manager of the Nazis’ Final
Solution of the “Jewish problem”) as a boring and passive person, an uninspired
bureaucrat who simply followed orders. In fact, Arendt never argued that Eich-
mann was a dull human being who only did what he was told; much of the book
recounts the enthusiasm with which he rounded up his victims. Her point was that
the motives for his behavior (e.g., ambition, vanity) were banal (Newman, 2006).
(See also Harris [1979] on wildly distorted summaries of Watson and Rayner’s
[1920] “Little Albert” study.)
In summary, citation classics are often reduced to misleading phrases and
slogans, which can then take on lives of their own. That is doubly unfortunate.
First of all, and as just discussed, these books and papers can then more easily be
called upon to buttress arguments that they do not actually support. In addition,
scientific and scholarly works become classics not because they can be boiled
down to ambiguous sentence-long messages, but because they are packed with
novel, provocative ideas that can inspire other scholars and researchers. Mischel’s
(1968) book has more to offer than skepticism about the utility of broad trait
constructs; his call for an analysis of personality based on underlying processing
dynamics inspired the development of subsequent social– cognitive personality
models (e.g., Cervone, 2004). Similarly, Arendt’s (1963) book is more than an
illustration of how mundane people can do terrible things; she implicitly devel-
oped an interactionist approach to evil before such analyses were common in
 WALTER LIPPMANN AND STEREOTYPING 9

personality psychology (Newman, 2006). However, these works cannot play a

role in the germination of new ideas if they are not read.
How Public Opinion Is Cited
Public Opinion has been of interest to a wide range of social scientists, and for
different reasons. What aspects of the book have been most salient for social
psychologists? In April of 2007 the Social Science Citation Index on the Web of
Knowledge was used to search for all articles in a group of major social psychology
journals and periodicals that cited Public Opinion since 1987 (i.e., over the previous
20 years). The publication outlets selected (including all of social psychology’s
highest impact journals) were Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Basic
and Applied Social Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, European
Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Journal of Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Person-
ality and Social Psychology Review, Social Cognition, and Social Psychology Quar-
terly. Needless to say, this procedure was not meant to yield a comprehensive list of
all of Public Opinion’s citations. The intent was only to identify a list of references
that would represent what most social psychologists have written about Lippmann’s
book in mainstream social psychology journals in recent decades, and what most
graduate and undergraduate students would learn about it from those journals.
Overall, 49 references were found.1,2 Over and above the details about how
the book was cited, the most important point to emphasize is that almost every
single citation was in a paper on the topic of group stereotyping or prejudice. The
number of exceptions to that rule was two (Krosnick, 1988; Strange & Leung,
1999).
More specifically, what did these papers say about Lippmann? Thirteen
papers either directly or implicitly identified Lippmann as either the first serious
student of stereotyping (or “father of the concept of stereotypes”) or the person
who “introduced” the term. Nine cited Lippmann’s memorable phrase “pictures in
our heads,” which he used to describe stereotypes. Twelve gave him credit for
discussing the idea that stereotypes are energy-saving devices that simplify
reality, help people manage complexity, and allow for more efficient categoriza-
tion of people. Ten cited his claim that stereotypes were rigid and/or lead to both
overgeneralizations and faulty reasoning about people. Five cited Lippmann’s
discussion of how categorization processes underlie stereotyping and prejudice,
with three more specifically focusing on Lippmann’s claim that stereotypes affect
how we perceive others’ behavior. Moreover, four others mentioned Lippmann’s
discussion of stereotypes’ defensive functions. (Note that the numbers do not add
up to 49 because authors of a few papers made more than one comment about the
book).
What these data demonstrate is that it would be reasonable for anyone reading
the social psychology literature over the last 20 years or so to conclude that (1)

1
A complete list is available from the author by request.
2
The first few volumes of one of the target journals, Personality and Social Psychology
Review, were not covered by the citation index. However, one citation of Public Opinion in that
journal during that period, discovered serendipitously, has been included.
10 NEWMAN

Lippmann’s book focused heavily on group (racial, ethnic, national) stereotyping,

and (2) Lippmann was the first to use the term stereotype— or at least the first to
use it to refer to something other than a printing process developed in the late 18th
century. As discussed by Ashmore and Del Boca (1981; see also Jones, 1977) in
a review of the history of stereotyping research, that was the original meaning of
the term. Nevertheless, Lippmann, apparently, was the first to extend its meaning.
In fact, not only would it be reasonable to conclude those things, one would
probably have to reach those conclusions. However, as I will discuss below,
1. Lippmann was not the first to extend the meaning of the word “stereotype;”
2. “Stereotypes” in the modern sense play only a minor role in Public Opinion;
3. Lippmann himself was not actually known for his concern with the unjust
perception of and treatment of stigmatized groups of people;
4. Nevertheless, Public Opinion is still a book that should be read by
psychologists—including, to be sure, students of stereotyping and prejudice.

The man and the Book

However, who was Walter Lippmann, and how did the book come about?
Lippmann was not himself a psychologist—in other words, he did not have formal
training in the field, nor did he have an academic affiliation. One of the founding
editors of the magazine The New Republic, Lippmann was a syndicated newspa-
per columnist and a public intellectual. He was probably most famous for his
column “Today and Tomorrow” that ran in the New York Herald Tribune for over
30 years. Nonetheless, he was more than a pundit; he was also an advisor to and
speechwriter for many of the 20th century’s most prominent American politicians.
In fact, Public Opinion is not his most well known piece of writing. That
distinction would have to belong to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen
Points” speech before Congress in 1918, in which Wilson laid out America’s
plans for a post-World War I peace settlement. Lippmann wrote most of it (before
he was 30 years of age), at a point in his career when he was working for the War
Department.
It was that experience working for the government that led him to write Public
Opinion. He saw firsthand during the war how propaganda twists facts and distorts
the beliefs and attitudes people use to form their opinions. This led him to wonder
how one could ideally convey accurate and unbiased information to the public that
it could use to form intelligent opinions about important public issues. Ultimately,
he decided that it is impossible. He concluded that bias and distortion is inherent
in how people’s minds work, and because of that, people are unable to construct
accurate and consensual pictures of reality. This insight, he felt, had important
implications for society. If public policy is driven by public opinion, and public
opinion is based on ignorance and bias, how can a government develop and carry
out reasonable and effective public policies? He decided to write a book to present
his analysis of this problem.

“Stereotypes” in Public Opinion

A reader familiar with Public Opinion primarily from references to the book
in the social psychology literature, when looking between its covers for the first
 WALTER LIPPMANN AND STEREOTYPING 11

time, would almost certainly be interested in finding that part of the book where
Lippmann famously introduced the term “stereotype” to the world. The reader
might be surprised, though, to discover that when the term first appears, it is
introduced abruptly without any fanfare, or even any comment. On page 19,
Lippmann notes that the book will “examine how in the individual person the
limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified
with his own interests as he feels and conceives them.” The assumption seems to
be that the reader will already be familiar with the word. The second appearance
is on page 55, where readers are told that “In the great blooming buzzing
confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for
us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped
by our culture.” Again, Lippmann is writing as if an intelligent and well-read
person will already know what the word “stereotype” refers to.
This might be puzzling to someone aware that Lippmann’s claim to fame is
that he introduced the modern usage of the words stereotype and stereotyping.
Examination of the definitive biography of Lippmann, Ronald Steel’s (1980/1999)
669 page long book Walter Lippmann and the American Century, might lead to
another surprise. Steel’s book is quite extensive; the opinion of one reviewer was
that it “is far too long and suffers from the current Anglo-Saxon biographer’s vice
of putting everyone and everything in” (Deas, 1982, p. 105). That may or may not
be a fair comment; the more important point is that the book is ambitious,
detailed, and comprehensive. However, in the 31-page-long index, there is one
term that cannot be found: that is, “stereotype.” Apparently, Steel did not find
Lippmann’s use of the word in Public Opinion to be all that important or notable.
The same is true of two earlier biographies of Lippmann by Luskin (1972) and
Weingast (1970). Reviews of the book that appeared when it was first published
also either do not mention the word (e.g., Holcombe, 1922; Park, 1922) or do so
only in passing (Dewey, 1922; King, 1922). Similarly, one cannot find the word
“stereotype” in the lengthy online guide to the Walter Lippmann papers archived
at Yale University, nor could it be found in any of Lippmann’s personal corre-
spondence with his publisher.3
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), by the mid-19th century,
the word “stereotype” was already being used to refer to something other than a
printing process (a usage that dates to the late 18th century). By 1850 or so, people
were using it to apply to anything constantly repeated without change. A phrase
could be a stereotype; so could a painting, or a dramatic presentation.4 So could
a person; the OED notes a reference to a “stereotyped businessman” in 1912, 10
years before the publication of Public Opinion. Basically, it was used as the term
“cliché” is today. In fact, the words “stereotype” and “cliché” were both first used
in the printing business (Mish, 1989).
The Oxford English Dictionary does, however, give credit to Lippmann for
being among the first to use the term to refer to not just observable, tangible things
that impinge on the senses like works of art, theatrical productions, phrases, or
even people, but to abstractions like ideas or attitudes. So, one could argue that

3
See http://mssa.library.yale.edu/findaids/eadHTML/mssa.ms.0326.html.
4
A related term, “stereotypy,” was in use by psychiatrists at the end of the 19th century to refer
to repetitive movements (Ashmore & Del Boca, 1981).
12 NEWMAN

Lippmann did indeed pioneer the use of the word to refer to mental representa-
tions. Nevertheless, the fact that the term was already commonly used in a very
related way is why Lippmann did not need to draw attention to how he was using
it in Public Opinion. He did not have to explain the word’s basic meaning to his
readers, because he was not introducing the term— he was just broadening its
meaning a bit.
However, how did Lippmann use the word “stereotype” in Public Opinion?
Here are some examples: After describing how a group of observers had misre-
membered details of a staged brawl, he noted that this was because “They saw
their stereotype of such a brawl” (p. 56). He also notes that how people recall the
appearance of common objects is affected by the “stereotyped shapes art has lent
them” (p. 56). Shortly after that he writes about stereotypes of landscapes, and
even more extensively, about political beliefs as stereotypes.
In other words, what Lippmann called a stereotype was what a contemporary
psychologist would recognize as the broader concept of a “schema.” This is
something that Ashmore and Del Boca (1981) also pointed out, but few seem to
remember that. That is unfortunate, because (as will be argued below), an
implication of this fact is that Lippmann’s discussion of how people make sense
of their social worlds could actually be of interest to many more psychologists
than just those who today study stereotyping and prejudice.
Of course, in a number of places in Public Opinion, Lippmann did in fact use
the term stereotype in the sense that would be more easily recognized today. For
example, “. . . we notice a trait which marks a well-known type, and fill out the
rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry around in our heads. He
is an agitator. That much we notice, or are told. Well, an agitator is this sort of
person, and so he is this sort of person. He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He
is a foreigner. He is a ‘south European.’ He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard
Man . . .” (p. 59). There are other such passages. However, the important point is
that these were just illustrations of a more general concept. Stereotypes of social,
ethnic, racial, and national groups and the discriminatory behavior that could
follow from those stereotypes are not by any stretch of the imagination central to
Lippmann’s discussion.
What, then, is the basis for the impression that Public Opinion focuses on
social stereotypes? Rice’s (1926) study of how people socially categorize others
based on photographic portraits seems to be the first published paper in the
psychological literature to present the book in this way.5 Rice noted that the kinds
of social judgments his subjects made could be influenced by “What Lippmann
calls ‘stereotypes’ or ‘pictures in our heads’ concerning the supposed appearance
of individuals of a certain race, class, occupation, or social group” (p. 268). The
Social Science Citation Index reveals that the Rice paper has rarely been cited
over the last 50 years or so. However, it was discussed by Katz and Braly (1935)
in a subsequent paper that has been much more influential, and Katz and Braly’s
presentation of Rice’s work was framed in terms of “the class of beliefs which
Lippmann has called stereotypes” (p. 181). Public Opinion’s status as a seminal

5
Interestingly, in the title of the paper, the word “stereotypes” is placed in quotation marks,
suggesting that the word was being used in a way that might still seem somewhat special or unusual
to other psychologists.
 WALTER LIPPMANN AND STEREOTYPING 13

work on the stereotyping of social groups seems to derive from these articles,
which were among the earliest empirical investigations of stereotyping and
prejudice.

Lippmann and Intergroup Relations

The fact that stereotyping, as currently defined, does not play such a promi-
nent role in Public Opinion is not very surprising. Indeed, were he still alive,
Lippmann might be surprised to learn that he has become such an icon for
researchers studying stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. As previously
noted, Lippmann had a long and prolific career as a newspaper columnist and
public intellectual. In the course of that career he ended up writing about almost
every major social, political, and economic issue imaginable— or almost every
one. Some topics never attracted his sustained attention, such as the unequal
treatment of minority groups in America, the internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II, anti-Semitism, or until very late in his career, the civil rights
movement. Actually, Lippmann did write a little about the internment of Japanese
Americans: He supported it. As for race relations, although he once argued that
“the idea must go that in order to segregate the races biologically it is necessary
to degrade and terrorize one of them,” he did not claim to disagree with the idea
that “amalgamation” was “undesirable for both Blacks and Whites” (Lippmann,
1919, pp. xix-xx).
In general, Lippmann was not very comfortable discussing discrimination or
writing about how some groups in American society might be stigmatized and
disadvantaged. Steel (1980/1999) discussed these tendencies at length. The con-
sensus among the people who knew Lippmann well was that his reluctance to
write about these kinds of matters came from his discomfort with his own identity
as a minority member—as a Jew—and his desire not to jeopardize his own
assimilation into the mainstream. This desire to blend in and not make waves was
something he shared with many American Jews of German background of his
generation. As Steel put it, “for them Judaism was not a matter of pride or a
question to be discussed, but an infirmity that could be rendered innocuous and
perhaps unnoticeable by being ignored” (p. 9). That was certainly true for
Lippmann. He himself had directly experienced discrimination over the years by
being barred from many clubs and organizations he wanted to join. However, he
seems to have felt that when members of groups outside of the mainstream
encountered such injustices, the appropriate response was for them to redouble
their efforts to assimilate to the majority culture.
This conflict over his own Jewishness led him to write some things over the
years that one might find very surprising, coming as they do from a person who
did so much to inspire researchers concerned with stereotyping, prejudice and
discrimination. In a discussion of nationalism in his 1915 book The Stakes of
Diplomacy, he suggested that “the bad economic habits of the Jew, his exploiting
of simple people, has caused his victims to assert their own nationality” (Steel,
1980/1999, p. 189). In an article in 1922 entitled “Public Opinion and the
American Jew,” he wrote that “the rich and vulgar and pretentious Jews of our big
American cities are perhaps the greatest misfortune that has ever befallen the
14 NEWMAN

Jewish people” (p. 192). That, of course, was the same year that Public Opinion
was published.
Around the same time, Lippmann was asked to comment on a debate then taking
place at Harvard University, his alma mater, about whether to impose quotas for the
number of Jewish students admitted. Lippmann was opposed to quotas, but he
expressed his sympathy with the spirit of the proposal. In a letter sent to Harvard, he
wrote “I do not regard the Jews as innocent victims. They hand on unconsciously and
uncritically from one generation to the another many distressing personal and social
habits;” in this matter, he said, “my sympathies are with the non-Jew. . . His personal
manners and physical habits are, I believe, distinctly superior to the prevailing
manners and habits of the Jews” (both p. 194). Once again, it should be noted that
during that period, such attitudes and beliefs were not all that uncommon even among
Jews themselves, some of whom could have been (and have been) characterized as
“social anti-Semites” (see Teachout, 2002, p. 137).
There is one more irony, though. Psychologists who pay tribute to Lippmann
today might be more than a little alienated by the final sections of Public Opinion.
There, Lippmann laid out his proposed solution to what he saw as the difficulties
democracies have in effectively formulating rational public policies to address
their problems. In brief, he felt that it was foolish to think that the average person
could have intelligent opinions about public affairs. There is just too much
relevant information, he argued; people cannot hope to take it all in, and what they
do take in, they distort. His analysis of people’s cognitive limitations and biases
led him to believe that the average person’s opinions about domestic and foreign
affairs are worse than worthless (for a more recent version of this argument, see
Caplan, 2007). Instead, he thought that the only opinions that should count are
those of trained specialists. Lippmann argued that special intelligence bureaus
should be set up to provide objective information to congress and the executive
branch. Office-holders, in turn, should make decisions based only on that infor-
mation. The job of the public, he said, should be simply to vote out of power
administrations that seemed incapable of using the information provided to them
to make rational decisions. However, the public’s input, he felt, should generally
be reduced as much as possible.
Even at the time, this proposal seemed to many commentators to be outland-
ish and unworkable, but John Dewey (1922) did call the book overall “the most
effective indictment of democracy” he had ever read. Others went further and
suggested that the work implicitly advocated a fascist form of government
(Weingast, 1970). So, Public Opinion, a book that has become a citation classic
in social psychology, is actually an extended argument for a proposal to transform
representative government that (it can be assumed) few contemporary psycholo-
gists would endorse.

Why (and How) Public Opinion Should Be Read

Why, then, should psychologists still bother to read Public Opinion? As
previously noted, among the ideas credited to Lippmann are that stereotypes,
however he defined them, are energy-saving devices that simplify reality (“the
attempt to see all things freshly, and in detail, rather than as types and generalities,
is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question,” p. 59).
 WALTER LIPPMANN AND STEREOTYPING 15

Another is that stereotypes can lead to biased judgments (“the way we see things
is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find”). Clearly,
Lippmann did say those things. These are ideas that are familiar to psychologists
today (see Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994)
and guide much of their research. More generally, Lippmann’s analysis of how
people think about themselves, other people, and their environments is surpris-
ingly contemporary (see Sherman, Lee, Bessenoff, & Frost, 1998, and Schneider,
2005, for similar conclusions).
As previously noted, Lippmann’s conclusion that people are limited capacity
motivated processors of information who are prone to biases led him to be
extremely pessimistic about the ability of complex societies to effectively manage
their affairs. Contemporary social psychologists are generally less alarmist in their
thinking, emphasizing people’s abilities to pragmatically construct mental repre-
sentations that allow them to function within their social worlds despite the biases
to which they are prone. Fiske and Taylor (1991) conceptualized people as
“motivated tacticians” who are able to transcend many of their cognitive limita-
tions and biases when they are motivated to do so. Similarly, Gill and Swann
(2004; see also Swann, 1984) emphasized people’s pragmatic accuracy when
forming impressions of others and predicting their behavior; specifically, they
presented evidence that people are accurate enough when gathering information
crucial to their own social interaction goals. Overall, though, Lippmann, devel-
oped a portrayal of human beings that is remarkably similar to the one developed
by social cognition researchers over the last 30 to 40 years or so.
In the process of developing his arguments, Lippmann also zeroed in on many
of the same phenomena and variables that have also captured the interest of
cognitive social psychologists. These include (but are not limited to) illusory
correlations (“The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory
that two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally connected,”
p. 99), schematic effects on attention and memory (“he recognizes a landscape
and exclaims that it is beautiful. But two days later, when he tries to recall what
he saw, he will remember chiefly some landscape in a parlor,” p. 58), naı̈ve
realism (“we believe in the absolutism of our own vision;” once people see what
they expect, “they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it
as ‘reality’,” p. 82), halo effects (“everything painful tends to collect in one
system of cause and effect, and likewise everything pleasant,” p. 99), the effects
of cognitive load (“The time and attention are limited that we can spare for the
labor of not taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant interrup-
tion,” p. 36), just-world thinking (“One can imagine the more sensitive bent on
convincing themselves that the people to whom they were doing such terrible
things must be terrible people,” p. 67), accuracy versus directional goals, the need
for consistency, and many others.
The defensive function of stereotypes is also a prominent theme in the book
(see Chapter 7, especially). Lippman suggested that stereotypes are “highly
charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our
tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the
position we occupy” (p. 64). However, as already noted (see “How Public
Opinion is cited”), this aspect of Lippmann’s discussion is rarely cited. This is
probably a reflection of the fact that the psychodynamic approach to stereotyping
16 NEWMAN

and prejudice, was, until recently, relatively dormant (Newman & Caldwell,
2005). Lippmann’s analysis, however, anticipated the recent resurgence of interest
in this topic.
Needless to say, it is one thing to speculate about such processes and
phenomena, and another to validate them empirically, and Lippmann was no
experimentalist. Is the fact that Lippmann simply foreshadowed much of the
research conducted by cognitive social psychologists (certainly including, but not
limited to those studying stereotyping and prejudice) reason enough to read the
book? In a word: yes. Lippmann not only elaborates on many of the ideas that
have become the stock in trade of contemporary research on social information
processing, but he does so in a compelling way. His book breathes life into those
ideas in a way that most academic writers are unable to. It is not for nothing that
he was one of the last century’s most prominent public intellectuals.
Recall also why Lippmann wrote Public Opinion, and why he took on all of
the intellectual work required to do so. His goal was to understand how individual
people apprehend the world, and how all of those individual apprehensions
coalesce into something called public opinion; he was interested in how that
public opinion gets translated into policy, and how reasonable the policies are that
come into being in that way. These are not little issues. Lippmann’s topic was
about as big and complex a sociopolitical problem as one can imagine. What more
important question is there than how people can collectively agree about what
they need to do to make the world a happier and healthier place, and how they can
get it done?
That is what Lippmann tackled, and his attempt to do so led him to a
conception of how people think about and interact with each other that closely
corresponds to the one that has come to dominate the work of contemporary
psychologists. Public Opinion can also serve as an antidote to social psychology’s
periodic existential crises: It vividly demonstrates how relevant and important a
systematic and fine-grained analysis of the cognitive processes underlying social
behavior can be.

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Received January 23, 2008
Revision received October 23, 2008
Accepted December 30, 2008 y

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