We report a meta-analysis of survey studies examining the relationship between people's perceptions of support for their opinions and their willingness to express those opinions. Evidence from the analysis indicates the presence of a very small, but statistically significant, relationship between the degree to which a person believes others hold similar opinions and the willingness to express those opinions. Moderator analyses did not reveal significant moderators of this relationship, although the observed correlations were statistically heterogeneous, suggesting at least one undiscovered moderator.Are we more willing to express our beliefs when we perceive support for those beliefs and less willing to disclose them when we think they are not widely shared? More than 20 years ago, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974) articulated a theory of public opinion expression and formation based on this idea. Her theory rests on the notion that individuals who perceive they are in the minority will feel pressure either to express the majority opinion or to remain silent (Glynn and McLeod 1985;Salmon and Kline 1985). The ''spiral of silence'' theory asserts that, in a society carroll j. glynn is an associate professor of communication and department chair at Cornell University.

An experiment with 243 young communication scholars tested hypotheses derived from role congruity theory regarding impacts of author gender and gender typing of research topics on perceived quality of scientific publications and collaboration interest. Participants rated conference abstracts ostensibly authored by females or males, with author associations rotated. The abstracts fell into research areas perceived as gender-typed or gender-neutral to ascertain impacts from gender typing of topics. Publications from male authors were associated with greater scientific quality, in particular if the topic was male-typed. Collaboration interest was highest for male authors working on male-typed topics. Respondent sex did not influence these patterns.

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