Frontiers in Political Science research

## ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci., 04 January 2024

Sec. Political Science Methodologies

Volume 5 - 2023 \| [https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2023.1300149](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2023.1300149)

# Awareness of opinion change: evidence from two deliberative mini-publics

- [SH\\
\\
Staffan Himmelroos 1\*](https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/948890)
- [HS\\
\\
Henrik Serup Christensen 2](https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/1320650)

- 1. Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

- 2. Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, and Law, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland


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## Abstract

Although opinion changes during discussions and negotiations have been studied extensively in different fields of research, surprisingly little effort has been put into studying whether people correctly recognize that they revised their opinions. This is important because it has implications for both the cognitive mechanisms underpinning these changes and their likely consequences. We in this study examine whether participants in two deliberative mini-publics (DMP) were able to determine the extent to which they revised their opinions (DMP1 = 135; DMP2 = 207). We measure awareness with two questions asking respondents to indicate the extent to which their opinions and views changed during the processes, while we ascertain the actual developments with three measures that capture developments in opinions and attitude consistency. Our results suggest that people are generally unaware of revising their opinions during these processes, and it is only for drastic opinion changes that people have some level of awareness. The difference in how people perceive opinion change compared to how they respond to statements about policy issues shows that probing opinion changes by asking people directly about this can be problematic from a methodological standpoint.

## Introduction

The aim of this study is to gain more knowledge on the extent to which people accurately perceive they change opinions over time and how this can be measured. Although opinion changes have been examined extensively, there is relatively little research on people's awareness of how their opinions change (see Hellqvist, [2023](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2023.1300149/full#B25) for a recent exception). Our understanding of opinion change awareness is to a large degree based on how opinion change is examined and explained in different studies. Moreover, these explanations and the evidence they are based on seem to point in different directions.

Some classic work suggests that people generally hold few stable opinions, basically making up answers when asked in a more or less random fashion or based on perceived ideological heuristics and cues (Converse, [1964](htt

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