of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is
dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public
affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the
pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and
relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are
acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name
of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the
chapters which follow we shall inquire first into some of the reasons
why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with
the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the
chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the
artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the
comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention
to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be
compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small
vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing
those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of
men's lives.

The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations
to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is
affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices
which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct
the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it
proceeds to 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. In the
succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into
what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a
Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.