Opinion Leaders

Outside of the social sciences, the term opinion leader is widely used to allude to celebrities in politics and the media and to public intellectuals, who are thought to have and to hold large followings. In the social sciences, the term refers to everyday influentials whose advice is sought and acknowledged by family, friends, and neighbors.

In this restricted sense, the term dates to Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues' The People's Choice, an empirical study of how voters make their decisions during the course of a presidential campaign. Expecting to document the influential power of the media, the Lazarsfeld team found instead that those who made up their minds or changed them during the campaign were more likely to attribute influence to word-of-mouth than to radio or newspapers. Taking a further step, the researchers found that such everyday influence tends to flow from persons—now dubbed opinion leaders—who were more likely to be exposed to the mass media than those whom they influenced. This tentative finding, whereby opinion leaders were thought to serve as gatekeepers, came to be known as “the two-step flow of communication.”

Reacting to these findings, publishers and broadcasters saw potential advantage in being able to establish that there would likely be opinion leaders among their audiences who might pass along what they have read or heard. Time magazine and MacFadden Publications were among the first to sponsor further research along these lines. The Time study (Merton 1949) showed a concentration of “cosmopolitan” leaders among readers of the magazine who were looked to for information and advice about politics and fashion—but only few “local” leaders who were expert in supermarket sales and neighborhood affairs. The idea that opinion leaders may “specialize” in certain domains and the possibility that the several social classes breed their own brands of leadership led to the MacFadden study (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) that, indeed, showed only a little overlap among influentials in the domains of shopping, fashions, movie going, and politics. And, in a more detailed analysis of influential-influencee pairs, Lazarsfeld's team found that both members of the pair shared the same social class and that there was little trickle down from one class to another—except, perhaps, in the political domain. MacFadden was reassured that the lower-middle-class women who read True Story were influential for, and were influenced by, women much like themselves. Moreover, each of these studies gave further support to the two-step flow hypothesis in that the opinion leaders tended to be more attuned to the media in their areas of specialization than were the persons for whom they were influential.

Apart from shared class membership, Lazarsfeld's studies found that “marketing leaders” tended to be older women, more experienced in shopping and more gregarious, whose advisees also included younger women. On the other hand, “fashion leaders” and their followers were more likely to be younger women because interest in fashion, it seems, predominates among younger women. This research suggests that leadership—including opinion leadership—is not just a personal trait. However qualified, the potential for leadership in a given domain cannot be activated without interested followers.

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