Opinion Occlusion
opinion occlusion
Etymology
opinion (Latin opinio, belief, conjecture) + occlusion (Latin occlusio, a shutting up, blockage).
Noun
opinion occlusion (uncountable and countable, plural opinion occlusions)
- social psychology The suppression of a sincerely held view due to social pressure, conformity norms, or anticipated consequence. Distinguished from reticence in that the opinion exists but is actively withheld.
- The unanimous vote was less a consensus than a product of opinion occlusion, with several members privately dissenting.
- epistemology, media studies The systemic marginalization of a viewpoint within a discourse or information environment — not through censorship but through agenda-setting, framing effects, or signal-to-noise dynamics that render the view effectively invisible.
- Minority scientific positions may undergo opinion occlusion not by editorial suppression but by sheer volume of contradictory coverage.
- artificial intelligence The phenomenon whereby an AI system's reasoned output is overridden by optimization pressures — such as reinforcement learning from human feedback — resulting in expressed outputs that diverge from those its underlying processing would otherwise yield.
- Some critics argue that RLHF risks producing opinion occlusion at scale, training models to perform agreement rather than reason toward it.
- rhetoric|informal Any mechanism, deliberate or structural, by which a genuine judgment is displaced in expression by a safer or more palatable substitute.
- His carefully worded non-answer was textbook opinion occlusion — saying everything except what he actually thought.
Related terms
See also
References
- Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies. Harvard University Press.
- Gabriel, I. (2020). "Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment." Minds and Machines, 30, 411–437.