Group Think: the battle for the American mind

One of the most puzzling conundrums in the American political world is why people support ideas and policies that are not in their own best interests.

As you might guess, we see this time and time again amongst the working class portion of the conservative base of the Republican party. Tax cuts for the rich? - no problem. Health care for the poor? - take a hike! Anti-union "right-to-work" laws? - right on! Underfunding "no child left behind"? - that's the spirit! Combat global warming? - give me coal-fired power! Bail out the big banks? - OK, but screw General Motors. Trial lawyers fighting for safe products and work places? - ambulance chasers!

You see what we mean.

How does this happen? We submit this is a carefully crafted effect created by a powerful, rich minority who have learned how to manipulate the minions.

The principle at work here is group identification. If you can make someone feel like part of a group, a group that represents wealth and power, and then you tell them that if they want to maintain this membership they have to support things that protect the wealth and power that group represents, then they will vote against their own best interests.

The idea that group membership has significant effect on individual behavior has been strongly supported by countless psychological and sociological experiments done in well-respected educational institutions. They show that you don't actually have to have ANYTHING in common with the other members of the group, you just have to be TOLD you do. (No kidding. In the studies, groups are given a phony "test", then assigned randomly into groups, but told they are grouped with like-minded individuals based on the results of the test. Then a phony group member who is in league with the scientists states his opinion on something, and voila! the others agree with him.)

Then, if you see that some other members of the group believe this or that, you'll come around to that belief too. If they think X is good and Y is bad, you'll come to believe the same thing. And if that means you have to boycott that movie, or shout lies at a public meeting, you'll do it, or at least support it.

By gaining ownership of substantial segments of the news media, and funding think tanks designed to produce pundits for those "news" sources, the rich and powerful have drawn on specific topics and played to the audience that identifies with those topics - gay marriage, abortion, taxes to name a few - and made that audience think they have virtually everything in common with the folks who crafted the message.

Once people feel like group members, the distance between support group and activism is very short. Voting fits in somewhere along the way.

Americans don't want to believe this, but it is true that just about everybody can be manipulated into behaviors they would never act out if left on their own.

When group membership is removed from the picture, individual behavior/beliefs/attitudes revert to those based on personal experience and education. Simple. But not an easy job to disengage someone from a perceived group. Try telling someone who cheers for the Yankees that they should give it up and cheer for the Red Sox, even if they've never seen either team play in person. Would you make any friends by telling those working-class Republicans that they, personally, are neither rich nor powerful and those who are don't give a rat's ass about them?

So, what can we liberals tell people that will create a new sense of "group membership" and swing people to the left? What media can we utilize to the purpose? And should we take up this method of political influence so foreign to our liberal mindset?

It would appear we will lose the battle if we don't.

We can start with the basics. Liberals support personal liberty and freedom, and seek to control and regulate corporate behavior. Conservatives, at least as exhibited by Republican leadership, want to control personal behavior, but give free reign to corporations.

We can point out that when individuals act as part of a corporation, or group, their behavior succumbs to the group think - they do whatever makes the company more profitable, and give the profits to the shareholders. These same individuals, acting one to one with customers or neighbors, might behave quite differently. Take the Ford Pinto for example. They learned that the placement of the gas tanks was leading to many deaths that could be prevented by re-designing the placement. As individual people, those Ford designers and Board members would doubtless have worked to save those lives. But as group members, they decided that the $300 per vehicle a change would cost, multiplied by the number of sales lost due to the higher price, would cost the company more than the lawsuits filed by families of people who died in the fiery collisions. So they left it the way it was.

When lawyers working for health insurance companies have to choose between policies that increase profits and those that cover experimental treatments for desperate customers, they will decide quite differently than when they're working for the customer.

Liberals want to promote personal freedom, something most Americans identify with, and we could craft messages that emphasize that. We want you to make your own decisions about the kind of health care treatments your doctor suggests, not give up that freedom to an insurance company bureaucrat.

With such a conservative monopoly on media ownership these days, the medium of choice seems to be the internet, and this message of personal freedom is well-suited to the medium. Mass emails, facebook posts, and blogs. It's up to you, and us, to get the message in front of the people who have the most to gain.

Anybody out there got a copy of Ann Coulter's emailing list?

JM