AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MOTIVATION IS NECESSARY
TO THE WORK OF THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL
Before defining the fundamental motivations of society, let me mention
those outward signs on which psychologists base their study of
conditions.
Psychological habits, or as Mr. Lippmann calls them, “stereotypes,”
are shorthand by which human effort is minimized. They are so clearly
and commonly understood that every one will immediately respond to
the mention of a stereotype within his personal experience. The words
“capitalist” or “boy scout” bring out definite images to the hearer.
These images are more comprehensible than detailed descriptions. Chorus
girl, woman lawyer, politician, detective, financier are clean-cut
concepts and capable of definition. We all have stereotypes which
minimize not only our thinking habits but also the ordinary routine of
life.
Mr. Lippmann finds that the stereotypes at the center of the code
by which various sections of the public live “largely determine what
group of facts we shall see and in what light we shall see them.” That
is why, he says, “with the best will in the world, the news policy
of a journal tends to support its editorial policy, why a capitalist
sees one set of facts and certain aspects of human nature--literally
sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and
why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real
difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference
is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist
pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an
American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. If you have
the editor’s pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts
that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If
you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different
things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and
the editor happen to see in common.”
The stereotype is the basis of a large part of the work of the
public relations counsel. Let us try to inquire where the stereotype
originates--why it is so influential and why from a practical
standpoint it is so tremendously difficult to affect or change
stereotypes or to attempt to substitute one set of stereotypes for
another.
Mr. Martin attempts to answer questions such as these in his volume on
“The Behavior of Crowds.” By “crowds” Mr. Martin does not mean merely a
physical aggregation of a number of persons. To Mr. Martin the crowd is
rather a state of mind, “the peculiar mental condition which sometimes
occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the
members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as
when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an
organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.”
Motives of social behavior are based on individual instincts.
Individual instincts, on the other hand, must yield to group needs.
Mr. Martin pictures society as an aggregation of people who have
sacrificed individual freedom in order to remain within the group. This
sacrifice of freedom on the part of individuals in the groups leads its
members to resist all efforts at fundamental changes in the group code.
Because all have made certain sacrifices, reasons are developed why
such sacrifices must be insisted upon at all times. The “logic-proof”
compartment is the result of this unwillingness to accept changes.
“What has been so painstakingly built up is not to be lightly
destroyed. Each group, therefore, within itself, considers its own
standards ultimate and indisputable, and tends to dismiss all contrary
or different standards as indefensible.
“Even an honest, critical understanding of the demands of the opposing
crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the
critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the
other, and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last
ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting
a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the
Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The medieval Catholics, even
at Leo’s court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in North
Germany. Thousands saw in the reformation only the alleged fact that
the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife....”[14]
The main satisfaction, Mr. Martin thinks, which the individual derives
from his group association is the satisfaction of his vanity through
the creation of an enlarged self-importance.
The Freudian theories upon which Mr. Martin relies very largely for
his argument lead to the conclusion that what Mr. Henry Watterson has
said of the suppression of news applies equally to the suppression of
individual desire. Neither will suppress. With the normal person,
the result of this social suppression is to produce an individual who
conforms with sufficient closeness to the standards of his group to
enable him to remain comfortably within it.
The tendency, however, of the instincts and desires which are thus
ruled out of conduct is somehow or other, when the conditions are
favorable, to seek some avenue of release and satisfaction. To the
individual most of these avenues of release are closed. He cannot, for
example, indulge his instinct of pugnacity without running foul of
the law. The only release which the individual can have is one which
commands, however briefly, the approval of his fellows. That is why
Mr. Martin calls crowd psychology and crowd activity “the result of
forces hidden in a personal and unconscious psyche of the members of
the crowd, forces which are merely released by social gatherings of
a certain sort.” The crowd enables the individual to express himself
according to his desire and without restraint.
He says further, “Every crowd ‘boosts for’ itself, gives itself airs,
speaks with oracular finality, regards itself as morally superior, and
will, so far as it has the power, lord it over every one. Notice how
each group and section in society, so far as it permits itself to think
as crowd, claims to be ‘the people.’”
As an illustration of the boosting principle Mr. Martin points out the
readiness of most groups to enter upon conflict of one kind or another
with opposing groups. “Nothing so easily catches general attention
and grips a crowd as a contest of any kind,” he says. “The crowd
unconsciously identifies its members with one or the other competitor.
Success enables the winning crowd to ‘crow over’ the losers. Such an
action becomes symbolical, and is utilized by the ego to enhance its
feeling of importance. In society this egoism tends to take the form of
the desire for dominance.” According to Mr. Martin, that is why “...
whenever any attempt is being made to secure recruits for a movement
or a point of view the leaders intuitively assume and reiterate the
certainty of ultimate victory.”
Two points which Mr. Martin makes seem to me most important. In the
first place, Mr. Martin points out with absolute justice that the
crowd-mind is by no means limited to the ignorant. “Any class,” he
says, “may behave and think as a crowd--in fact, it usually does so in
so far as its class interests are concerned.” Neither is the crowd-mind
to be found only when there is a physical agglomeration of people. This
fact is important to an understanding of the problems of the public
relations counsel, because he must bear in mind always that the readers
of advertisements, the recipients of letters, the solitary listener at
a radio speech, the reader of the morning newspapers are mysteriously
part of the crowd-mind.
When Bergson came to America about a decade ago, men and women flocked
to his classes, both the French and the English sessions. It was
obvious to the observer that numbers of disciples who conscientiously
attended the full course of lectures understood almost nothing of what
was being said. Their behavior was an instance of the crowd-mind.
Everybody read “Main Street.” Each reader in his own study tried to
react as a crowd-mind. They felt as they thought they ought to.
Initiation scandals, where the crowd-mind has created a brutality not
possible to individuals, take place not only in brotherhoods among what
Mr. Martin calls “the lower classes,” but also among well-bred college
youths and the fraternal orders of successful business and professional
men. A more specific instance is the football game, with its
manifestations of the crowd-mind among a selected group of individuals.
The Ku Klux Klan has numbered among its violent supporters some of the
“best” families of the affected localities.
The crowd is a state of mind which permeates society and its
individuals at almost all times. What becomes articulate in times of
stress under great excitement is present in the mind of the individual
at most times and explains in part why popular opinion is so positive
and so intolerant of contrary points of view. The college professor in
his study on a peaceful summer day is just as likely to be reacting as
a unit of a crowd-mind, as any member of a lynching party in Texas or
Georgia.
Mr. Trotter in his book, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,”[15]
gives us further material for study. He discusses the underlying causes
and results of “herd” tendencies, stressing the herd’s cohesiveness.
The tendency the group has to standardize the habits of individuals
and to assign logical reasons for them is an important factor in the
work of the public relations counsel. The predominant point of view,
according to Mr. Trotter, which translates a rationalized point of view
into an axiomatic truth, arises and derives its strength from the fact
that it enlists herd support for the point of view of the individual.
This explains why it is so easy to popularize many ideas.
“The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity.”[16] The biological
significance of homogeneity lies in its survival value. The wolf
pack is many times as strong as the combined strength of each of its
individual members. These results of homogeneity have created the
“herd” point of view.
One of the psychological results of homogeneity is the fact that
physical loneliness is a real terror to the gregarious animal, and that
association with the herd causes a feeling of security. In man this
fear of loneliness creates a desire for identification with the herd in
matters of opinion. It is here, says Mr. Trotter,[17] that we find “the
ineradicable impulse mankind has always displayed towards segregation
into classes. Each one of us in his opinions and his conduct, in
matters of amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain
the support of a class, of a herd within the herd.”
Says Mr. Trotter:[18] “The effect of it will clearly be to make
acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and those only.
It is of especial importance to note that this suggestibility is not
general, and it is only herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable
by the action of instinct, and man is, for example, notoriously
insensitive to the suggestions of experience. The history of what is
rather grandiosely called human progress everywhere illustrates this.
If we look back upon the developments of some such thing as the steam
engine, we cannot fail to be struck by the extreme obviousness of each
advance, and how obstinately it was refused assimilation until the
machine almost invented itself.”
The workings of the gregarious instinct in man result frequently in
conduct of the most remarkable complexity, but it is characterized by
all of the qualities of instinctive action. Such conduct is usually
rationalized, but this does not conceal its real character.
We may sincerely think that we vote the Republican ticket because we
have thought out the issues of the political campaign and reached our
decision in the cold-blooded exercise of judgment. The fact remains
that it is just as likely that we voted the Republican ticket because
we did so the year before or because the Republican platform contains a
declaration of principle, no matter how vague, which awakens profound
emotional response in us, or because our neighbor whom we do not like
happens to be a Democrat.
Mr. Lippmann remarks:[19] “For the most part we do not first see and
then define, we define first and then see. In the great booming,
buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out of the clutter what
is already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have
picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
Mr. Trotter cites as a few of the examples of rationalization the
mechanism which “enables the European lady who wears rings in her ears
to smile at the barbarism of the colored lady who wears her rings
in her nose”[20] and the process which enables the Englishman “who
is amused by the African chieftain’s regard for the top hat as an
essential piece of the furniture of state to ignore the identity of his
own behavior when he goes to church beneath the same tremendous ensign.”
The gregarious tendency in man, according to Mr. Trotter, results in
five characteristics which he displays in common with all gregarious
animals.
1. “_He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or
mental._”[21] The same urge which drives the buffalo into the herd
and man into the city requires on the part of the latter a sense of
spiritual identification with the herd. Man is never so much at home as
when on the band wagon.
2. “_He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other
influence._” Mr. Trotter illustrates this characteristic in a paragraph
which is worth quoting in its entirety. He says: “It (the voice of
the herd) can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is
the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and
philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and
can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own
punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to
tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can
it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can
make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable
afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power
of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable
proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.”
3. “_He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and
the passions of the herd in his panics._”
4. “_He is remarkably susceptible to leadership._” Mr. Trotter points
out that the need for leadership is often satisfied by leadership of a
quality which cannot stand analysis, and which must therefore satisfy
some impulse rather than the demands of reason.
5. “_His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition
of him as a member of the herd._”
The gregarious tendency, Mr. Trotter believes, is biologically
fundamental. He finds therefore that the herd reaction is not confined
to outbreaks such as panics and mob violence, but that it is a constant
factor in all human thinking and feeling. Discussing the results of
the sensitiveness of the individual to the herd point of view, Mr.
Trotter says in part, “To believe must be an ineradicable natural bias
of man, or in other words, an affirmation, positive or negative, is
more readily accepted than rejected, unless its source is definitely
disassociated from the herd. _Man is not, therefore, suggestible by
fits and starts, not merely in panics and mobs, under hypnosis, and so
forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances._”
The suggestibility of people to ideas which are part of the standards
of their groups could not be more succinctly expressed than in the old
command, “When in Rome do as the Romans.”
Psychologists have defined for the public relations counsel the
fundamental equipment of the individual mind and its relation to group
reactions. We have seen the motivations of the individual mind--the
motivations of the group mind. We have seen the characteristics in
thought and action of the individual and the group. All these things
we have touched on, though briefly, since they form the ground-work of
knowledge for the public relations counsel. Their application will be
discussed later.