CHAPTER V 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.

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