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Deep down at heart... people are... stupid.
Many of the secrets of crisis communication involve managing people's knee-jerk, self-defeating tendencies. We've got a lot of instinctive crisis response strategies that are highly self-destructive when practiced in unison by large groups. That's no surprise--I'd wager that when most people think of "emergency response," they would be quick to put down "crowd control" as a related thought.
Roadside accidents, generally, don't cause traffic because of the blocked lane. The traffic comes from the instinctive desire of each driver, at the end of the bottleneck, to slow down and look at the accident, instead of speeding up right away.
So of course crisis communication involves many approaches to talking people through their panic, or speaking past their distrust... But I'm interested in the one strategy that encourages taking advantage of our (stupid) instinct to hate.
Having somebody you hate, or maybe a virus you hate, can enable you to bear your fear and hang in there without tripping the circuit breaker
into denial.
This is using one kind of stupidity against another--if I understand correctly, denial is dangerous because it postpones panic, and while panic early can result in more attentive, involved and responsive people, panic late in the game causes riots and other craziness.
So using the galvanizing power of hate might bring people to a rally instead of a riot, where information could be dispersed... Or more simply, admitting that our instinctive response to threat is to identify an enemy, public leaders should be prepared to get out in front of that. Pick a useful enemy, before more atavistic organizers take advantage in a more destructive way...
Roadside accidents, generally, don't cause traffic because of the blocked lane. The traffic comes from the instinctive desire of each driver, at the end of the bottleneck, to slow down and look at the accident, instead of speeding up right away.
So of course crisis communication involves many approaches to talking people through their panic, or speaking past their distrust... But I'm interested in the one strategy that encourages taking advantage of our (stupid) instinct to hate.
Having somebody you hate, or maybe a virus you hate, can enable you to bear your fear and hang in there without tripping the circuit breaker
into denial.
This is using one kind of stupidity against another--if I understand correctly, denial is dangerous because it postpones panic, and while panic early can result in more attentive, involved and responsive people, panic late in the game causes riots and other craziness.
So using the galvanizing power of hate might bring people to a rally instead of a riot, where information could be dispersed... Or more simply, admitting that our instinctive response to threat is to identify an enemy, public leaders should be prepared to get out in front of that. Pick a useful enemy, before more atavistic organizers take advantage in a more destructive way...
Views: 15
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Comment by Iron Helix on May 13, 2010 at 6:09am
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Hahaha... classic. Your pessimism on the stupidity of people yields to an optimism that collectivizing hatred cancels out the individualistic survival responses, which, in my view, is optimistic on the face of it.
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Comment by Jeremy Laird Hogg on May 13, 2010 at 6:35am
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Aquinas said that it is sometimes better for a blind horse to be lame. Ie evils can cancel each other out. There's not much psychology of hatred out there, while there is so much on love and happiness. I wonder if there is a place for passionate negative affects in a healthy psychology.
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When a disaster is "natural" it's pretty hard to get angry about it. Most of the time, I'd imagine people would be angry at "God" rather than the disaster. But even hatred has a purpose. It's purpose is to serve the person experiencing the hate. I can hate or fear a person who's about to rob me, but either way, the result is the same: an individual survival response. Collectivizing emotions that are based on serving the individual is fundamentally flawed, I think, and will ultimately fail, particularly when the veil that the collective "hate" is not serving the individual is removed.
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I think a plausible theory of psychological health will take our social nature into account - that's the 'in' psychology has for conceptualizing anti-social cognitive and behavioral tendencies as 'unhealthy', which gives an 'in' for the position that practical rationality (think psychological health) and ethicality (think anti/social) are inextricably linked. Would this mean the collapse of the dichotomy between individual serving and collective serving? Not quite. What it means is that one doesn't balance morality against self-interest; rather morality and rationality are co-extensive and the right thing to do is to find the correct balance between self-care and group-care. Martyrdom in this case is as much a vice (with moral and practical weight) as over occupation with a "marooned" concept of individuality.
This is all the mapping of a position mind you, not an argument. In my vernacular (as per the above), *if* passionate negative affect has it's place in self-care that immediately leads me to consider whether passionate negative affect has a place for a group. And I'd start thinking about similarly targeted negative affects of members of a group (aggregate group hatred, say) vs members having a passionate negative affect as part of identification of the group (holistic group hatred, say). Perhaps one way is practical in some situations, the other way practical in other situations.
In a health crisis situation, other people are the source of the threat (contagion); even when the disease itself is the culprit, it is the sight of the contagious sick that captures our imaginations. So that suggests to me that the cohesion of holistic group hate is not the natural response; aggregate group hatred would be. That aggregate response is antithetical to the forming of greater social contact that is supposedly a cornerstone for successful navigation of a health crisis. Therefore my reaction is to question the utility of promoted hatred as means of health crisis control.
But I don't rule it out on principle (I only question it on practical grounds). I ask myself - is anything in all possible worlds worth hating? Worth vehement dislike so strong it arouses a bitter passion? Well I don't know, but it sounds plausible given all possible words - and even given this one wee possible world we are trying to urgently respond to. I don't want to rule out a source of passion (motivation) on the grounds that is constituted by intentional negativity toward an object (villainizing *may be* a useful tool in our social innovative tool box. Look at Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit for useful literary villainization - in the hobbit, greed is given form, and in the LotR the theme of 'power corrupts' is likewise and everywhere given imaginative face deliver the powerful thematic message). No I don't want to rule out negative motivations, because I think that there is cause to think that one of the major steps to overcoming our urgent world problems is motivational in nature. We cannot, collectively and many of us individually, find the motivational initiative and commitment take up the challenge of *ourselves* taking advantage of opportunities of taking on the costs of being more sustainable (eg, the cost in convenience, time, money, for eg simplifying food purchase/consumption, reducing energy use, paying for simplifying / more efficient technology to replace staples [eg, toilets, fridges]). Our tool box for sparking sustainable motivation must be open to resources that are prima facie suspect - like passionate negative affect and vehement dislike - hatred, perhaps.
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A little revisionary comment: interestingly, the villains in the hobbit and LotR inspire both awe and pity rather than hatred.
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Comment by Wasserperson on May 13, 2010 at 8:33pm
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Iron Helix--I'd say my position is pragmatic or pessimistic in its a****sment of human nature, but guardedly hopeful about the outcomes if right minded people aren't afraid of harnessing all the knowledge we have about the madness of crowds.
As to "natural" disasters, well, there's folks in the US who've blamed earth quakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis on the immorality of the "natural" victims, so I don't think I see anything special about those crises that make them less prone to trigger irrational mob hatred.
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Quote: As to "natural" disasters, well, there's folks in the US who've blamed earth quakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis on the immorality of the "natural" victims, so I don't think I see anything special about those crises that make them less prone to trigger irrational mob hatred.
It's a matter of cause vs effect. Anger is usually vented at the cause rather than the result, because it's rather illogical to do otherwise. Blaming a "victim" may work among certain individuals, but by and large I doubt it could ever be used as a motivator, nor should it be. I just don't see how you can apply feelings of anger to a cause that occurs naturally or by chance.
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I'm not particularly concerned with the idealism behind your "should."
In crisis situations, people will feel anger and fear, and those feelings can easily be manipulated into hate. Civic leaders ignore that dynamic at their own peril.
I don't think any of these emotions have to attach to "logical" targets. Emotions aren't syllogisms.
But I do think hatred, or at least, anger, can be a useful motivating force if it is intelligently (and even ethically) directed. Imagine, for example, using a speech about the failure of government rescue operations ("They've left us to die!") to motivate "looters" to ration and share the food they scavenge. Not sure that's the best example, but hopefully it communicates the gist of my idea.
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Jeremy--I tried to follow your line but there's a lot of abstract verbiage there and I'm not sure I could regurgitate your argument reliably, let alone cogently.
I can say that there's plenty of psychological study of negative emotions, even beyond the Zimbardo prison experiments that were cut short.
Broadly, you seem to be concerned with whether negative emotions should be used as motivators, from a morally or ethically ideal perspective.
I'm more results oriented. If hate can be used to save lives in a crisis, then I have no problem. Even if it just saves time to take advantage of people's tendency to hate, rather than talk them past it, I'm fine with it. What is most important to me is that crisis leaders pay attention to people's capacity for hate, and not just hope that no one else takes advantage.
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I didn't have a point Wasser - I should have laid that on the line up front. It was mostly abstract verbiage (as you say, bluntly), not an argument, and untranslatable for discourse. Sorry If I messed up your board; sometimes speaking/writing is mostly for the speaker/writer -- that was the case for me in this instance. A fast brain storm.
Anywayz, there's no dichotomy between between practicality and ethicality, so you can't be more practical than ethical or vice versa. The results you endorse when you are results oriented make an ethical stance.
I know the studies on power/corruption by Zimbardo. But that study didn't really have to do with clarifying the emotion of hate. To be honest, I don't know what hate is, only a pretty diffuse idea about it being passionate and negative.
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