Changing the Public Discourse

The impact of public opinion had been powerfully demonstrated during much of 2011 via the global unrest unleashed first in the Arab world and Europe, and then worldwide, fueled by social media, and then official and traditional media. If you look up the concept of the 1% vs. the 99%, you will find almost no mention of it before the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement began its protests on September 17, 2011.

Another acknowledgment of the power of social discourse and public opinion to improve society came in a written statement by the World Bank titled, “The Power of Public Discourse”: “The concept of open development [granting equal trade opportunities to all] presupposes a greatly increased supply of information available to citizens. ...The purpose of all this [open development] is to create a shift in the power relationship from the institutions and governments, whose responsibility it is to provide services and improve lives, to the people whom those services are supposed to benefit. That power can be effectively exercised by small groups of citizens working together to identify and confront politicians or service providers who are failing to deliver the services for which money is available. Because corruption and political or self-interest are heavily entrenched, more open development is unlikely to have the desired effects unless various publics are able, collectively and peacefully, to exert public influence.” [47]

The effectiveness of the influence of the environment was scientifically proven decades ago. In 1951, one of the most renowned studies on the subject was conducted by psychologist Solomon Eliot Asch. That study became known as the Asch Conformity Experiment. Using the Line Judgment Task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven confederates. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe that the other seven participants were also real participants.

Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B, or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. There were 18 trials in total and the bogus participants gave the wrong answer on 12 trails.

Results: On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority. Over the 18 trials about 75% of participants conformed at least once and 25% of the participants never conformed.

Conclusion: Why did the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought peculiar. A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct.

Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence). [48]

A new study proves the rather Orwellian notion that the influence of one’s social environment can even change one’s memories. A study at the Weizmann Institute of Science tested to what extent people’s memories could be altered through social manipulation. The release by the Weizmann Institute declared, “New research at the Weizmann Institute shows that a bit of social pressure may be all that is needed.” The experiment took place in four stages. First, volunteers watched a film. Three days later, they took a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were about their answers.

They were later invited to retake the test while being scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. This time, the subjects were also given the supposed answers of the others in their viewing group. Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. After seeing these “planted” responses, the participants conformed to the group, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time.

But were they simply conforming to social demands, or had their memory of the film actually changed? To find out, the researchers invited the subjects to retake the memory test. In some cases the respondents reverted back to the original, correct ones; however, close to half remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session.

An analysis of the fMRI data showed differences in brain activity between the persistent false memories and the temporary errors of social compliance. The scientists think there is a link connecting the social and the memory processing parts of the brain: “Its ‘stamp’ may be needed ... to give [memories] approval before they get uploaded to the memory bank. Thus, social reinforcement could act on ... our brains to replace a strong memory with a false one.” [49]

“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as the majority.”

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving [50]

Now that we have seen how society affects people’s views, let’s examine the issue from a practical, educational angle. The impact of the media on our views, even physically on our brains, has been documented and recognized more than once. Headlines such as “Violent Video Games and Changes in the Brain,” [51] “Norwegian Retailer Pulls Violent Games In Wake of Attack,” [52] and “Mass Shooting in Germany Prompts Retailer to Drop Mature-Rated Games” [53] indicate that people are well aware of the harm of violent and aggressive media. Yet, for all our awareness, the media not only keeps showing these offending images, but even increases their frequency and explicitness.

To understand how much violence young minds absorb, consider this piece of information from a University of Michigan Health System publication titled, “Television and Children”: “An average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV by age 18.” [54] If this number doesn’t seem alarming, consider that there are 6,570 days in eighteen years, which means that on average, by age eighteen a child will have watched slightly more than thirty acts of violence on TV, 2.4 of which are murders, every day of his or her young life.

“It is not neutrality for which we are demanded, but rather unity, unity of common guarantee, of mutual responsibility, of reciprocity... This is where our work in education among our youngsters aims, and even more so with the adults.”

Martin Buber,
philosopher and educator, A Nation and a World: Essays on current events [55]

To conclude, contemporary research proves that “my environment today is me tomorrow.” Our environments build us as human beings, and because we are products of our environments, every change that we wish to impose on ourselves must first be absorbed into our environments. Therefore, when we build an environment in which the value of mutual guarantee is endorsed and is deemed praiseworthy, that value will be praiseworthy in our own eyes, as well.

[47] Kavita Abraham Dowsing, PhD, and James Deane, “The Power of Public Discourse,” http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/devoutreach/article/1298/power-public-discourse

[48] Source: Saul Mcleod, “Asch Experiment,” Simply Psychology, 2008, http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html

[49] “Thanks for the Memories,” an experiment in false memories conducted by Prof. Yadin Dudai and Micah Edelson of the Institute’s Neurobiology Department, together with Prof. Raymond Dolan and Dr. Tali Sharot of University College London ( released August 29, 2011), http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/thanks-for-the-memories

[50] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (U.S.A., Harper Perennial, September 5, 2000), 13

[51]Eryn Brown, “Violent video games and changes in the brain,” Los Angeles Times (November 30, 2011), http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-violent-videogame-brain-20111130,0,6877853.story

[52] Following the July 22, 2011 attack on Norwegians by a Norway native: “Report: Norwegian Retailer Pulls Violent Games In Wake Of Attack,” DigiPen Institute of Technology (July 29, 2011), http://www.gamecareerguide.com/industry_news/36185/report_norwegian_retailer_pulls_.php

[53] David Jenkins, “Mass Shooting In Germany Prompts Retailer To Drop Mature-Rated Games,” Gamasutra (March 20, 2009), http://www.gamasutra.com/news/production/?story=22839

[54] University of Michigan Health System, “Television and Children,” http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv.htm

[55] Martin Buber, philosopher and educator, A Nation and a World: Essays on current events, trans. from Hebrew: Chaim Ratz (Israel, Zionistic Library Publications, 1964), 220