The True Believers

In 1951, Princeton's All-American tailback, Dick Kazmeier was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. The issue featured a football game between the Tigers and Ivy league rival, Dartmouth. It was a rough, dirty game. A number of players left due to injury, including Kazmier with a broken nose. 

Two professors, Hadley Cantril of Princeton and Albert Hastorf of Dartmouth, used the event to study tribal psychology. When they showed students from each school game footage, the divisions were sharp. On average, Princeton students saw Dartmouth commit 9.8 penalties. Looking at the same film, Dartmouth saw its team only commit 4.3. Cantril and Hastorf's classic study was the first to back the theory of tribal psychology with data. Their findings highlighted how tribal identities result in people having different attitudes concerning the same "thing." They added, "The 'thing' is not the same for different people whether the 'thing' is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach."

As humans, we select and assign meaning to things based not just on reality, but on our specific points of view. They are informed by personal situations, our circle of contacts, and perhaps more significant than ever, the media. The splintering of media-generated perspective creates gaps in our ability to make sense of complex events. This is obviously not good. The absence of confidence in institutional perspective creates a breeding ground for go-it-your-own-way meaning-making, conspiracy theories, and fear-mongering. 

• Hoffer on why people join movements: "It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.”
• On why movements overlook the truth: “Orchestrators of mass movements strive to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.”
• On why revolutionary spirit manifests in uprisings: "A rising movement is all change and experiment — open to new views and techniques from all quarters.”
• On why media have a hard time covering the current moment: “There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization."
• On why discord is so searing now: "Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt."
• On why events in Washington caught many by surprise: "A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are but names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are.”
• On why we need to dig beneath the surface to come to find common ground: "The tangibility of a pleasant and secure existence is such that it makes other realities, however imminent, seem vague and visionary."

The attack on the U.S. Capitol building was the culmination of years of disinformation and conspiracy theories that had been weaponized on social media networks. Could that weaponization have been prevented? Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Donovan makes the case that perhaps it could have been.

Lockdowns and other restrictions have broken old habits and created new ones, but this year we’ll discover how fundamental those changes have been. Reuters outlines how media leaders view the year ahead, including some findings that might surprise us. 

One of the stranger subplots in the long, weird story of 2020 is the millennial wellness community’s embrace of QAnon conspiracy theories. Marc-André Argentino, a doctoral student at Concordia University who studies how extremist groups use technology, coined the term “pastel QAnon” to describe how watered-down, sound-bite-friendly versions of misinformation gained much more mass appeal than the angry (and much more masculine) originals. 

'I hope this email finds you well' is a phrase that has recently been widely reported, tweeted, and memed because in the last year, a typical email is increasingly likely to find its recipient unwell. Detractors say the phrase comes off as oblivious to the reality in which we're living. Just as 2020 introduced many new words into daily vernacular, this collective anger is a reminder that some existing language may need revisiting to reflect this spectacularly odd time. 

MIT announced the launch of the interdisciplinary Center for Constructive Communication, which will leverage data-driven analytics to better understand current social and mass media ecosystems and design new tools and communication networks capable of bridging social, cultural, and political divides. The center hopes to create new ‘spaces’ where diverse voices and nuanced perspectives can be heard, and to design tools and methods that enable influencers and organizations to play new and even more beneficial roles in society. 

In this lecture, Academy of Ideas explores some of True Believers author Eric Hoffer's analysis of mass movements – from their origins to those most prone to join, to the role of leaders and intellectuals within, and more.