His administration is besieged in scandal after scandal, there are no roses in the Iraq War-of-Choice, and enemy number one (bin Laden -- you know, the guy who might actually have had something to do with 9/11) is raking up a straight-to-video catalog that makes an ex-Brat Pack actor of the 80’s blush. Why aren’t Georgie-boy’s poll numbers, as bad as they are, in the negative numbers? Sure seems like they should be. What more can it take to wake people up?
In my admittedly futile attempts to understand how anyone can still support Lil’ Lord Pissypants, I offer yet another possibility as to why Bush has any “supporters” at all and also to why it took so long for so many people to realize the Chimperor has no clothes.
In the early fifties, Dr. Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, became famous for research he conducted into the ways in which human beings will conform to the perceptions of a group. The experiment was set up so that one true subject was in a room with what that person believed were other subjects. The other subjects were, in actuality, in on the joke, so to speak. They were shown cards with lines printed on them and asked to judge the relative lengths of the lines. Check out the Wikipedia link at the end of the post for an example, in you’re interested.
Now, everyone except the subject would pick a wrong answer, but declare aloud that it was their pick for the right answer. So, the subject found him- or herself in disagreement with everyone else in the room.
The experiment found that roughly 33% (some summaries of his experiment put the number higher) of participants would go along with the rest of the group, even though the answer given by the group was clearly wrong. Hmm. 33%. What does that number remind me of? Oh, yes, that’s dangerously close to Bush’s approval rating.
The participants said that while they usually knew the answer was wrong, they went along with the group consensus, citing not wanting to be ridiculed (or “though peculiar”) by the others as the reason.
I think this might have some bearing on the Bush supporters. Think about the experiment again. People actually changed their answers to wrong ones for something that was right in front of them just because other people were saying a different answer was right. Something they could see with their own two eyes. Something that wasn’t subjective or a matter of opinion or even knowledge. Something that a chimp could be trained to figure out.
In some ways, many of Bush supporters (past and present) are in the same boat as the sole dupe of Asch experiment, and it’s just as contrived. The architects of this administration set up the idea and the media, willing to go along out of fear, out of stupidity, out of laziness (take your pick), creates the illusion that everyone loves Bush, that the economy is great, that only terrorists are against the Iraq war. You’re “peculiar” if you don’t see it. After all, everybody else does.
So, there is a situation created in this country in which people go along with the impulse that Asch found in his research – to deny what they see in order to conform to the group.
The only difference might be that Asch conducted his experiment in order to look for insight into the human condition, into what makes us tick, and was appalled by the results. I don’t think those who are orchestrating the current experiment are appalled at all, except perhaps by the fact that it doesn’t work on all of us, all of the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experimentshttp://www.psych.upenn.edu/sacsec/about/solomon.htm
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