I. Basic training: two theoretical accounts
A. Cognitive dissonance: a self persuasion and self justification process
that under the right circumstances can be extremely powerful...Aronson suggests
that it is particularly strong where there is a conflict between self-image
and behavior and where the behavior has serious consequences.
1. The basic dissonance: you've been raised a Christian (or at least a
civilian), but here you are chanting about being a "romping, stomping
kill-crazy marine" and roaring with approval at the idea of sending your
enemy home to his mommy in a glad bag... you're shooting at humanoid targets
and bayoneting humanoid dummies... (Is this because all boys are filled with
aggression and they just need basic training to activate it?)
Officers interviewed in the video very explicit about the fact that you're
building a new self (maybe you're brainwashing them a little, as one of
the drill instructors; you're giving them the tools to build a marine, another
officer said)... so everything that dehumanizes your enemy and glorifies
the Marine Corps, its traditions and its loyalties, helps you resolve the
dissonance... (notice that you don't have to resolve the dissonance all
by yourself; this is what sociology can add to C.I. theory)
2. The second cognitive dissonance: what we might call the initiation effect.
Remember the Aronson-Mills experiment with college women participating in
a discussion of sex. Where someone undergoes a difficult initiation (and Marine
basic training certainly qualifies), it creates a powerful incentive to put
a high value on whatever you achieved via that initiation.... otherwise you've
been a fool... so you have to persuade yourself of the great value of what
you've attained via that initiation... (It doesn't always work, of course;
remember the recruit who was dropping out.)
B. Symbolic interactionism...
1. Symbols: uniforms, songs, chants, weapons
2. Interactions: your drill instructor and the others in your basic training
unit become the interactional center of your life, while you are cut off from
relationships with your previous friends and family... you can't bring your
spouse to basic training (or your mother)
Notice that those who fail conspicuously serve as symbols of what you don't
want to be and by their very failure, amplify your success.
C. These theories may be complementary--that's how I see them. Whichever theory
you use, the whole change process is greatly facilitated if you're experienced
failure in your old self or become seriously discontented with who you've been
(remember the Marine recruit who said he'd realized he was "just a maid")
II. Religious conversion (cults?)
A. Example from a Stanford student in Philip Zimbardo's class, who sees a
poster and goes to a Moonie training (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon)
1. Initial meeting: friendliness and food
2. Project Volunteer Weekend Seminar
a. The Spirit Van and the Elephant Express
b. Songs and chants and games
c. Large and small group experiences... dissent (deviance) met more with
sorrow than with anger
d. Sharing of food
e. Sleep deprivation
f. "The stupendous, the magnificent... seven day training session."
g. What gives our observer the power to resist these pressures to change?
B. Bill Bainbridge and The Process (a Satanic cult)
1. Recruitment via personal networks... friendship more than belief
2. People who were at a loss about their lives... what to do next... relationships
that had broken up, school that had ended or from which they'd dropped out.
Kenneth Burke: "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing"
And vice versa, I might add. Every failure is an opportunity to become
someone new.
3. Social implosion process
4. New language and symbols: dark garb, new names, cross with Satan
C. Stark/Loflund Conversion Model
1. The person experiences enduring, acutely-felt tensions
2. Within a religious perspective, which leads to self-definition as a "seeker"
3. Encounters change agent at a turning point and forms an affective bond
4. Extra-cult attachments are absent or neutralized
5. Exposed to intensive interaction to become a "deployable agent"
(someone who can go out and recruit more members)... Notice this last step
in relation to cognitive dissonance. This is where the rationalizations that
justify your new faith really become strong.
6. My addition: your whole life history is apt to be reinterpreted (Invitation
to Sociology)
D. Creating the ex-role (unconversion?)... the author is an ex-nun turned
sociologist
1. How does the person exiting a social role signal to "audiences"
that they expect to be treated differently and reacted to differently?
"For most exiters I interviewed this presentation of self to others
was a major factor in the adjustment process."
For ex-nuns, critical issues included clothing, length of hair, and even
ways of carrying their bodies.
"When I left I went crazy in regard to clothes, makeup, and how
I acted. I didn't want people to label me as an ex-nun."
2. Intimacies
a. Sex and romance: should I tell?
b. Friendship. "Very rarely do exiters experience a role exit without
some changes in the people who they value and with whom they associate as
friends."
c. Relating to members of your previous group. "I still have many
friends in the order and want to continue my relationship with them; however,
for the most part the relationships changed once I left. It was difficult
for me to deal with the fact that it had to be so."
d. Self-help groups. networks of ex-nuns, Alcoholics Anonymous, support
groups for mothers without custody of their children
MY SUMMARY: Dramatic personal changes in your sense of who you are almost
always involve equally dramatic changes in your reference groups, and it often
isn't easy to distinguish which came first--the social network changes or the
personal changes. It's a reciprocal process.
II. Attribution: how do we know about other people--who they are, their motivations
and purposes, their strengths and weaknesses, how we should be relating to them?