Sociology 3701: Outline--Week Twelve

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? How is this dissonance resolved? We'll think about this again when we watch "The Fog of War."

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; more about this later)

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); you can't bring your guitar (Can you bring books?)

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. Cognitive dissonance and symbolic interactionism work well together. 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")... this applies not just to becoming a Marine but to a lot of other dramatic personal changes

1. Isolation/insulation from the people who supported your old way of being.

2. Exemplars and heroes... you'll never forget your drill instructor. "By the time we're done, I can motivate these recruits to jump off ..."

3. Subculture: new language, songs, symbols, art. (Getting a marine tatoo, for example) My father-in-law and the Marine song (My brother's dog tags were stamped "Anti-war")

4. Relationship between change of behavior and change of attitude. Cognitive dissonance helps to explain why it is that if we can change someone's behavior, we can change their attitude.

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. Stark/Loflund Conversion Model

1. The person experiences enduring, acutely-felt tensions (Instructor: this helps to set up a cognitive dissonance situation)

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 (from this point on, a step by step process. Remember the pyramid of choice and the differences that will develop between two people who are recruited, the one who takes the next step toward joining and the one who resists. (We're interested in the social psychology of resistance as much as the social psychology of joining.)

4. Extra-cult attachments are absent or neutralized. William Bainbridge: social implosion process.

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.... I've converted these newcomers; I must believe very deeply. (Maybe a reason for the strength of faith among young Mormons who spend two years in missionary efforts)

6. My addition: your whole life history is apt to be reinterpreted ( Invitation to Sociology)... now you can see the ways God was always trying to reach you.

III. Groups: Law and Disorder. Discussion based on the questions you came up with for chapter 5.

A. Student who read Courtroom 302 (Steve Bogira): "It's just a self-serving myth that we'd rather release ten guilty people that have one innocent person go to jail."

1. The case of Leroy Jones (ch 9 of Courtroom 302)

a. eventually led to 2 federal lawsuits, one requiring a change in the procedures of prosecutors and detectives, and the other awarding Jones $801,000 for fales arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and intentional infliction of emotional abuse

b. Police never reopened the case; they "knew" Jones had been the real offender

c. Prosecutor Locallo (now a judge). Never felt bad for Jones... still thinks Jones was guilty "based on my conversations with Purvy"... see p. 170

B. Based on the DNA exonerations of death row prisoners, "law professor Samule Gross and his associates concluded that 'if we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences, there would have been over 28,500 non-death-row exonerations in the past 15 years, rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred."

C. T and A: "How can you possibly think you got the right guy in the face of the new evidence to the contrary? Because, you convince yourself, the evidence is lousy, and look, he's a bad guy; even if he didn't commit this particular crime he undoubtedly committed another one."

D. The Investigators and "testilying" (Myron Orfield study)

E. The Interrogators. 15-25% of exonerated prisoners have confessed to a crime they didn't commit.
How can this be?

1. The 9-Step Reid Technique and the "Bible" of interrogations: "It is our clear position that merely introducing fictitious evidence during an interrogation would not cause an innocent person to confess."

2. Officers who are sure they've never coerced anyone into a false confession. "I never interrogate innocent people"

3. Experiment by Kassin and Fong: recruited 44 professional detectives averaging nearly 14 years of experience (2/3 trained in the Reid Technique)to observe videotapes of people being interrograted by an experienced police officer and make their own judgement... did not better than chance yet convinced that their accuracy was close to 100%

E. "Currently the professional training of most police officers, detectives, judges and attorneys includes almost no information about their own cognitive biases; how to correct for them as much as possible; and how to manage the dissonance they will feel when their beliefs meet disconfirming evidence. On the contrary, much of what they learn about psychology comes from self-proclaimed experts with no training in psychological science..."

F. Videotaping of interrogations