Imagine having to complete 10 statements that start “I am . . .”. Your responses would likely span your individual identity (student, welder), your group identity (mother, union member), and your mass identity (American, Catholic). These identities define many of your opinions, values, and behaviors.
Personal and group identities are tied with personal outcomes. To get a college degree, you must think and act like a student. To maintain friendships, you must shape your attitude and behavior to accommodate your friends. A good life requires nurturing personal and group identities. Not so with mass identity.
In fact, there’s no obvious reason to have a mass identity. Mass collectives are impersonal: You will never meet most members of your nation, your ethnic or religious group. Mass collectives are also diverse: Americans in California are different from Americans in Alabama. Finally, these large collectives offer very little in the way of tangible benefits, while they demand a lot for the privilege of belonging. Being an American means paying taxes, serving on jury duty, voting, maybe even risking your life if there is a draft into a military campaign.
You could have a happy and fulfilling life without a mass identity. But most people pledge allegiance to some large and impersonal group, giving their time, money, and even lives for the intangible benefit of that membership—for their mass identity.
Evolutionary psychologists would say it’s a glitch in our brain’s programming. For millennia, humans have existed in tight-knit groups where everyone knew everyone else, where survival of an individual depended on belonging. Being cast out meant a quick death by predators, rival groups, cold, or starvation. It wasn’t until medieval times that the concept of a nation emerged to define “imagined communities.”1 Evolutionary psychologists would say we repurposed the brain structures that evolved to process small face-to-face group membership for use with large, impersonal groups, where costs are steeper and benefits more elusive.
Another view of mass identity says that it is not a glitch but a feature. Jon Haidt calls this idea hive psychology. He argues that humans are ultrasocial species (like bees) whose brains have a kind of “hive-switch” to turn off individual perspective in favor of the collective and abandon self-interest for the interest of the group.2 In this view, the cost–benefit analysis extends beyond any one individual to the whole group whose survival depends on its members. We could say that mass identity is activated when the hive switch is turned on.
In a way, radicalization is a process of loosening the hive switch, making mass identity more easily triggered by symbols, slogans, or images referencing the large collective.
Look around you, and you will likely see an American flag on someone’s property, an Irish clover bumper sticker, a sports team logo on a T–shirt, or a star of David on a gold chain around someone’s neck. All of these are markers of mass identity. People display them to assert their membership in a large and impersonal collective, such as a sports team fandom, an ethnic group, a religious group, or a nation. You may say these are irrelevant: Who cares what people display on their bumpers, their property, or their clothes? But psychological research shows that mass identities serve an important function: People flock to them when threatened.
In the days following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, American students rated their nation and their university as more important than either before or months after the attacks.3 The threat of the terrorist attacks made students embrace their mass identities. When their “hive” was endangered, the hive switch was flipped, and the mass identity came forefront.
One study illuminated why that might happen. When people are made to feel bad about themselves because of false-negative feedback, they are especially prone to “bask in reflected glory” (BIRG)—that is, associate themselves with a successful group by using personal pronouns (“we” as opposed to “them”) when describing the group’s achievements.4 The threat of bad self-image makes one lean on mass identity.
Similarly, national leaders are more likely to use “we” in speeches leading up to a war than in speeches made during peaceful times.5 The threat of war produces a more inclusive language that could trigger mass identity to rally the nation against that threat.
A different kind of threat—physical pain—also makes people flock to groups. Thus, when waiting for an electric shock, people prefer to sit in (anonymous and silent) the company of others who are going to be shocked as well, as opposed to sitting alone or sitting with others who are not expecting to be electrocuted.6 This anonymous collective helps to diffuse anxiety just by being there. Those who were very anxious about the procedure felt less anxious after waiting with others; those who were calm felt more anxious after waiting in company. The mere presence of others who share our fate allows us to share emotions and reduce stress.
Emotional contagion is a tendency of people to pick up on feelings of others around them, even when these feelings are not explicitly expressed.7 Epidemiology research has demonstrated that not only emotional states (depression,8 anxiety, loneliness)9 but also physical conditions (obesity, insomnia)10 and behaviors (suicide, divorce, illegal drug use) 11 can spread through a population like a virus, with emotional contagion likely playing a large role in transmission.12
Recent research on Twitter showcases emotional contagion on a mass level. When aggregated across geographic areas, tweets can be analyzed to see if, for example, curse words appear more frequently in some counties than in others. These results can then be compared with countywide health statistics. The more tweets from a particular county used words expressing negative emotions (“Ass*ole,” “bored,” or “jealous”), the greater was that county’s heart disease mortality rates. Remarkably, these Twitter emotion markers predict cardiovascular mortality better than all other factors combined: demographics, smoking, diabetes, hypertension, race, and marital status. And the surprise is that people who were tweeting were likely different (younger) than people who were dying from heart disease.
In other words, Twitter users, although not themselves afflicted with heart disease, expressed the emotional climate of their larger community. This emotional climate likely contributed to the rates of mortality among those suffering from heart disease in the community. Mass identity has real health consequences.
Another study examined not Twitter but Google Trends, which tracks the popularity of Google searches. Google Trends showed that counties with more frequent searches for “erectile dysfunction,” “how to get girls,” “penis size,” “impotence,” and “Viagra” were more likely to have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.13 This correlation held even when controlling for education and racial composition, as well as for other Google search phrases, such as “breast augmentation” and “menopause.” The study authors concluded that Trump appealed to men with “fragile masculinity,” anxious about fitting in with the social standard of manliness. The authors suggest that the correlation between fragile masculinity and voting behavior is driven by these men’s desire to associate with a strong authoritarian figure (a kind of surrogate for their own masculinity), such as Trump. The correlation between the umbrella of search terms related to fragile masculinity and voting for Republican candidates repeated in 2018 midterm elections, boosting the reliability of the results.14 As in the Twitter study, we can’t assume that the individuals who did the googling are the ones whose votes determined election outcomes in their districts. Yet this meta-data on the county level predicts individual voting behavior, suggesting mass identity at play.
Another study15 went one step further by demonstrating a relationship between mass radicalization of opinion and radicalization of action—terrorism. The study compared public opinion toward leadership of nine world powers (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, India, China, and France) among residents of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries. The more disapproval residents of a MENA country expressed (in a Gallup survey) against a world power, the more terrorist attacks against that world power originated from the MENA country. In other words, public opinion in country A about country B predicted rates of terrorism from country A toward country B.
It’s fascinating that, as with angry tweets predicting heart attacks, and googling “penis enlargement” predicting voting, people answering Gallup questions are likely not the ones orchestrating and carrying out terrorist attacks. But their opinion—mass opinion—is predictive of radical action among their compatriots who share their mass identity. Mass radicalization is connected with individual radicalization.
If mass identity can affect our emotions, actions, and even mortality, perhaps it is useful to pay attention to it. Perhaps our hive mind is not a glitch, even if we don’t quite understand it yet. Perhaps we should try to understand it better.
Twelve days before the presidential election of 2016, the Trump campaign analytics team told reporters that Trump had only a 15 percent chance of winning.16 National polls showed Hillary Clinton 6 points ahead of Trump. The spectacular upset that followed has been the subject of speculations and investigations ever since.
Several factors seem to have contributed to Clinton’s defeat, including the vagaries of the electoral college and FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Clinton’s improper use of email servers.17 Less objective, but not less important, were (fabricated) internet rumors about Clinton’s involvement with an underground pedophile and child trafficking ring operating out of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant—“Pizzagate.”18 These rumors, advanced by partisan Washington insiders like Eric Prince and Roger Stone and featured on the (now-banned from YouTube) conspiracy site Infowars, were amplified on social media by Russian trolls and bots (automated accounts posing as internet users).19
Ten days before the election, combined search terms “Clinton” and “pedophile” registered 0 interest on Google Trends (a measure of interest ranked from 0 to 100). Only 4 days later, the combination of search terms hit 100 on Google Trends, a maximum among 1.7 billion unique users of the search engine worldwide.20 Research now estimates that fake news stories such as Pizzagate were successful in swinging undecided voters from Clinton to Trump by a wide enough margin to explain the election going to Trump.21
These fake news stories were propped up by Trump, who began calling Clinton “Crooked Hillary,” reinforcing the idea that Clinton was a criminal. At Trump rallies, crowds routinely chanted “Lock her up!”—again referencing the idea that Clinton was a criminal who must be put in jail. “That became Trump’s closing argument —Watergate, endless investigations, criminal activities and an inability to govern.”22
The Trump campaign’s efforts to stay on this message paid off. For example, in Florida, early voters favored Clinton by about 4 percent, but those who decided on the candidate on the last day before the election (voters likely exposed to internet rumors and Trump campaign’s messaging) favored Trump by 13 percent—a 300 percent increase.23
Arguably the greatest political upset in American history, Trump’s victory was pulled off within 12 days, fueled largely by a rumor, a slogan, and a chant. To many political observers and scholars, this defies rationality and strains credulity.
Yet there are many examples of irrational, counterfactual ideas stirring mass identities and aiding mass radicalization. Attacks on Jews in Europe (pogroms) often resulted from rumors about Jews abducting Christian children.24 The 1917 Russian revolution, born of public frustration with the bloodbath of World War I and czarist oppression of peasants and factory workers, gained momentum with the rallying cry “Peace! Land! Bread!”25 In recent American history, Barack Obama’s presidential run against John McCain was nearly derailed by an advertisement that compared the young and relatively inexperienced candidate to Paris Hilton, a blonde Hollywood socialite.26
Mass identity manipulations (MIMs) are messages that, in their simplicity, shortcut through the nuance of political issues straight to the heart of mass identity. “Give me freedom or give me death!”—to hell with the complexity of taxation and representation: Americans want to be free of British rule.
MIMs come in different forms. “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light . . .” summons the memory of the tune and the urge to stand up as we experience the swelling of national pride. The song awakens the American mass identity.
Some of the most powerful MIMs have no words at all. Seeing an American flag when traveling abroad, do you feel pride and joy at being an American? A national flag is a powerful symbol able to rouse the national mass identity.
Other MIMs are all about the experience. Being part of a procession, a protest or a rally, or witnessing a religious or cultural ceremony, a torchlit procession or a military parade, can make participants feel as one, willing to protect one another and sacrifice for strangers.
MIMs are a kind of meme that can spread fast, far and wide. MIMs’ success is rooted not in a kitten’s cuteness or in a joke’s cleverness but in humans’ ability to share an identity with perfect strangers. MIMs reach past our individual interests and daily grind and straight into the identification with a large and impersonal collective to which we feel connection: religious group, ethnic group, and national group. Deep inside, most of us carry an allegiance strong enough to sacrifice for it. MIMs are psychological access codes that bypass our normal cynicism and self-preservation, bringing the cherished group to the forefront of our mind and preparing us for sacrifice.
In the following sections, we discuss a variety of MIMs: pictures, symbols, rumors, music/songs/chants, synchronized movements, and slogans. This is not an exhaustive list. In fact, we wrote a whole book about one powerful MIM—martyrdom.27 Here, we present only the most basic, most frequently used MIMs, whose power to mass radicalize has been documented.
In the wake of revelations about efforts by governments (Russia) and the private sector (Cambridge Analytica) to manipulate mass identity by targeted social media posts that included pictures, rumors, and slogans, time is ripe for researchers and policymakers to become more invested in studying MIMs.
Through paradox and vulnerability.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. An entire book about the Holocaust may not have the same gut-wrenching effect as a photograph of starving prisoners behind the barbed wire fences of Auschwitz. In the universe of images, some pictures are worth a million words.
A single image can have the power to undermine a military campaign. In 1972, the photo of a Vietnam girl running naked from a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm bomb on her village became iconic for its power to turn Americans against the Vietnam War.28 Attempting to put a dent in the public outcry about the photo, President Nixon mused that the image might have been altered by the photographer. The photographer, Nick Ut, responded, in print, “The horror of the Vietnam War recorded by me did not have to be fixed.” The war ended the same year.
Similarly, images of American soldiers, dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after they were captured and killed in the Black Hawk Down operation, shattered Americans’ positive view about US involvement in Somalia. This public sentiment contributed to the withdrawal of US troops from Somalia the next day and continued to inform US foreign policy for years afterward.29
Other images have the opposite effect: to incite people into battle. Notoriously, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda created an entire campaign of posters to radicalize the German nation for war. Many of these posters depicted blonde and beautiful Germans suffering at the hands of sickly, ugly, or inhuman-looking Jews or communists.
More recently, we have witnessed iconic images move mass opinion and action toward empathy. The photo of a drowned little boy, whose body washed up on a beach in Greece, changed the rhetoric about Syrian refugees in Europe.30 The average daily amount of donations to the Red Cross for the Syrian refugees was 55 times greater in the week following the release of the photograph than in the weeks prior. Even 6 weeks later, donations continued at a rate twice as high. Additionally, there was a 10-fold increase in donors signing up for monthly contributions to the Red Cross campaign asking support for refugees. Six months later, 99.9 percent of these donors remained committed to monthly contributions. The study’s authors attribute the increased giving for refuges to the emotional impact of the photograph, especially for people in Europe. Supporting this argument is the fact that at the same time as donations for refugees increased, so did the number of Google searches for “Syria,” Refugee,” and “Aylan” (the boy’s name).31
Google “iconic images,” and you may discover that you have already seen many: a Viet Cong officer, bloodied and tied up, being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese general;32 police dogs attacking an unarmed Black protestor in Birmingham, Alabama;33 a young woman screaming over the body of a student shot dead during the Kent State protests;34 a Chinese man with a plastic grocery bag in each hand confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square.35
One measure of an image’s impact is how many people recognize it from even a brief verbal description. This familiarity suggests that many people have been emotionally moved by these images and then moved to share their experience with others.
Not only are these images emotionally powerful, they are politically powerful as well. Each image we have mentioned supports one side in a political conflict. The fact that many people have shared them is evidence that these images have shaped opinions about the conflicts they represented.
Each of these pictures forces the indifferent to pick a side in the conflict, and moves those already committed higher in the pyramid of opinion radicalization.36 How could an image do that, and what about these particular images made them so powerful? We believe that the radicalizing power of iconic images lies in their combining two elements: paradox and vulnerability.
The paradox in the picture engages the mind. A dead toddler on an idyllic beach, a naked girl running from a blazing fire, or a man confronting a tank with nothing but grocery bags—the paradox brings our thoughts back to the picture again and again.37 Research on visual advertisements found that incongruous images made people change their perspectives by challenging habitual thinking. Not only does a paradoxical picture challenge one’s opinions but also it leaves a lasting impression: Images with incongruencies in them are more memorable than images that do not violate expectations.38 Like an unsolved puzzle, the incongruency nags at our order-seeking mind,39 making us think about the image and what it represents, making us remember it.
The second element of iconic images, vulnerability, engages our heart. A small child distressed or dead; a tied-up, bruised and bloodied prisoner being shot; an unarmed man attacked by vicious-looking dogs—these portray powerlessness juxtaposed with power. We sympathize with the powerless in these images, feeling pity and sadness, and we empathize, sharing their helplessness, hopelessness, and humiliation.
These emotions amplify the cognitive processes stirred by the paradox in the image. The cognitive pull and the emotional push motivate us do something to resolve both. As a result, we are likely to form a more radical opinion about the political conflict portrayed in the image and sometimes even to engage in radical action.
Through familiarity, message, and synchronicity.
Marching songs seem to be as old as war. Revolutions often have distinct songs associated with them, sometimes specifically commissioned for radicalizing the masses.
The most famous and time-tested is “La Marseillaise,” commissioned by the mayor of Strasbourg, France, in the face of an imminent invasion by Austrian forces intent on rolling back the French Revolution and restoring Louis XIV to the throne. The author, Rouget de Lisle, a soldier and violinist, reportedly stole the music from a popular song and stole half the lyrics from graffiti plastered around the city.40 The result was a MIM so successful that a French general once said “La Marseillaise” was worth 1,000 extra men in battle.41 To this day, the French sing it at protests and parades to inspire unity, and all over the world, people sang it to express solidarity with the French in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
How can a song be worth 1,000 soldiers? We suggest that there are three forces behind the radicalizing power of songs and chants. The first is familiarity.
In the chaos and uncertainty of the battle, a street protest, or a violent riot, anxiety is high. To act together, people must overcome their fear.
Research finds that familiarity reduces anxiety.42 Patients awaiting medical procedures, for example, feel less anxious when they are told exactly what will happen to them and in what order—expectations create perceived familiarity. So, too, a familiar song can reduce fear.
Familiarity with a musical piece activates pleasure circuits in the brain.43 Across varied pieces of music, familiarity correlates with both self-reported pleasure and physiological activity in the brain’s pleasure centers.44 The more familiar the music, the more pleasure it brings.45 A song as familiar as “La Marseillaise” would produce a wave of pleasure, reducing anxiety as it makes people feel good.
This effect might be stronger for simple songs than for songs with complicated melody.46 Marching songs or chants such as the soccer fans’ favorite “Olé Olé Olé” are especially useful as MIMs because of their simplicity.
But music is capable of eliciting all kinds of emotions.47 A sad song can make you cry, a theme to a horror movie can make your skin crawl, and happy music can bring joy. People manning the barricades or trenches choose music and lyrics that build up unity and courage. “La Marseillaise,” for example, begins with energetic chords and the words, “Arise, children of fatherland.” The refrain goes, “To arms, citizens, form your battalions! Let’s march! Let’s march!”
Radicalizing songs and chants offer a measure of comfort and pleasure to people in the uncertainty of a conflict. At the same time, they reinforce a radicalizing message through the lyrics. Message is the second radicalizing force behind songs and chants.
The Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917 relied on the MIM power of “The International.” It begins with rhythmic and rousing beats, “Rise, you branded and cursed world of the hungry and the slaves.” The radicalizing rhetoric is powerful, wrapped into familiar, pleasure-producing music.
The Nazis popularized the catchy tune of “Horst Wessel Leid,” the official song of Hitler Youth whose refrain says, “Today, Germany is ours, and tomorrow, the whole world.” “Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten” (“Battle Hymn of the National Socialists”), another popular Nazi song, begins with a blare of brass and the words, “We are the army of the swastika.” Both of these songs are banned in Germany and Austria today because their radicalizing power has been, unfortunately, well documented. A chilling re-creation of the power of such songs is available in a YouTube clip from the 1972 film Cabaret.48
In the 1960s, the US civil rights movement produced several songs that became anthems, sung by crowds at protests, sit-ins, and rallies. Among these are “We Shall Overcome” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
In the United States today, presidential candidates often use simple, familiar songs with a political message at rallies to rouse their followers’ mass identity—like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”49 or John Mellencamp’s “Our Country.”50 At Obama’s campaign rallies, people chanted “Yes we can!”—a simple message with a simple beat, familiar to all. At Trump’s rallies, people often chanted “Lock her up”—another simple message (about Hillary Clinton), albeit of a very different nature.
The familiarity of a song’s tune or a chant’s beat brings comfort in an unfamiliar setting. The message of the song or chant informs the mass identity of the crowd. But there’s an added benefit in singing or chanting together.
In a crowd of hundreds or thousands, the act of chanting or singing together creates an instant community. These strangers know the same song you know; they feel the same passion for its message as you feel; you can see on their faces the emotions you feel inside. The familiarity of the song or chant, shared with others, creates an instant community.
The third force behind songs’ and chants’ mass-radicalizing power, synchronicity, completes this transition from individual to mass identity. Synchronicity is a human tendency to involuntarily sync posture, speaking patterns, and physiology, including skin conductivity, breathing, and heart rates.51 Research has found a variety of stimuli that produce synchronicity: holding hands,52 staring at each other while sitting silently face-to-face,53 and moving in rhythm with another, such as tapping on the table in the same pattern.54 One powerful path to synchronicity is singing or chanting together. Choir singers develop synchronicity so complete that their hearts literally “beat as one,” rising or falling simultaneously as they sing or chant.55
To answer this question, consider the effects of synchronicity. In small groups, synchronicity predicts cooperation, conflict regulation, and motivation for group goals.56 Synchronicity also moderates risk-taking behaviors and boosts performance of group members.57 One study even demonstrated that synchronicity can reduce pain.58
Extrapolating these effects to large impersonal collectives, you can imagine how synchronicity can contribute to mass radicalization. Singing or chanting together, people in a street protest or on a battlefield sync their heart rates, brain waves, and levels of hormones that regulate stress, aggression, and joy. They begin to feel more unity, acting more cooperatively, striving to achieve group goals and moderating risky behaviors. If they get injured, synchronicity helps reduce their pain. Through synchronicity, a large crowd begins to act like a single organism—sharing emotions, motivations, and action.
Songs and chants are thus powerful MIMs. Through familiarity, message, and synchronicity, they activate the hive switch that unleashes mass identity, enabling large collectives of people to act as one, to submerge individual interests for the interest of the larger group. A marching song or a protest chant radicalizes en masse, preparing the community for battle.
Through stirring mass emotions, putting mass identities in conflict, and suggesting radical action.
The British East India Company represented the British colonial rule in India in 1757. In the battle of Plassey, the East India Company overthrew the Nawab of Bengal and established a military presence through the formation of the East India Company’s Bengal Native Army. The soldiers in the army were mostly Hindu or Muslims, while the senior officers were British. A hundred years later, in 1857, native soldiers had accumulated a number of grievances against the company, including low pay and frequent deployments far from their families. New rules added to the dissatisfaction: a law permitting remarriage by Hindu widows, seen by Hindu soldiers as an affront to their religion, and a regulation that a soldier unfit for foreign service would be ineligible for pensions. These grievances, both economic and religious, were widely shared—and yet it was a rumor that sparked a rebellion.59
The rumor had nothing to do with any of the grievances of the past. Instead, it was about something the British were allegedly about to do. And it was atrocious. The rumor was that the British were about to start using cartridges greased with pig fat and beef tallow. The soldiers had to tear the cartridges open with their teeth before they could pour the gunpowder into their rifles. The idea that the British were about to make them touch pig fat (forbidden for Muslims) or beef tallow (forbidden for Hindus) with their lips led to a series of violent riots against the East India Company, with two-thirds of the native regiments mutinying.
What was so powerful about a rumor that legitimate economic and religious grievances lacked? How could a rumor radicalize the majority of the Hindu and Muslim soldiers against the British?
A rumor is a particular kind of story. It is different from news: Unlike news, a rumor is false or at least unsubstantiated. It’s different from gossip: Gossip is only relevant to a few individuals, whereas rumor is important to a larger group.60 A rumor is a story that stirs collective emotions: fear, outrage, disgust, and anger.61 It is especially effective in uncertain or anxiety-producing situations62 because it reduces uncertainty and anxiety through a process of communal sense-making.63 A few elements mark successful (widely shared) rumors: plausibility, simplicity, suitability (how applicable to the anxiety-producing situation), vividness, and suggestiveness (how straightforward are the implications for opinion/action).64
The rumor that triggered mutiny among East India soldiers in 1857 fit the profile of a successful rumor: It was unsubstantiated but important to all soldiers. It stirred communal emotions, including outrage and anger. It was plausible, simple, vivid, and suitable for a community already aggrieved against the British. And it was highly suggestive: No Hindu or Muslim soldier could in good conscience obey orders to put forbidden animal fat in his mouth—the only course of action was rebellion.
Before, soldiers’ grievances were personal—my pension, my deployment, my widow now allowed to remarry. The rumor brought into the mix a collective grievance—our religious identity. The moral dimension of the rumored violation by the British opened the floodgates to the moral outrage that could be expressed and shared with other soldiers.
Modern historians have shown that regiments rebelled shortly after soldiers engaged in a religious gathering or procession; the British had permitted such rituals for both Hindu and Muslim soldiers.65 The timing of rebellions across regiments indicates that the time and space dedicated for mass gathering and celebrating of the mass identity allowed also for the sharing and amplification of the emotions stirred by the rumor. In other words, a rumor elicited a shared emotion, and with it, highlighted a mass identity. The simplicity of the rumor drew a line between us and them: the Indians versus the Brits. The suggestiveness of the rumor laid out the choice of action: Violate your religious belief and betray your mass identity, or rise up against those who threaten it.
Rumors are often thought of as stories circulating from person to person. But the rise of the internet as a medium of news that competes with traditional news outlets has undermined the distinction between person-to-person communication and mass media communication. We began with consideration of a rumor that surely spread person to person; the British controlled the telegraph system in India and did their best to block the story about cartridges greased with pig and cow fat. We move now to discussion of misinformation and disinformation campaigns—stories—that are launched and disseminated using mass media, including the internet. These stories depend on both mass media and person-to-person communication, and we believe that the same factors that make a rumor successful are important to the success of a misinformation campaign.
The power of a good story was not lost on the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who crafted a story of martyrdom out of a street thug murdered for unpaid rent.66 Goebbels wrote newspaper stories and delivered a eulogy that painted Horst Wessel as an embodiment of all that was good and pure in Germany, and his communist killers as intent on stifling Germany’s innocence and grace. The story, although fabricated, was effective: Horst Wessel became a national hero. After his death, stories that he was still fighting on one front or another gave birth to a euphemism for dying in battle: “He joined the Horst Wessel battalion.”
Goebbels’ story had all the necessary elements to go viral: It was simple (a good boy, killed by an anonymous enemy threatening us all), it stirred collective emotions (outrage and fear), it was plausible (Horst Wessel was indeed killed), it was suitable (many Germans felt threatened by communism), it was vivid (portraits of smiling, Aryan-looking Horst Wessel were widely publicized), and it was suggestive. Celebrating Horst Wessel’s martyrdom in annual pilgrimages to his grave and naming streets, military units, and ships after him, Germans fortified and radicalized their mass identity in conflict with their enemies’ identity.
In more recent examples, propagandistic misinformation has been weaponized by the Russian government for an internet era. After the Ukrainian revolution of 2014 threw off Russian influence, Russian media disseminated a story purportedly from Eastern Ukraine. According to the Russian “news,” Ukrainian armed forces crucified a 4-year-old boy on his town’s news stand,67 later driving around a tank with the boy’s lifeless body hanging off the turret. This story, told by “an eyewitness” in convincing detail (she claimed the boy was crucified wearing only his underwear), became a rallying cry for Russian volunteers to join a military campaign against Ukraine.
Similarly, after Russian forces occupied Eastern Ukraine and accidentally downed a passenger plane, the Russian propaganda mill put out a host of rumors to deflect the blame. These ranged from suggestions that the plane was downed by Ukrainians to stories that the plane was not carrying any people and that dead bodies had been brought to the field where the plane crashed—for publicity.68
Most recently, the US public has been on the receiving end of the Russian rumor mill—through social media including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Simple stories designed to stir mass identity and rouse emotions divided the US public into conflicting camps, radicalizing Whites against Blacks, liberals against conservatives, straight against LGBT.69 Some researchers believe that Russian “discourse saboteurs” were instrumental in changing the outcome of the 2016 election.70 According to communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, extensive studies of past campaigns have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”71
Perhaps a story of a crucified 4-year-old boy or a rumor of the British using pig fat for cartridge lubricant sound ridiculous to you. But these were effective MIMs among people who shared a mass identity that the rumor threatened. In an era in which our mass identities are easily identified and targeted through the internet, dismissing the radicalizing power of ridiculous stories is unwise. Especially in times of uncertainty and anxiety, rumors and misinformation campaigns are powerful MIMs that can rouse people to riots, lead to war, and change election outcomes.
Through synchronicity and basking in reflected glory.
The Maori, native New Zealanders, perform the haka, a ceremonial group dance and chant, for a variety of occasions. Perhaps the most famous haka is the one the New Zealand rugby team has traditionally performed before games. A war haka’s elements include scary facial contortions (pocking of the tongue and bulging of the eyes), stomping of the feet, grunting, and slapping of hands on thighs. Originally, warriors performed this haka before a battle to build up their spirits and to intimidate their opponents. It is a choreographed display of unity, ferocity, and athletic prowess.
Other traditional cultures have war rituals that also include choreographed group movements, designed to display skill, strength, and unity72 and to be performed in front of a large audience. Modern Western militaries stage parades where soldiers march in formations as citizens watch. Even during pretend war—sports—teams and fans alike often ritualize their pregame chants accompanied by synchronized movements.73 Football and soccer fans create stadium “waves,” rising and sitting down in a pattern.
Mass ritualized movement, be it haka, a hopak,74 or a parade, is used by a variety of cultures throughout the world to prepare for battle. What about mass ritual affects mass identity, and how can mass ritual radicalize? We propose two ways.
The first is synchronicity, the synchronization of movement, speech patterns, and biorhythms. (See the section on songs and chants.) Just as singing together or chanting together can synchronize people’s heartbeats and brain waves, so can moving together in time.
Synchronicity has profound and far-reaching effects on unifying and motivating a group. Research shows that spontaneously synchronized movements correspond with greater rapport among strangers meeting for the first time.75 The effects go beyond rapport and are especially strong when synchronicity is induced rather than spontaneous. Dancing together in synchrony produces cooperation, especially when people are intentionally trying to synchronize their movements (compared to when they spontaneously fall into synchronicity because of a rhythm they hear).76
When cleverly orchestrated, synchronized movements can make strangers act altruistically toward each other. In one experiment, people wore headphones while they tapped on the table the rhythm of audio tones. Some heard the same pattern and tapped in unison; others heard a different pattern, making their tapping distinct. Afterward, given a choice to stay and help their partner with some math problems, those who synchronized through tapping volunteered to help at almost three times the rate of unsynchronized participants.77 Synchronized movement makes group members give time and effort for group members’ benefit.
Driving this point further, another experiment re-created traditional military-style movements, asking some participants to march together around campus in unison, while other participants walked the same route for the same amount of time but without synchronization. Afterward, participants played economic games where they could maximize their own earnings or give up personal profit for the benefit of the group. Those who synchronized were 50 percent more likely to give up personal benefit for the group than were those who didn’t synchronize.78 A follow-up study established the reason for the difference: Synchronization created a feeling of unity—cohesion—which resulted in greater altruism.79
Mass rituals bring strangers together and engage them in synchronizing actions: singing, dancing, marching. The synchronization of movement in these mass collectives leads to greater unity, cooperation, and altruism, reinforcing mass identity and preparing self-sacrifice for the group.
Active participation in the ritualized movement is not even necessary. Observing it from the sidelines is enough to achieve a boost in mass identity through mass ritual.
One study of Spanish fire-walking, a ceremonial feat in which courageous (or crazy) individuals walk on burning coals barefoot, demonstrated that the biomarkers of stress (elevated heart rate, cortisol, adrenaline) synchronized between the walkers and their fellow villagers who watched their performance.80 Visiting spectators with no ties with the village or the fire-walker did not synchronize. Lacking a shared identity, these spectators didn’t benefit from a ritual that was a powerful MIM for villagers.
A study of soccer fans in Europe found that fans of a winning team experienced a surge in testosterone—the hormone marker of dominance—even though they only observed their team dominate an opposing team.81 At the same time, testosterone dropped in fans of a losing team, marking the submissive status of their team. The mass identity shared between the team and the fans shines through in biochemical reactions to the team’s successes and failures. If mass identity sometimes seems mysterious and abstract, these results show it to be concrete and powerful.
Synchronicity is not the only mechanism that drives mass ritual’s MIM effects. It is not by accident that ritualized war dances display strength and vigor; it is not by accident that military parades dazzle observers with the sheer number of marching soldiers and the latest and greatest weapons. Mass ritual is especially powerful as a MIM when it allows observers to feel the warm glow of basking in reflected glory (BIRGing), to identify with the successful group.82 BIRGing allows observers to achieve a boost to their own self-esteem—even though they made no contribution to the group’s success. This tendency is evident when individuals whose self-esteem is threatened use second-person pronouns (“we”) to describe their favorite team’s winning game.83 For mass identities of ethnicity, religion, or nationality, ritualized displays of a group’s size and power invite spectators to partake of the power by identifying with the group, boosting their mass identity.
The flip side of BIRGing is CORFing—cutting off reflected failure. Individuals use more third-person pronouns (“they”) to describe their team’s losing game; they protect their self-esteem by reducing group identification. The problem is that no team always wins, and no ethnic, religious, or national group always wins. If self-esteem were the only thing people cared about, no amount of mass ritual could keep up mass identification against a trend of losses.
But many people do maintain mass identification despite losses and even humiliations experienced by their ethnic, religious, or national group. How is this possible? The obvious answer is that self-esteem is not the only reward of mass identification.
One possibility is that a mass identity is an answer to mortality.84 Most religions offer an explicit answer to mortality with promise of an afterlife. Ethnic and national groups offer a kind of civil religion in which an individual continues after death as part of the progress of a group with a long history and an indefinitely long future. Mass identity offers symbolic immortality. No wonder we are ready to kill and die for it.
By highlighting mass identity’s boundary, leading to out-group discrimination, and fostering pluralistic ignorance.
Symbols are a diverse category. They include letters of the alphabet, numbers, and words; pictograms like the smiley face; abbreviations like USA; animals such as rats (traitors) or bulls (fearless); and historical figures—heroes (Paul Revere), martyrs (Gandhi), or villains (Hitler). Symbols are simple representations of complex ideas. They help us communicate and navigate the world.
Mass identities often rely on symbols to communicate the complexity of social identities. And mass identity can sometimes be manipulated through these symbols. Indeed, symbols are a particularly powerful kind of MIM.
Every nation has a unique symbol associated with it: the flag. Often, there is another graphic representation of national identity, such as the bald eagle for Americans, the two-headed crowned eagle for Russians, the Ukrainian trident, or the French fleur-de-lis. Among religions, Christians revere the cross, Jews the star of David, and Muslims a star inside a crescent moon. Political parties and movements use symbolic representations as well: donkey stands for US Democrats, elephant for Republicans, a peace sign for hippies, a MAGA hat for Trump supporters. LGBT’s symbol is a rainbow, neo-Nazis favor swastikas, and anarchists identify with the pentagram.
But mass identity symbols are not limited to pictographs. Some are hand gestures. The Nazis invented the Nazi salute; the Black Power fist denotes Black nationalism. At the Brett Kavanaugh Senate confirmation hearings, Zena Bash, seated behind him, repeatedly flashed an upside-down OK gesture that many recognized as a White Power salute.85
Symbols are the simplest, most basic representations of a mass identity. Being Ukrainian means many things. Are you ethnic Ukrainian, Russian, or mixed? Catholic or Orthodox? From the mountains in the West or the plains in the East? Big city or small village? These sub-identities of the mass identity are so different as to be in direct conflict at times. So what does a national flag convey to all whose nation it represents? What is the lowest common denominator among all of our loyalties and affiliations? The Ukrainian flag’s blue and gold fields highlight the one thing all Ukrainians have in common: their Ukrainian citizenship.
Mass identities—national, religious, ethnic—are so diverse that the only thing all members share is their membership. A mass identity is therefore defined less by the in-group than by the out-group. Being Black means not being White or Hispanic; being Jewish means not being Muslim or Christian; being a Democrat means not being a Republican. Us versus them is the simplest way to define a mass identity; symbols, in their abstract simplicity, are uniquely suited for this task.
Highlighting the divide between the in-group and the out-group(s), MIM symbols set the stage for mass identity radicalization. Experiments on minimal groups showed that highlighting the group boundary makes people likely to favor the in-group and discriminate against the out-group. This is true even if the groups are formed arbitrarily for the duration of the experiment, and the divide is irrelevant to any real-life conflicts (a preference for paintings of Klee vs. Kandinsky, or even assignment by coin flip).86
When we see a national flag, it reminds us of our national identity, defined by its difference from other national identities. As a result, we favor the in-group (our nation) and denigrate the out-group (foreigners). Seeing an American flag makes American students more nationalistic (negative toward the out-group) and makes them feel superior to non-Americans.87 Likewise, exposure to the German flag increased out-group prejudice among Germans.88 Across different nations, then, national flags, symbol MIMs, increase negativity toward those who don’t share that mass identity.
The effect of exposure to the flag doesn’t end with out-group discrimination: It can lead to greater unity within the in-group and even to changes in political behavior. A study in Israel assessed participants’ political positions before subliminally exposing some participants to the Israeli flag. Glimpsing the flag reduced political differences among participants, making them more unified than before. This change in attitudes translated into a change in their voting behavior: Those exposed to the flag voted more alike than those who hadn’t glimpsed the flag.89 A study in New Zealand found that subliminally exposing New Zealanders to the national flag made them more mindful of the national values and norms, although this exposure had no similar effect on foreigners.90
Seeing the national flag reminds people of their national identity’s norms and values, unites them, and prejudices them toward outsiders. These are all markers of mass radicalization. Flags, therefore, are MIM symbols whose mere presence can radicalize a national identity.
Beyond flags, other mass identity symbols have attracted less research. A few studies have examined the effect of religious symbols. A study in France found that more individuals were willing to sign up to be organ donors (consistent with the norms of Christianity) when the individual soliciting the donation wore a Christian cross.91 Similarly, a study in Chile using an economic game that measures cooperation showed that playing the game in a chapel produced more cooperation than playing it in a lecture hall.92 Exposure to religious symbols, like exposure to national symbols, leads to greater adherence to group norms.
Like national symbols, religious symbols can lead to greater out-group discrimination. Muslim students in Israel, primed with either symbols of Judaism or symbols of Islam, showed greater stereotyping and rejection of Israeli Jews.93
One mechanism of mass radicalization through symbol MIMs is their ability to highlight the mass identity, increasing stereotyping and rejection of the out-group. Another radicalizing effect of MIM symbols is fostering pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is a mistaken belief about a social group that is widely shared among group members—for example, college students’ mistaken belief that most students don’t mind heavy drinking on campus.94 Princeton University freshman males who shared this mistaken belief became more favorable toward heavy drinking over time, changing their initial attitudes toward the (mis)perceived norm.95 In other words, pluralistic ignorance is a common misconception about the opinions of other group members (meta-opinions).
Display of group symbols asserts a group’s legitimacy and cohesion, making the group seem more unified and fearsome to outsiders.96 In times of threat, symbol display may help restore the violated mass identity. Thus, Americans displayed the national flag much more frequently on their cars, front lawns, and clothes following the 9/11 terrorist attacks than they did before.97 The symbol MIM helped us cope with the outside threat.
Display of MIM symbols helps create a false meta-opinion that favors the group represented by the symbol (All these Ukrainian flags in northeast Philadelphia must mean the Ukrainian community is big and powerful here). In turn, meta-opinion can change people’s own attitudes toward the group (I guess Ukrainians are cool/important/interesting).
Pluralistic ignorance driven by MIM symbols can help legitimize a marginalized mass identity. The change in meta-opinion is especially likely when the MIM symbol is displayed on a high-power platform.
When we see a White power hand gesture on the US Senate floor, this display raises and legitimizes the alt-right movement. When the gesture is repeated during a Senate confirmation hearing, observers begin to wonder if the inaction of people watching the hearings in real life means they condone the display and condone the group and its norms. Before, the alt-right seemed distant and insignificant. After, it gained immediacy and clout. In 2019, the gesture was repeated at his courtroom hearing by the New Zealand mosque shooter.
Spray-painted swastikas communicate the hostile intentions of those who did the painting, but they also imply support of those who didn’t stop them. Perhaps there is no support; perhaps the swastikas were painted in the darkness, and every passerby since has silently cursed the vandals. But looking at the symbols, all the observers see is an unfettered assertion of one group’s claim to power. Supporters of the group will therefore feel reassured, and the opponents threatened, by the symbol’s presence. The more swastikas, the bigger and more assertive the group behind them seems.
The Nazi salute “Heil Hitler” began as a marginal group’s “secret handshake” and transitioned into a compulsory greeting, serving as a litmus test for loyalty to the Nazi party.98 The symbolic gesture was more than an alternative to “hello.” It asserted a mass identity’s ideology and the group’s social dominance every time it was used. Eventually, so many people were using it that it became a better test of defection than of loyalty.
Mass identities are fluid constructs. Nations, ethnicities, and religions persist only so long as enough people believe in them. Symbols express not only belief in a mass identity but also a public display of such belief. They prop up mass identities, assuring supporters, threatening opponents, and laying the foundation for mass radicalization.
By creating a collective action frame.
Remember George W. Bush’ presidential campaign slogan? Nobody does. Some slogans never catch on.
Others go viral.
Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign popularized “Make America Great Again!” The abbreviation of the slogan, MAGA, turned into a symbol of Trump support displayed on hats, pins, and bumper stickers. Another slogan, “Lock her up!” became a favorite chant at Trump rallies, affirming his supporters’ belief in Hillary Clinton’s criminal misconduct. Recently, Trump rallies have been using a different slogan, “build that wall,” to support his agenda to fund a wall on the border with Mexico. In a tweet, Trump amended this shorter version by adding a rhyming second line: “Build the wall, and crime will fall.”
These slogans may sound ridiculous to Trump’s opponents, but they excite and mobilize his supporters. What is it about slogans that can excite crowds, and sometimes even foment a revolution?
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was not the first attempt to overthrow the czar. Friction describes a decade-long effort by Russian activists to persuade the peasants to rebel. Idealistic young people traveled the countryside convincing peasants that the cause of their miserable existence was the czar, and the cure was revolution. But the peasants refused to listen, often reporting the agitators to the police. This disappointment led some activists to turn to terrorism; People’s Will aimed to kill the czar and free the peasants to act on their grievances. They did kill the czar. They failed to move the peasants.
The man who succeeded in moving the peasants shared the goals of People’s Will but not their idealism. Vladimir Lenin was a cynic. Instead of schlepping down dirt roads to schmooze with barbarians, Lenin lived in Europe off the rent he charged peasants to use his family land. This while popularizing the slogan “All land to the peasants!”
World War I took able men away from their farmlands. In 1915 and 1916, the czarist military routinely “requisitioned” grain and other food from the peasants—already weakened by the loss of breadwinners. Lenin’s slogan fell on fertile ground. He told the peasants what they yearned to hear.
He told them a lie. In his political writing of 1915 and 1916 (writing that illiterate peasants would never read), Lenin advocated state ownership of the land.
Lenin’s gift was his understanding of the Russian peasants’ mass identity. His slogans spoke to them in the simplest terms, appealing to deep-seated emotions instead of intellectual truths or moral convictions. “All land to the peasants” promised bread. Circuses were promised in another of Lenin’s greatest hits: “Communism is Soviet government plus electrification of the whole country.” At a time when electricity seemed akin to magic, Lenin’s branding linked a future utopia with the Soviet government.
Understanding the peasants’ mass identity didn’t mean Lenin cared about them. When the peasants rebelled against the Bolsheviks’ confiscation of bread, Lenin rolled out another slogan. “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat!” placed the responsibility for hunger on the peasants and justified the Red Army’s atrocities against them.
To fuel messaging, Lenin started a cultural revolution in the 1920s, sponsoring artists, especially writers and poets. Amid the civil war and mass starvation, artists faced a choice: Create propaganda or perish. Some immigrated, like Ivan Bunin. Others were arrested and executed, like Nikolai Gumilev. But many writers and poets threw their creative power behind the revolution.
Lenin’s intuition to invest in talented poets to spread the Party’s message was on target. Research shows that rhymed messages are easier to remember and more persuasive than unrhymed messages carrying the same idea.
Slogans are the most basic expression of one side of a political issue. They appeal to widely shared emotions, creating a perception of unity in a crowd of strangers. They prescribe a (simple) course of action that stems from these shared emotions, mobilizing the crowd.
“Make America Great Again” condenses complicated economic and political issues into two basic premises. First, things used to be great, but not anymore. With its wistful “great again,” the first premise elicits nostalgia. Second, they better give back our greatness. The second premise, conveyed through the imperative and indiscriminate “Make America” builds anger. Notice how the slogan eludes details: Who is responsible for the not-greatness? What was the greatness that is no more? How to bring it back? There is plenty of room for political maneuvering while the crowd, moved by nostalgia and fired up by anger, throws support behind the politician promising to satisfy these emotions.
“Build that wall, and crime will fall” adds the persuasive power of rhyming to the emotional appeal of crime (fear) and wall-building (safety and ownership).
Gifted messengers create slogans that speak to mass identity in the language it understands: simplified divisions and mobilizing emotions. “Us versus them,” where we are threatened and must fight for the glorious future we deserve, is a timeless hit. The Great Wall of China and the remnants of the Berlin Wall testify to the historic appeal of walls—if not to their practicality.
Other countries also have famous slogans. The banner of the French Revolution and the motto of France today is “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.” For Hitler, the foundational slogan was “Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.”
The examples cited show what slogans have in common: They are brief, memorable, and highlight one side of a political conflict. Slogans can be understood as condensations of a political cause and, specifically, of the collective action frame of that cause.
Sociology has studied why some social movements persevere and succeed, while others quickly fade and accomplish nothing. To be successful, a social movement needs a collective action frame that can move individuals to sacrifice for the cause. The frame must identify a problem or grievance and who or what is to blame (diagnostic frame), must identify what is to be done (prognostic frame), and must identify who should do what is to be done (motivational frame).99
Slogans remind us of the attacks our group has suffered, highlight our glorious goals, and call for action. That is, slogans are diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings of a political cause. They are condensed versions of the collective action frames that power social movements.
At the bottom of every successful political slogan is a threat or injustice, and a promise of safety and justice. A good slogan evokes emotion in members of the group threatened or suffering: fear, anger, shame, and humiliation. The promise of common action toward justice and safety evokes positive emotions: pride, hope, and joy.
These emotions are all focused on a particular mass identity. Emotional reactions make the mass identity more salient and better able to radicalize opinion and motivate sacrifice for the group. Most individuals have more than one mass identity—that is, they care what happens to their nation, their ethnicity, their religious, regional, and neighborhood groups. A good slogan raises one identity above all others.
In short, slogans are a form of MIM that can radicalize sentiment and action for a political movement. Chanted in a mass public setting, a slogan joins in the MIM power of song and synchronicity.
Cognitive simplicity and emotional power.
One thing all MIMs have in common is simplicity. No need to think deep thoughts or engage an ideology, no need to spend time studying or interpreting. MIMs require a minimum of effort from the audience. A photo or a few chords of a song, a glimpse of the flag, and we are transported into the political theater, ready to transcend individual interests for a large and impersonal collective. MIMs deliver the biggest bang for the radicalizing buck.
For many observers, this simplicity can be misleading. Sitting in an armchair, surrounded by books and articles about a political conflict, we are likely to downplay the importance of a photograph, newly painted graffiti, or a video of a crowd chanting. Who would fall for that, we may think, dismissing the MIM.
Research has long mapped two routes to persuasion: central and peripheral.100 Attitudes change via the central route to persuasion when we rely on well-informed arguments, acknowledge both sides of the issue, and trust experts. A debate, the kind we would expect between debate teams, would rely on the central route to persuasion. The central route to persuasion is politics at its refinest.
In contrast, the peripheral route to persuasion builds on heuristics instead of algorithms, quick and dirty estimations instead of lengthy calculations, celebrities instead of experts. Attitudes and behavior can change via the peripheral route when we are less attentive to the substance of the argument than to the source and style of its delivery. MIMs rely on the peripheral route to persuasion to radicalize political attitudes and behaviors.
Several factors make the peripheral route to persuasion appealing. These include the audience’s inability or unwillingness to devote the resources to central route processing. If a political issue is too complex, if the audience is overwhelmed with other tasks or thoughts, or if the audience doesn’t have time or the intellectual capacity to discern the issue’s nuances, it’s more likely to rely on peripheral route processing. The audience is more likely to be influenced by MIMs.
So, sitting in an armchair studying political issues, we are likely to miss the true power of MIMs: We have the time and inclination to contemplate mass politics; we dedicate our undivided attention and our intellectual capacity to the issue. These are ideal conditions for central-route persuasion. But in the midst of a street protest or a noisy rally, when feeling threatened by a foreign adversary or an authoritarian government, the peripheral route moves us easier and faster. These are the conditions that drive the power of MIMs.
Even in less dramatic circumstances, we may lean on MIMs when we feel overwhelmed. The expanding reach of social media puts pressure on our cognitive resources and absorbs increasing portions of our day. As we struggle to keep up with the influx of complex and conflicting stories, we are more likely subject to peripheral-route persuasion, relying more on MIMs’ simplicity than on experts’ complex analyses.
The second common factor among MIMs is their appeal to emotions. Sober discussions about political issues will cite studies and statistics, speaking to cold rationality rather than to heated emotions. In contrast, MIMs produce gut reactions and irrational behaviors.101 Policy wonks speak to the issues; MIMs speak to the heart.
Emotions are another political force too often ignored by experts. Politics in the Western world are dominated by White men who’ve spent lifetimes mastering the ability to control impulses, delay gratification, and prioritize logic and reason above emotion. A political candidate can lose support for appearing too emotional (Gov. Howard Dean lost the presidential nomination for an excited scream).102 Female politicians are often criticized for appearing too emotional (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for a video of her dancing in joy).103 With emotions so costly to political careers, it is not surprising that political players and experts underestimate the impact of emotion-stirring MIMs. Having been trained to control and deprecate emotions, experts and politicians often expect logic and reason to have the final word on political issues.104
But psychological research has rejected this idea again and again. It showed instead that attitudes and actions are often irrational, framed in logical terms only after they were born of sensations (warm sensation in the hand makes a stranger seem more likable),105 social pressures (an authority’s order will lead most people to deliver deadly electric shocks to an innocent stranger),106 and emotions (feeling bad about having done something shameful leads to attitude change that justifies the behavior).107
Jon Haidt’s apt metaphor describes a rider atop an elephant, where the rider is our logical mind, and the elephant is everything else that drives us outside of conscious awareness: emotions, sensations, and social pressures.108 Haidt observes that too often in political discourse, we pay attention to the rider and ignore the elephant. Yet the difference between the rider’s and the elephant’s size and power suggests that trying to persuade the rider to go in a particular direction is much more effective if the elephant can be persuaded first. Once the elephant is willing, persuading the rider is easy; but if the elephant is digging in or dragging its feet, persuading the rider is unlikely to be enough. So, too, we often try to persuade people by informed logical arguments, when the difference that needs settling is within the emotional domain.
MIMs are politically powerful because they persuade the elephant, speaking to our fears and hopes, our loves and hates, our pride, anger, and shame. Shared within the mass identity, individual emotions add up to more than the sum of their parts when they achieve synchronicity. Synchronicity unites strangers into something like a single organism, with individual interests submerged in group interest, and actions coordinated for common goals. That’s some mighty horsepower behind silly rumors, crowd chants, and street graffiti.
Failing to account for MIMs, high-brow pundits failed to predict the Arab Spring, the Ukrainian revolution, or Donald Trump’s election. Chapter 12 considers mass radicalization in the United States today. Some of the driving forces behind it were MIMs, including MIMs deployed through internet social media by an adversarial foreign power in an effort to destabilize and control American politics.