The Culture of Conformity: Understanding Social Consent

Hogan Patrick Colm
Duke University Press, 2001
177 pp.
Cover Price: $21.95 (paper)

ISBN: 08-2232-7163

In this monograph, Patrick Colm Hogan, a professor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut, examines the psychological and cultural determinants of social consent and conformity, with particular attention paid to economic inequities in contemporary America. One theme that Hogan emphasizes throughout his book is the underlying pervasiveness of subtle psychological coercion in America, while frequent lip-service is nevertheless paid to the importance of participatory democracy by its politicians.

Early in his book, Hogan takes up the important question of why more people, particularly those who (and they are in the majority) suffer economic and class inequities, do not rebel. As he attempts to demonstrate, using theory and data derived from social and cognitive psychology - and to a lesser extent, psychoanalysis - those who suffer the most from political, social and economic inequity often participate in the establishment and maintenance of their own suffering and humiliation, through the often unconscious absorption of largely unarticulated group norms.

In the first chapter, the author challenges the theory, often put forth by conservative groups, of "rational conformity" - that is, the idea that people will be motivated to do what benefits them. As Hogan repeatedly demonstrates, the masses, often in response to media manipulation, will acquiesce to policies that are clearly against their best interests, through a subtle process of identification with a ruling or leader class, and sometimes with an acceptance of a rather blatant distortion of facts. However, the author maintains that readers and viewers often will ignore their best interests as a result of an ongoing and subtle immersion in an ideological environment that "sets the terms of the debate so as to exclude certain sets of possible beliefs from consideration or discussion" (p 59). That is, the terms of debate limit the framework of what views are even considered imaginable. And once the terms of the debate are set, they tend to be self-perpetuating.

Hogan expands upon the transmission of belief and consent in his second chapter, with a particularly elegant section in which he emphasizes how the afore-mentioned problematics will guide thought and inference "even for those who appear to have rejected the relevant biases (my emphasis)" (p 61). Here he offers an example of a professor who believes that blacks and whites are equal in intelligence, but still makes that decision within the context of the broadly accepted problematic. His example is of a "Professor Smith", who finds that a black, British student, "Jones", responds in "an unclear way to readings and class lectures" (pp 61-62). While not consciously a bigot, Smith may still interpret this in terms of the student's intellectual capacities rather than in terms of regional differences in speech patterns and vocabulary, which might be potential shapers of the communication difficulty - the way he might in the case of a white student from a different part of the country. Even if Smith were to interpret the student's difficulty as stemming from a greater intellectual capacity, the question is still being framed in terms of the racial intellectual difference problematic. Thus, the terms of the debate are set so that sources of data and inferences about these data are circumscribed. Hogan later offers many fascinating examples of this bias as they appear in academia - particularly on tenure and promotion committees - which may be of particular relevance to many of the readers of this journal. While the author does not mention psychoanalytic institutes, as a bloodied but not bowed member of that group, I can vouch for the generalizability of Hogan's observations.

Hogan maintains that "many of the same practices that operate to determine specific beliefs may function to establish problematics" (p 71). One obvious example of this occurs in the print and broadcast media and the author reminds us, in chilling detail, of the consequences of changes in FCC rules that no longer instruct broadcasters to air diverse or critical views (that was the "Fairness Doctrine") - one more casualty of the Reagan/H.W. Bush years. Thus, there is a lack of a range of alternative perspectives that might alter the prevailing cognitive frame.

Hogan's book is also informed by the social psychological construct of the "Confirmatory Bias" in which discontinuous findings then tend to be classified as "exceptions", and thus do not result in an alteration of theory and practice. The social sciences - but the physical sciences as well - are rife with examples of this problem: that is, outcomes and theories that do not conform to previous research findings and prevailing theories tend not to be published, thus inhibiting - some would say, crippling - scientific research throughout history. (The dichotomy between the "truth" of the "hard" sciences vs the social sciences is another problematic that is ever with us. The physical sciences have their own set of hermeneutics, that is, at some point after the data is collected, an interpretation must be made. And, too often, this interpretation is shaped by a subtle social conformity). He points out that the dominant ideology always has the first word, and so establishes a baseline for other opinions, thus often limiting the terms of the debate. (This is what cognitive psychologists refer to as the "anchoring effect").

Throughout his book, Hogan offers a number of approaches to the deconstruction of authority and hierarchies of domination, structures that are maintained through the inculcation of social conformity, particularly if they are unconsciously internalized by all. For, if the intrapsychic structures of potential rebels are shaped through the various means described above, force may be rendered unnecessary. One of Hogan's more trenchant themes is the demonstration of how dominant hierarchies, often exercising authority through the sometimes intentional dissemination of incomprehensible information and engaging in a pretense of democratic process through "pseudo-consultation" (p 85), shape, not only opinion, but compliance and disaffection.

While, on the whole, this volume makes a fine contribution to current discourse on culture and society - and a particularly timely one given our socio-political zeitgeist - it makes rather limited and, at times, superficial use of psychoanalytic theory. For example, in the third chapter on "Ideology and Emotion", while making indirect reference to the phenomenon of group contagion in the transmission of emotion, Hogan neglects many other relevant psychoanalytic concepts, particularly those of Object Relations theory, which has made many important contributions to our understanding of group processes, for example, Wilfred Bion's Experiences in Groups (1959). Such concepts as splitting and projective identification are omitted from Hogan's work and, indeed, the term "unconscious" seems underutilized, particularly in Chapter 3. He also omits reference to the important and emergent areas of infant research and neuropsychoanalysis in helping us to understand how we may indirectly gain access to the minds of others. For example, the recently discovered phenomenon of "mirror neurons" in helping infant and parent to establish emotional contact and synchronization - thus forming the cornerstone of infant development and later emotional communication in adults - is entirely omitted from this volume, as are other important findings in this area. Also, on page 104, Hogan refers to transference as "a particular, pathological form of thought and action based on 'exempla' ", which modern psychoanalysts would regard as an unusually narrow usage of the term. Missing from consideration is the notion of the group-as-a-whole transference - a key concept in understanding the functioning of groups, small and large - and which comprises more than the sum of its parts. It is at this level that unconsciously determined norms are most deeply embedded and are most resistant to influence, despite intentional and concerted group efforts to change its functioning.

With these reservations, I would nevertheless recommend this book to instructors who are looking for a text that will help to enhance students' awareness of, and their participation in, the mechanisms of social consent.

References

Bion, W.R. (1959). Experiences in Groups . London: Tavistock.