Collective Behavior and Public Opinion

Rapid Shifts in Opinion and Communication

Jaap van Ginneken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135629038
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a highly innovative and stimulating work with the outline of an entirely new approach to massive and rapid shifts in opinion and communication. It discusses and explains such mysterious phenomena as sudden crazes and crashes, fads and fashion, hypes and manias, moral outrage and protests, gossip and rumors, and scares and panics.

Rich in alternative insights, the book is divided into four parts. Part I discusses the points of departure: the most relevant processes of opinion formation and communication. Part II is about phenomena on three different levels, that have traditionally been studied within the twin fields of mass psychology and collective behavior sociology. Part III focuses on the three prime forms of "emotional coloring" of opinion currents and public moods. Part IV discusses a combination of some of the aforementioned phenomena: successive crazes and crashes in financial markets, and looks at why technological and economic, and social and opinion forecasts often fail so miserably.

The audience for this book includes students of social and mass psychology, social movements and collective behavior sociology, and opinion and communication in general. Professionals in public relations, marketing, health, finance, and politics, as well as the educated lay audience, will also find this book of interest.

PART I
MIND QUAKES

CHAPTER 1
Public Opinion as a Complex Adaptive System (CAS)

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

—R. H. Tawney, British historian (Gross, 1987, p. 321)

The true test of a brilliant theory [is that] what first is thought to be wrong is later shown to be obvious.

—Assar Lindbeck, Nobel Prize Committee (Giacalone & Rosenfeld, 1991, p. 3)

The first section of this first chapter probes the case of Benetton, which acquired worldwide renown and notoriety, through the “3C” rock star strategy of continually courting controversy. By turning the Benetton brand into an issue, into a matter of recurrent reporting and conversation, it succeeded in boosting its visibility and recognizability from zero to close to 100%. In order to see how this works, we use the second section to delve somewhat deeper into the phenomenon of public opinion in general, which is often treated as if it were the mere sum of individual opinions of relative stability. Rather, it should be approached as a dynamic configuration in constant transformation. In the third section, this is further explored by taking a closer look at the newly discovered metaprinciples of complex adaptive systems. Within this framework, it becomes understandable how immeasurably small details may provoke dramatic turnarounds.

CASE NUMBER ONE: THE TRUE COLORS OF BENETTON

Let us take a look at a relatively recent controversy in public opinion, or rather a string of controversies, about a brand. It catapulted the brand into the front ranks of world renown and notoriety, for better and for worse. It happened through a series of tremors. We later encounter other examples, where one mighty earthquake made public opinion shift from positive to negative, from sympathy to antipathy.

The story of the Benetton family is a classic “rags to riches” tale. The father was a simple bicycle repairman. After he died (around the end of World War II), the older children were forced to leave school early and try to make a living. The eldest, Luciano, became a ready-to-wear salesman; his sister, Giuliana, went to work in a ready-to-wear workshop. Ten years later, they set out on their own. Luciano made the rounds on his motorbike to sell what they produced. Giuliana used a knitting machine, on which she made colorful sweaters. Ten years later, they decided to change the label from the bland, French brand name, Très Jolie, into their own characteristic Italian family name, Benetton, and embarked on one of the major entrepreneurial success stories of our time. Gradually, the younger brothers Gilberto and Carlo joined the business as well (Moskowitz, 1987).

The success of the company was based on a unique configuration of factors. Style: They thrived on the long-term evolution from drab to vivid colors and patterns, natural fabrics, the emergence of casual youth, leisure, and sportswear. Production: They had a key part made on ultramodern machinery, and another part made by archaic subcontracting methods. This enabled them to maintain competitive prices, while at the same time circumventing employment rules and labor unions. Distribution: They developed a franchise formula, whereby shopkeepers put up the money, bought a fixed interior (and exterior) design, and a changing seasonal collection. Trends: The outlet PCs all came to be connected to a central computer system, which directed Benettons undyed sweaters to be instantaneously finished in the fashion color of the day for any region of the world, and to be airlifted there (van Niekerk, 1993).

By the late 1960s, they already had some 300 shops throughout Italy and opened their first shop in Paris. By the late 1970s, they already had almost 300 shops in France, hundreds elsewhere in Europe, and opened their first shop in New York. By the late 1980s, they had hundreds of shops in North America and some 5,000 worldwide. But they also ran into overexpansion problems. Whereas sales continued to rise, profits stagnated for the first time in 1988, and even fell in 1989. They launched minority shares, but this was not entirely successful. They tried to diversify, but had to make a Uturn back to their main business—fashion. Finally, Luciano Benetton and his family decided that they could restore profitability by having more of an “image.”

For a few years, they worked with Oliviero Toscani. His father had been a long-time press photographer at the daily, Corriere della Sera. He himself had gone to art school in Zürich, Switzerland, and had in turn become a well-known fashion photographer, working for magazines such as Donna, Moda, and Vogue. He was very much a provocateur, in tune with the spirit of the times (Toscani, 1995).

After “Jesus Christ Superstar” had become a popular musical, a friend of his had launched a new brand of “Jesus” jeans, and Toscani had developed a promotion campaign of controversial images and texts. Predictably, they were attacked by the Vatican and their official newspaper, the Osservatore Romano. Later, when they criticized Toscani and his advertising agency of stamping the Benetton logo on all the misery of the world, and thereby exploiting it, he retorted without blushing by observing that this was exactly what Christ, his disciples, and the Church had done with the crucifix for almost 2,000 years. The Bible was an accumulation of unsettling stories and images, he said, no different from his own campaigns.

Later, Toscani had done the well-received “Real People” campaign for the new American fashion brand, Esprit. It portrayed ordinary people picked from the streets in their casual wear, rather than sterile super models. He also did a campaign for the new Italian fashion brand, Fiorucci, part of which was later bought by the Benetton family. That is how Toscani got to work for them as well. Until the late 1980s, Toscani’s Benetton campaigns had been noteworthy, but not revolutionary. They portrayed lively youngsters—alone, in couples, or in groups—in vividly colored knitwear. From 1989 on, however, they developed a new focus.

On one hand, they had gradually shifted to a new name and logo in a green quadrangle, “United Colors of Benetton.” This was vaguely reminiscent of the United States, the United Nations, and some kind of “global village,” or melting pot. On the other hand, they had gradually shifted to matching new visual themes; bridging differences in national colors, skin colors, and so forth. It turned out this sparked recurrent controversies, which obviously served their purpose very well. The strategy was based on several elements: graphic and archetypical images, which could alternately be taken to confirm or disclaim stereotypes; toying with manifold possible interpretations by choosing never to “anchor” a simple meaning for the image in an explanatory by-line. There would be a contrasting reception of the images by different social groups due to cultural diversity, which would automatically stir up a debate.

There had been some minor controversy when they began by displaying the national flags of “opposite” countries. When Gorbachev visited Paris at the end of the Cold War, Benetton lined the entire Champs Elysées boulevard with posters featuring kissing Black twins clad in Soviet and American flags. Similar campaigns where based on the Greek and Turkish flags, the British and the Argentinian flags, the German and the Israeli flags. These depictions encountered fierce opposition; the first complaints: the media refused to print them, discussions were held at regulatory bodies, and there were problems with government restrictions imposed.

The campaign went into higher gear with a Black woman presenting a bare breast to a white baby. The ad was forbidden by the White minority in South Africa, and criticized by a Black minority in North America. The theme was further developed with a Black and a White hand tied by handcuffs, a Black adult hand and a White baby hand, Black and White toddlers with “devils horns” and an “angel curls” hairdo, Black and White toddlers kissing, on a potty, sticking their tongues out, and so on. In retrospect, it seems surprising that many of these apparently innocent posters stirred controversy and “free publicity” at all. But Toscani and Benetton had to continue to push the limits in order to keep the attention.

By the early 1990s, they chose a complete revolution in advertising strategy. On one hand, they would give up the visual theme of “united colors,” and thereby all direct references to the product itself. On the other hand, they would simply focus on humanitarian subjects, with press photographs selected and acquired for that purpose. These were pictures about Mafia terror and Mafia victims in Italy, about civil and military violence, about refugees and poverty. Earlier, at the outbreak of the Gulf conflict, they had published pictures of a war cemetery. Later, when the Yugoslav conflict persisted, they published pictures of bloodstained clothes of a known soldier killed in the fighting. Although many protested against these pictures, a small Sarajevo agency asked Benetton to send thousands of free copies of such posters to line the streets of the Bosnian capital, and Benetton complied.

Most controversial of all were the “safe sex” and AIDS campaigns. Early forerunners were a poster with colored condoms, and another one featured test tubes with the first names of major political figures of the day: Yasser, Helmut, George, Mikhael, and Moammar. In 1992, Benetton gave worldwide exposure to a press picture of dying AIDS activist, David Kirby, surrounded and supported by his family. The latter condoned both the original publication of the pictures in Life magazine, and their later recirculation by Benetton. The chosen picture had earned its author several awards, and even a second prize at the World Press Photo competition. Yet its public exhibition as part of an advertising campaign stirred many protests, for instance, by the Catholic Church.

Toscani countered that it should be seen as the present-day equivalent of Michelangelo’s famous Pietà sculpture. For once, it showed an AIDS victim supported by a caring family, rather than abandoned as a pestilent outcast. Philippe Ariès’s famous study on La mort et l’Occident had already shown, he added, that death and its images had become a taboo subject throughout the West. Only on very few occasions had major Western media ever dared to show AIDS victims (or cancer victims, for that matter).

Others referred to the essays of Susan Sontag on “Illness as Metaphor” and “On Photography” to account for the strong reaction. The format of the picture, they said, reminded one of an intimate family snapshot, which was suddenly exposed to the impudent eyes of the public (van Niekerk, 1993, pp. 45–54). During a trip to the United States, Toscani saw a local television report about a row, when a student had come to the college gates, dressed in no more than a tattoo, “HIV Positive.” This inspired another controversial picture and campaign.

Throughout the 1990s, the Benetton campaigns continued to divide people. No campaigns were more often denounced as immoral, or more often acclaimed as innovative. The critics repeated that advertising space should be filled with positive and uplifting images, that filling it with these negative and depressing images was confrontational, and amounted to a cynical exploitation of conflict, death, and sex for personal gain. The supporters repeated that the campaigns broke down artificial barriers, that most mass media were commercial anyway, and that there was no a priori reason why the huge budgets and space reserved for advertising could not be used to make people think about social problems. But they acknowledged that within 6 years, its strategy of thriving on controversy had propelled Benetton into one of the best-known brands in the world.

The Benetton case is particularly interesting and relevant, because it illustrates a number of complex processes that we elaborate on in the course of this book. Even though it was not so much an example of one singular, rapid, radical, and massive shift, but rather of a succession of smaller ones, which ultimately led to the creation of a new and compelling brand image. This thorough mutation was fed and sustained by ever-new debates. There were feedback loops and media hypes, there was synergy formation, and an emerging pattern. In a way it was a twin pattern, a split image, a dual public—of proponents and opponents—with few people remaining indifferent.

The campaigns were both clear-cut and ambivalent; they resonated with the deepest hopes and fears of each individual, and also with feelings of admiration and loathing. They had their social effect in a very specific set of circumstances. There have been many attempts to repeat the feat, but these attempts had much less impact. There was no guarantee at the outset that this approach would work, and there is no guarantee that it will continue to work. There is something profoundly immeasurable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable about public opinion. Rather than a stable aggregate, it should be seen as a dynamic configuration; or even a complex adaptive system. Let us take a closer look at what this implies.

THE PHENOMENON OF PUBLIC OPINION

Within a few years time, Benetton had succeeded in turning an unknown and bland fashion brand into one of the best-known and most forceful brands in the world. It succeeded, because photographer Oliviero Toscani intuitively exploited the laws of opinion formation. He provoked recurrent controversies and thereby created “issues” that stirred the media and the public over and over again to take sides. In order to understand this, we must take a closer look at the functioning of public opinion. Public opinion is not the static sum of individual opinions, but a dynamic process, which continually evolves new and shifting patterns. This section sketches some basic principles, which will be further refined in the course of the book.

Of course the first question must be what public opinion really is. By the time the notion had become broadly used, a handbook identified more than 50 different definitions (Childs, 1965). Let us therefore start from the words themselves. First of all, public opinion is about opinions, not about statements of fact. It is an opinion or value judgment about which people are divided.

Secondly, public opinion is “public.” It does not refer to private opinions, which people may hold but keep to themselves. Public opinion is about opinions that people make public and express. Or, as Noelle-Neumann (1994) put it, it is “a social psychological process lending cohesion to human communities . . . a process in which agreement about the values of the community and the acts derived therefrom is continuously reestablished” (page). According to this definition, public opinion is a key process in the formation, reformation (and dissolution) of groups. What is it that people want to identify with, belong to? And what is it that they do not?

Public Opinion and Opinion Polls

The notion of public opinion has a long and varied history. It was always related to some kind of public debate, in which a number of free citizens spoke out, to reach some kind of common understanding about public questions. During Greek and Roman antiquity, and in southern Europe, this was often related to outdoor meeting places such as markets and squares— the forum. During the Enlightenment, and in northern Europe, it was often related to new indoor meeting places such as the coffee houses in larger English cities, the salons in France, and the Tischgesellschaften in the German language area. Within these relatively open environments, new groups, new aspirations, and new ideas came to the fore; for instance, regarding further restrictions on the powers of the absolute monarch, and extensions of the powers of people’s representatives in deliberative assemblies or parliaments, claiming to represent popular sovereignty and the general will (Lippmann, 1947).

Yet this public opinion of the late 18th and early 19th centuries remained an “elite opinion.” Only a limited upper class was supposed to be well informed, capable of reasoned judgment, and therefore entitled to vote. A true “mass opinion” only came about toward the end of the 19th century. The rise of the popular press enrolled an ever larger share of the general public to participate in the ongoing debates. Workers and women claimed voting rights. It was only during these decades, then, that public opinion acquired its modern nature; that current opinions and public moods were discovered in their new form; in France, for instance, with the Dreyfus affair (see van Ginneken, 1992a).

It was also this wider context that triggered a sudden interest in the diagnosis and prognosis of public opinion (e.g., through the improved study of electoral geography), and in methods to continue to understand and improve on this geography beyond the elections themselves. Some early techniques evolved within the framework of social surveys. These were extensive investigations into the health and living conditions of the poor and the common man. They were usually initiated by politicians, in order to demonstrate the need for reform and to stave off the threat of unrest (for a historical overview, see Bulmer, Bales, & Sklar, 1991). Also within the framework of policy making, a periodic census of the entire population came into wider use.

Innovations in marketing and media research proved important, too. When national commercial radio networks emerged in the United States in the late 1920s, sampling techniques had to be further refined in order to be able to estimate audiences reached and establish advertiser rates. With the onset of the Depression, and the threat of political upheaval, electoral prognoses became more important than ever (for a historical overview, see Converse, 1987). On the eve of the 1936 elections, finally, George Gallup and others were first able to predict the outcome with confidence, after interviewing only limited samples (van Ginneken, 1986a, 1995, 1996/7, 2002/3, in press). This established the basic principles of the opinion poll. Just before, during and after World War II, the technique further spread to the rest of the Western world (van Ginneken, 1993a).

The opinion poll (and related techniques of media surveys, advertising surveys, market surveys, and personnel surveys) is first of all very practical. The point of departure is that one interviews people face to face, by telephone, in writing, or by computer. Although the problem is, of course, that people do not always know what they want, or say what they mean. The second principle is that one uses questionnaires with a certain structure and certain formulations; the problem is that with a slightly different structure or with slightly different formulations, interviewees may give completely different answers.

A third principle is the use of multiple-choice, “closed” answer categories, in ascending or descending order of intensity. A problem is, that this forces people into the mental framework of the interviewers, researchers, or sponsors—which is not necessarily their own mental framework. A fourth principle is the use of representative samples; a problem with this is that the sample provides, by definition, only an average, bland and “instant picture.”

A fifth principle is that, with the help of statistical methods, the results are condensed into averages, percentages, scores, and other clearcut outcomes. The problem is that this creates simplicity, and kills complexity. In sum, it is a very useful technique to assemble certain basic data; but its routine use often ignores the limitations. Even the adding of other techniques (from in-depth interviews to group discussions, from expert interviews to consensus building) may fail to yield the underlying framework.

The main problem is twofold. On one hand, the technique leaves little room for configurations, in which the whole of public perception is more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, it leaves little room for the potential of uneven change, in which accelerated shifts alternate with decelerated shifts. The American sociologist Charles Cooley already said that public opinion is “no mere aggregate of separate individual judgments, but an organization, a cooperative product of communication and reciprocal influence” (Fraser & Gaskell, 1990, p. 80). Alan Barton put it even more bluntly:

Using random sampling of individuals, the survey is a sociological meatgrinder, tearing the individual from his social context and guaranteeing that nobody in the study interacts with anyone else in it. It is a little like a biologist putting his experimental animals through a hamburger machine and looking at every hundredth cell through a microscope; anatomy and physiology ge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction: A New Vision
• Part I Mind Quakes
• Part II Emerging Collective Behavior
• Part III Shifting Public Moods
• Part IV Conclusions