Page 125 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 107

time the students were in the 9th grade, they were half as likely to
smoke as those in a control group from a similar junior high school.
Research has found that, in producing resistance, inoculation is
most effective when the belief under attack is a cultural truism. 71 A
cultural truism is a belief accepted as unquestionably true by most
members of a society, like “The United States is the most wonderful
country in the world” or “If people are willing to work hard, they can
succeed.” Cultural truisms are rarely called into question; conse-
quently, it is relatively easy for us to lose sight of why we hold those
beliefs. Thus, if subjected to a severe attack, these beliefs may crum-
ble. To motivate us to bolster our beliefs, we must be made aware of
their vulnerability, and the best way to do this is to be exposed to a
mild attack on those beliefs. Prior exposure, in the form of a watered-
down attack on our beliefs, produces resistance to later persuasion
because (1) we become motivated to defend our beliefs, and (2) we
gain some practice in defending these beliefs by being forced to ex-
amine why we hold them. We are then better equipped to resist a
more serious attack.
This is an important point that was frequently ignored or mis-
understood by policymakers during the height of the Cold War. For
example, in the aftermath of the Korean War, when there was a
great deal of fear about the possibility that our prisoners of war had
been systematically “brainwashed” by the Chinese Communists, a
Senate committee recommended that, to build resistance among our
young people to brainwashing and other forms of Communist prop-
aganda, courses on “patriotism and Americanism” should be insti-
tuted in our public school system. But my reading of the research on
inoculation led me to an entirely different conclusion. Specifically, I
asserted that the best way to help people resist antidemocratic prop-
aganda would be to challenge their belief in democracy, and the best
way to build resistance to one-sided Communist propaganda would
be to teach fair, even-handed courses on Communism in high
schools. At the height of the Cold War, such a suggestion was un-
72
doubtedly considered subversive by those politicians who were ter-
rified at the prospect of our young people learning anything positive
about Communism. The fear was that this would make them more
vulnerable to propaganda. But historical events have supported the
social psychological research showing that, if one wants to mitigate
against simplistic propaganda, there is no substitute for free inquiry