I was watching the news and it made me think of the social psychology
of a protest, so I thought I would flood ya.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/02/kent.state.ap/index.html
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=kent+state

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

...Following the tragedy at Kent State University, in which four
students were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen while
demonstrating against the war in Southeast Asia, a high-school teacher
from Kent, Ohio, asserted that the slain students deserved to die. She
made this statement even though she was well aware of the fact that at
least two of the victims were not participating in the demonstration
but were peacefully walking across campus at the time of the shooting.
Indeed, she went on to say, "Anyone who appears on the streets of a
city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves
to be shot."...

...Exactly how the high-school teacher in Kent, Ohio, came to believe
that innocent people deserved to die is a fascinating and frightening
question; for now, let us simply say that this belief was probably
influenced by her own indirect complicity in the tragic events on
campus....

...People Who Do Crazy Things Are Not Necessarily Crazy

The social psychologist studies social situations that affect people's
behavior. Occasionally, these natural situations become focused into
pressures so great that they cause people to behave in ways easily
classifiable as abnormal. When I say people, I mean very large numbers
of people. To my mind, it does not increase our understanding of human
behavior to classify these people as psychotic. It is much more useful
to try to understand the nature of the situation and the processes
that were operating to produce the behavior. This leads us to
Aronson's first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily
crazy.

Let us take, as an illustration, the Ohio schoolteacher who asserted
that the four Kent State students deserved to die. I don't think she
was alone in this belief-and although all the people who hold this
belief may be psychotic, I seriously doubt it, and I doubt that so
classifying them does much to enhance our understanding of the
phenomenon. Similarly, in the aftermath of the Kent State slayings,
the rumor spread that the slain girls were pregnant anyway-so that it
was a blessing they died-and that all four of the students were filthy
and so covered with lice that the mortuary attendants became nauseated
while examining the bodies. These rumors, of course, were totally
false. But, according to James Michener,5 they spread like wildfire.
Were all the people who believed and spread these rumors insane? Later
in this book, we will examine the processes that produce this kind of
behavior, to which most of us are susceptible, under the right
sociopsycho-logical conditions...

...Let's look at something supposedly objective-like the news. Are the
newscasters trying to sell us anything? Probably not. But those who
produce television news can exert a powerful influence on our opinions
simply by determining which events are given exposure and how much
exposure they are given. For example, near the end of his presidency,
George Bush sent U.S. troops into Somalia because thousands of people
were suffering the ravages of famine while bands of armed thugs were
roaming the streets and countryside, effectively preventing the
distribution of food to the starving masses. In the summer of 1993,
President Bill Clinton raised the ante by sending in additional armed
personnel, including a division of crack troops to try to disarm the
militiamen. Several astute political analysts, including the
redoubtable Cokie Roberts, while not questioning the humanitarian
motives of our presidents, wondered why aid was going to Somalia and
not several other places, like Sudan, where similar tragedies were
occurring. Ms. Roberts's conclusion: Many powerful pictures of
starving Soma-lians (but not of starving Sudanese) were being aired on
American television, leading to massive public support for such a
military intervention.

Let us take one additional graphic example. Several years ago, a
motorist named Rodney King was stopped for reckless driving. In the
course of the arrest, he was savagely beaten by officers of the Los
Angeles police department. By a fluke of luck, a resident of the
neighborhood recorded the event on videotape; during the next several
weeks, the tape was shown over and over again on TV screens across the
nation. Subsequently, in the spring of 1992, when a jury found the
police officers innocent of any wrongdoing, the inner city of Los
Angeles erupted in the worst riot in American history. By the time
peace was restored, 44 people had been killed, some 2,000 were
seriously injured, and entire city blocks in South-Central Los Angeles
were in flames-resulting in over a billion dollars in property damage.
Needless to say, there were many causes of the riot. But certainly one
of the triggers was the fact that people had seen that beating many
times and were therefore in a position to be outraged by the verdict.

Given the power of TV newscasts, it is reasonable to ask what factors
determine which news items are selected for television newscasts. The
answer is not a simple one, but one major factor is the entertainment
value of the news items. Indeed, it has been said by no less an expert
than the former director of the British Broadcasting Corporation that
television news is a form of entertainment. Recent studies suggest
that when those in charge of news programming decide which news events
to cover and which fraction of the miles of daily videotape to present
to the public, they make their decisions, at least in part, on the
basis of the entertainment value of their material. Film footage of a
flooded metropolis has much more entertainment value than footage of a
dam built to prevent such flooding: It is simply not very exciting to
see a dam holding back a flood. And yet, the dam may be more important
news. Just as action events such as football games are more
entertaining on television than quiet events such as chess matches, it
is more likely that riots, bombings, earthquakes, massacres, and other
violent acts will get more air time than stories about people helping
each other or working to prevent violence. Thus, news telecasts tend
to focus on the violent behavior of individuals-terrorists,
protesters, strikers, or police-because action makes for more exciting
viewing than does a portrayal of people behaving in a peaceful,
orderly manner. Such coverage does not present a balanced picture of
what is happening in the nation, not because the people who run the
news media are evil and trying to manipulate us but simply because
they are trying to entertain us. And, in trying to entertain us, they
may unwittingly influence us to believe that people behave far more
violently now than ever before. This may cause us to be unhappy and
even depressed about the temper of the times or the state of the
nation. Ultimately, it may affect our vote, our desire to visit major
urban centers, our attitudes about other nations, and so on. As we
shall see, it may actually cause people to behave violently.

Such biased coverage was dramatically illustrated by the manner in
which the media handled the nonriot that occurred in Austin, Texas,
while I was living there several years ago. The background of the
story was a familiar one on college campuses during the war in
Southeast Asia. Tensions were running high between University of Texas
students and local police following a confrontation at an impromptu
student demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops.
During the demonstration, some 6,000 students marched on the state
capitol, broke a few windows, and skirmished with police; the police
used tear gas on the students, and several police officers and
students were injured in the melee. But this was a mere preface-a
minor event compared to what seemed to be coming. A few days later,
students at the University of Texas were outraged at the wanton
slaying of four students at Kent State University by members of the
Ohio National Guard. To protest this event, the Texas students planned
a gigantic march into downtown Austin-20,000 students were expected to
turn out.

The Austin City Council, fearing trouble, refused to issue a parade
permit. In frustration and anger, the students decided to march
anyway; their leaders opted to confine the march to the sidewalks,
where, technically, it would not be illegal. Rumors spread that
hundreds of armed hooligans were descending on Austin from all over
the state with the intention of assaulting the students. Other rumors
abounded to the effect that state troopers and Texas Rangers (not
known for their friendliness to students) had been called in and were
determined to take strong and violent action against anyone disobeying
the law by straying or falling off the sidewalk. In retrospect, it
appears that these rumors were almost certainly untrue, but the
important point is that they were widely believed. Because the
probability of keeping a crowd of 20,000 people from pushing itself
off the sidewalk was remote, the situation seemed certain to be a
prelude to extreme violence. Sniffing an exciting story, news teams
affiliated with the major television networks were alerted. As it
turned out, however, the explosive situation was defused at the llth
hour: A team of university psychologists, law professors, and law
students succeeded, at the last moment, in convincing a federal judge
to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from
enforcing the antiparade ordinance. Moreover, it quickly became known
that the testimony of several members of the police force, in favor of
allowing the students to march, was instrumental in the judge's
decision. This event-especially because of the positive role played by
the police-resulted not only in the total absence of violence but also
in a genuine explosion of goodwill and solidarity among various
diverse elements of the community. Twenty thousand students did march
that day, but they marched in a spirit of harmony. Some of them
offered cold drinks to the police officers who were diverting traffic
away from the parade route; students and police exchanged friendly
greetings and shook hands warmly. Interestingly enough, the national
television networks completely ignored this encouraging turn of
events. Because most of us were aware that teams of nationally
prominent reporters from a variety of news media had descended on the
city during the week, the lack of coverage seemed puzzling indeed. An
unsettling explanation was provided by Philip Mann and Ira Iscoe, who
stated: "Since there was no violence, news media teams left town and
there was no national publicity, a commentary whose implications are
by now sadly self-evident."...

--------------------------------

The Justification of Cruelty

I have repeatedly made the point that we need to convince ourselves
that we are decent, reasonable people. We have seen how this can cause
us to change our attitudes on issues important to us. We have seen,
for example, that if a person makes a counterattitudinal speech
favoring the use and legalization of marijuana for little external
justification, and learns that the videotape of the speech will be
shown to a group of persuadable youngsters, the individual tends to
convince him or herself that marijuana isn't so bad-as a means of
feeling less like an evil person. In this section, I will discuss a
variation of this theme: Suppose you performed an action that caused a
great deal of harm to an innocent young man. Further, suppose that the
harm was real and unambiguous. Your cognition "I am a decent, fair,
and reasonable person" would be dissonant with your cognition "I have
hurt another person." If the harm is clear, then you cannot reduce the
dissonance by changing your opinion on the issue, thus convincing
yourself that you've done no harm, as the people in the marijuana
experiment did. In this situation, the most effective way to reduce
dissonance would be to maximize the culpability of the victim of your
action-to convince yourself that the victim deserved what he got,
either because he did something to bring it on himself or because he
was a bad, evil, dirty, reprehensible person.

This mechanism might operate even if you did not directly cause the
harm that befell the victim, but if you only disliked him (prior to
his victimization) and were hoping that harm would befall him. For
example, after four students at Kent State University were shot and
killed by members of the Ohio National Guard, several rumors quickly
spread: (1) both of the women who were slain were pregnant (and
therefore, by implication, were oversexed and wanton); (2) the bodies
of all four students were crawling with lice; and (3) the victims were
so ridden with syphilis that they would have been dead in 2 weeks
anyway. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, these rumors were totally untrue.
The slain students were all clean, decent, bright people. Indeed, two
of them were not even involved in the demonstrations that resulted in
the tragedy but were peacefully walking across campus when they were
gunned down. Why were the townspeople so eager to believe and spread
these rumors? It is impossible to know for sure, but my guess is that
it was for reasons similar to the reasons rumors were spread among the
people in India studied by Prasad and Sinha (see pp. 181-182)-that is,
because the rumors were comforting. Picture the situation: Kent is a
conservative small town in Ohio. Many of the townspeople were
infuriated at the radical behavior of some of the students. Some were
probably hoping the students would get their comeuppance, but death
was more than they deserved. In such circumstances, any information
putting the victims in a bad light helped to reduce dissonance by
implying that it was, in fact, a good thing that they died. In
addition, this eagerness to believe that the victims were sinful and
deserved their fate was expressed in ways that were more direct:
Several members of the Ohio National Guard stoutly maintained that the
victims deserved to die, and a Kent high-school teacher, whom James
Michener interviewed, even went so far as to state that "anyone who
appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty
clothes or barefooted deserves to be shot." She went on to say that
this dictum applied even to her own children.

It is tempting simply to write such people off as crazy-but we should
not make such judgments lightly. Although it's certainly true that few
people are as extreme as the high-school teacher, it is also true that
just about everyone can be influenced in this direction.

-----------------------

...whatever the students at Kent State University might have been
doing to the members of the Ohio National Guard (shouting obscenities,
teasing, taunting), it hardly merited being shot and killed. Moreover,
most victims of massive aggression are totally innocent. In all these
situations, the opposite of catharsis takes place. Thus, once I have
shot dissenting students at Kent State, I will convince myself they
really deserved it, and I will hate dissenting students even more than
I did before I shot them; once I have slaughtered women and children
at My Lai, I will be even more convinced that Asians aren't really
human than I was before I slaughtered them; once I have denied black
people a decent education, I will become even more convinced that they
are stupid and couldn't have profited from a good education to begin
with. In most situations, committing violence does not reduce the
tendency toward violence: Violence breeds more violence...

...Empathy is an important phenomenon. Seymour Feshbach notes that
most people find it difficult to inflict pain purposely on another
human being unless they can find some way of dehumanizing their
victim. Thus, when our nation was fighting wars against Asians
(Japanese in the 1940s, Koreans in the 1950s, Vietnamese in the
1960s), our military personnel frequently referred to them as "gooks."
We see this as a dehumanizing rationalization for acts of cruelty. It
is easier to commit violent acts against a "gook" than it is to commit
violent acts against a fellow human being. As I have noted time and
again in this book, the rationalization Feshbach points out not only
makes it possible for us to aggress against another person, but it
also guarantees that we will continue to aggress against that person.
Recall the example of the schoolteacher living in Kent, Ohio, who,
after the killing of four Kent State students by Ohio National
Guardsmen, told author James Michener that anyone who walks on the
street barefoot deserves to die. This kind of statement is bizarre on
the face of it; we begin to understand it only when we realize that it
was made by someone who had already succeeded in dehumanizing the
victims of this tragedy.

We can deplore the process of dehumanization, but at the same time, an
understanding of the process can help us to reverse it. Specifically,
if it is true that most individuals must dehumanize their victims in
order to commit an extreme act of aggression, then, by building
empathy among people, aggressive acts will become more difficult to
commit. Indeed, Norma and Seymour Feshbach have demonstrated a
negative correlation between empathy and aggression in children: The
more empathy a person has, the less he or she resorts to aggressive
actions. Subsequently, Norma Feshbach developed a method of teaching
empathy and successfully tested its effects on aggression. Briefly,
she taught primary-school children how to take the perspective of
another. The children were trained to identify different emotions in
people, they played the role of other people in various emotionally
laden situations, and they explored (in a group) their own feelings.
These "empathy training activities" led to significant decreases in
aggressive behavior. Similarly, in a more recent experiment, Georgina
Hammock and Deborah Richardson demonstrated that empathy is an
important buffer against committing acts of extreme aggression. When
they placed college students in a situation where they were instructed
to deliver electric shocks to a fellow student, those who had learned
to experience empathic concern for the feelings of others delivered
less severe shocks than those who were less empathic. Ken-ichi Obuchi
and his colleagues, working with Japanese students, found similar
results. Obuchi instructed students to deliver electric shocks to
another student as part of a learning experiment. In one condition,
prior to receiving the shocks, the victims first disclosed something
personal about themselves-thus opening the door to the formation of
empathy; in the control condition, the victims were not afforded an
opportunity for self-disclosure. Subjects in the disclosure condition
administered much milder shocks than subjects in the nondisclosure
condition.

The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0fc_1178047414