No abstract

No abstract

A :TEMPTS at mass persuasion are not new. Mass persuasion has figured in religious, political, and social-economic contexts for centuries, reaching pinnacles of effectiveness in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements; and-especially in the United States-even in commercial advertising. It is not strange, then, that those who look upon attitudes and acts of bias against ethnic groups in our population as a grievous social ill should turn to mass propaganda as an antidote. And so millions of leaflets, pamphlets, cartoons, comic . books, articles-and more recently radio and movie scripts -have been produced and disseminated in the propaganda war against bigotry.The aims of such propagandausually implicit-would seem to be: (i) the restructuring of the attitudes of prejudiced individuals, or at least their neutralization; (2) the restructuring of group values toward intolerance; (3) the reinforcement of attitudes of those already committed to a democratic ideology perhaps by creating an illusion of universality or victory; (4) the continued neutralization of those whose attitudes are yet unstructured and who are deemed " safer" if they remain immune to symbols of bias; and (5), while accomplishing all of these aims, also offsetting the counter-symbols of intolerance.' But since so many people of goodwill have chosen mass propaganda as the most economical, efficient, and speedy way of reaching and persuading 140,000,000 Americans, it is at least pertinent to inquire whether this approach is-or can be-effective.

No abstract

BY means of concealed wire recorders and the use of planted respondents in what was ostensibly a routine opinion survey, rather unequivocal data were obtained concerning the cheating and error behavior of fifteen public opinion interviewers during thirty-three recorded interviews. In a surprising number of instances, serious discrepancies were noted between the respondent's actual statements and the replies with which the interviewer had credited him.Schedules for 158 additional unrecorded interviews by the same interviewers were also available for analysis. When the NaMni Stewart has been director of research for The Personnel Laboratory since 1960.