Sex Lies and Videotape
Can the Exploitation of Human Frailties Weaken Homeland Security?
By John A. Romero
“The October Surprise” is American political speak for a news event deliberately created to influence the outcome of an election. The reference to “October” was originally used to describe the lead time needed for the surprise to have the desired effect on a November presidential election. Like gladiator-sport, each side concocts a scandalous and often salacious batch of surprise. It is a virtual blood-sport for the enjoyment of many. It is the political equivalent of enjoying the Super Bowl commercials more than the game itself.
Once only available to the large radio, television, and print news outlets, the advent of “Web 2.0” (e.g., User Generated Content) has placed the October Surprise well within the reach of anyone with a computer and connectivity. Also, the recipe and serving suggestions for an October Surprise are no longer limited to just presidential elections. The recipe can be easily adapted to influence virtually any political decision, large or small, all twelve months of the year. The timing and ingredients still make or break the batch.
Don’t despair if quality ingredients are in short supply. When cupboards are bare of facts, truth, and accuracy, substitute factoids, half-truths, inaccuracies, rumors, and lies. Surprise is somewhat different from urban legend and lore, but the magnetic attraction to it is largely the same. A brief visit to an urban legend website, such as snopes.com, will act as a primer on how to mix truth with lore for wide appeal. If you have no time for snopes.com, just sprinkle your surprise with real names, real places, dates, and times, and it will have the ring of truth. A pinch of legitimate fear will act as a preservative so that your batch of surprise will be fresh for days.
If the thought of cheap imitations or lore is distasteful to you, anonymity may help release your inhibitions. Scholarly research tells us that anonymity releases individuals to act with a diminished regard for self-evaluation and a disregard for social norms. For the connoisseur of surprise, anonymity is the warning label that reads: This surprise was prepared by someone who may not care about accountability or social norms.
Deindividuation is a type of groupthink and anonymity. Deindividuation phenomenon tells us that as humans we are all prone to losing our individuality and becoming absorbed into the hivemind if the right conditions exist. Experts in crowd management and crowd control know that deindividuation adds a new level of complexity to crowd behavior. Since the field of online crowd behavior is yet to mature, you can still time your surprise and create the prime conditions for the hivemind. People who could likely resist a group behavior on the street will be lured into the online frenzy, and they may never know or admit that they have been duped.
If you have no time to bake from scratch, you can find a wide variety of surprise mix right off the shelf. Surprise mix is slightly different from being duped by the sweet smell of cooked surprise. It is knowingly entering the frenzy and adding in a few tidbits of your own half-baked ingredients. Confirmation bias is the human phenomenon wherein the desire to prove a suspicion blinds a decision maker to obvious judgment errors. So if your desire is to throw a few virtual rocks, simply create a pseudonym and take aim. Pick a mix that is just bubbling up and sling a factoid into the sauce and, voila, it must be true. One itsy bitsy warning: virtual rocks hurt real people and if you disclose privileged information, even anonymously, the violation was real and you are guilty.
Back to Reality
Gossiping, rumormongering, and all types of dishing the dirt are not likely going away anytime soon. The activity has been hurting families, groups, and organizations for thousands of years. In the digital age we call home, the damage is often permanent. Survive a gunfight on the street – and you might be a hero or get a medal. Survive a lawsuit, or the barbs of a thousand anonymous bloggers, and live under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of your life.
Is it possible to use group behavior to weaken a strong nation, military, police department, fire department, church, or family? If a frenzy, laced with enough truth, can influence an election or political decision, then why can’t it be weaponized? And if it can be weaponized, how can we defend against it? Would trained professionals act differently if they knew they were vulnerable to attack?
Author David Rock, in an article entitled Why Organizations Fail, citing research by Scientist Matthew Lieberman, agrees with the long held belief that people are rational, logical agents, driven by self-interest, greed, and desire. But he adds that this is only half of the story; there is a compelling need to be socially connected. The article is filled with insights useful to organization leadership, and the assertions on social rejection are especially interesting. Did you know that being socially rejected may lower that person’s I.Q. by as much as 20 percent?
The implications for this are huge. Think about the maid and cook in the blockbuster movie The Help. She was not driven to put her feces in a chocolate pie to advance the civil rights movement or to help her find a better job. She did it because she was disenfranchised and disrespected as a human being. In a tribe, not everyone can be the chief. Those who fancy themselves as chief should not taint the pie – it is not right. Vigorously consuming the product of a person who believes that he or she is disenfranchised is unwise.
David Rock suggests the current generation of leaders has been taught to think rationally rather than socially. He says that if we discount social cues we will miss important information and opportunities for creative problem solving. If that sounds like any one of a thousand books on leadership and pop-psychology – it may be. But “what if” we have been wrong about the power of social connectivity? And if leaders had a better understanding of the power of social assimilation and rejection, could we be better equipped for the challenges that lie ahead? Particularly in an era of user-generated content, if social rejection has such power, shouldn’t we worry that our adversaries may attempt to gain an advantage in operational theaters such as combat or political debate? Pie anyone?
