LF

At every turn, focus groups have been developed or further perfected to bridge a vast divide between a group of elites and the people they want to convince. We find this just as much with left-wing elites as with our current depraved ruling class.

In fact, the focus group was developed during Red Vienna, a period when the city, despite a very conservative national government, was run by socialists. The Viennese socialist leadership was very much a cultural elite — they were the intellectuals, the psychoanalysts. They had ideas about what socialism should be but were very out of touch with the working class. These elites held a lot of socially conservative views, like the working class shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage or drink, they should play team sports and listen to classical music. The working class wasn’t particularly interested in those ideas, so there was this disconnect.

Paul Lazarsfeld, a young socialist activist, became what we now call a sociologist. He explained that Red Vienna’s leaders “wanted to discover why [their] propaganda was unsuccessful.” That’s very important.

Flash forward a couple of decades to World War II. Lazarsfeld traveled to the United States as an exile, because Vienna was first taken over by a right-wing government and then by the Nazis. Since Lazarsfeld was a Jewish socialist, he obviously left the country. He formed various research institutes in the United States, the most permanent of which was at Columbia — the Bureau of Applied Social Research.

Lazarsfeld and Columbia contracted with the somewhat creepily named Office of War Information, which was the arm of the US government trying to convince Americans to support World War II. Today it’s commonplace for university scholars to contract with governments and corporations, but it was very unusual back then. Lazarsfeld was very entrepreneurial and on the cutting edge of all that.

Just like in Vienna, the Roosevelt administration needed to discover why its propaganda was unsuccessful. Americans, contrary to the sentimental ideas we now have about “the good war,” were quite uninterested in getting involved in this faraway European conflict. So, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues tested government propaganda to discover why that was.

In that process, they began to use groups. The notion of “focus” is actually more important in this moment than the idea of “groups.” The innovation was that you find out a lot by getting people to focus on a particular text or object, in this case a radio broadcast or newsreel.

When they showed people propaganda detailing how terrifying the Nazis were — that they were brutal and particularly cruel to civilians — this didn’t make people want to fight the Nazis. In fact it made people really scared. They said, “Well, if that’s the case then maybe we should just stay home, stay far away from these terrifying people.”

They found it was much more effective to appeal to Americans’ higher nature, to say, “Look at these irrational and terrible and authoritarian people. We, by contrast, are a very enlightened democracy. We need to fight and assure our better way of life.” It was about rational messaging.