The Flexible Thinkers

Yesterday, typing and trying to analyze-and-understand things -- and I thought and typed the following:

The vet called it "misplaced territorial aggression": because Genie couldn't get at the "foreign" outdoor cat, she turned her territory-protecting instincts on her housemate cat, with whom she ordinarily got along great. ...

That's what I wonder, if -- when we had the common enemy of Soviet communists, there was a balance in the world, a long-standing balance, crossing a couple of generations -- and then with that gone, it was like a vacuum, and some people's "territorial aggression" (or general, formerly submerged hostility) got "misplaced" onto their fellow Americans. And they became like Genie-the-cat, attacking their friends and neighbors and co-workers.

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In his book, Get Anyone To Do Anything, David J. Lieberman, Ph.D., writes -- in Chapter 21, "How to Get Any Group of People to Get Along" --
[quote]: Whether it's bickering friends or a feuding family, these techniques will quickly melt away disagreement and provide a core of unity among all members.

Numerous studies conclude that division among people dissolves when there is an opposing outside threat. External events arouse our need for affiliation and we will seek out support, creating a heightened sense of unity. Civil warring, intersocietal conflicts, and internal unrest often cease when a common outside enemy comes on to the scene. Conversely, individuals will turn their attention and hostility on one another when no outside forces are present. {italics mine}

[My own insert: Pres. Reagan (in 1989): "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And -- great, they did, but then who were we supposed to be suspicious of, and mad at, if not Soviet communists? -- we lost our "outside threat," or common enemy, and people began turning on each other in our own country -- road rage, deteriorating atmosphere in some workplaces, hate-radio and rant-tv, etc. ...?...]

[back to Lieberman]
The fastest way to instill cooperation within a group is to (a) create an external threat or (b) simply set your group against another group in some form of competition. A common enemy brings opposing sides together faster than any other type of group cohesion technique.

This phenomenon is also characteristic of how people respond within their own lives and minds....It's for this reason that those who have nothing going on in their lives are often the most neurotic. Without an external focus to occupy their attention their mind begins to turn in on itself. But once an objective is created our attention is turned outward. So too do groups who are confronted with a serious issue find that infighting quickly gives way to this new objective.

Also interesting is a study done by Ross and Samuels (1993) who found that the name given to a game has greater influence on the level of competitiveness than the individuals' personalities. They found that when participants played a game they believed to be called Wall Street they were much more competitive than their counterparts playing the same game, believing it was called Community Game. This is so fascinating because something as seemingly minor as the name of the game can override the members' personalities. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that within your group careful consideration should be given to the name of subsets as well as the overall group name. For instance, if you have two sections of your group with names such as The Righteous and The Victors, chances are you won't be inspiring as much cooperation as with names such as Common Ground and The Flexible Thinkers.

-----------[end quote]
{Get Anyone To Do Anything, by David J.
Lieberman. Copyright 2000. St. Martin's
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.}

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