Friday A/V Club: Fascism, Anarchy, and Democracy in After-School Clubs

When I
reviewed Fred Turner’s
The Democratic Surround yesterday, I had to leave out
a lot of interesting topics covered in the book. One was a
psychological experiment carried out by the psychologist Kurt Lewin
and two colleagues at the State University of Iowa in 1938. Here’s
how Turner describes it:

They began by asking how
phenomena such as scapegoating, submission to authoritarian
leaders, and even rebellion against authority might be linked. To
answer those questions, they staged an experiment designed to
compare the social-psychological dynamics of three kinds of
society: authoritarian, democratic, and anarchic. They gathered
groups of ten-year-old boys into five-member after-school clubs
where they would make masks and play games. They gave each group an
adult leader who was instructed to take charge in an authoritarian,
democratic, or laissez-faire manner. In the first mode, the leader
made all decisions and demanded that the boys simply follow them.
In the second, the leader engaged the boys in collaborative
discussion to choose their activities. And in the third variation,
the leader simply let the boys do whatever they liked with no
interference. The results were tellingly consistent with liberal
American views of contemporary geopolitics: under the authoritarian
condition, the boys either became passive and obedient, or imitated
their leader and became aggressively domineering toward each other.
They also chose scapegoats and turned on them in unison—not unlike
Germans under Nazi rule. Democratic leaders, by contrast,
engendered affection and a moderate level of aggression in the
boys—something closer to the energetic civic participation expected
of Americans than to the dominance/submission dynamics seen in
dictatorships. Under laissez-faire conditions, the boys were
similarly active and described themselves as quite happy—a finding
that Lewin and his colleagues acknowledged but did not dwell
on.

As it happens, a couple of months ago I came across
Experimental Studies in Social Climates of Groups, a film
that Lewin and company made to present what they’d done. It’s a dry
but fascinating little document, notable not just for its findings
but for its unexamined assumptions. It also includes some
unintentionally hilarious charts, with what are presented as
numerically precise measurements of “aggressiveness and egocentric
behavior,” “friendliness and we-feeling,” and so on. For my
favorite, skip to 12:10, where you’ll find a chart that attempts to
map the levels of hostility against different scapegoats.