Social Psychology of Hate Groups Content Analysis

Social Psychology of Hate Groups

Content Analysis of the Social Psychology of Hate Groups

Over a decade ago, it was already apparent that the Internet had advantages for social organization on the part of marginalized groups -- and that some of these marginalized groups would pose a challenge, as they could be described as "hate groups." A survey of literature on the social psychology of the Internet singles out many factors why "hate groups" can thrive on the Internet. As early as 1998, NYU Professor of Psychology John Bargh identified the way in which white supremacists used Internet "listservs" to reinforce their own beliefs and communicate with like-minded individuals across long distances -- and in the present Bargh warns that the internet has become such an effective tool for hate groups that it can give us an inflated sense of their numbers. Finally Bargh's insights may be applied to a specific sub-type of hate group -- anti-gay groups such as Pastor Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church, monitored as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- offering verification of his thesis.

Introduction

I did research on hate groups in general, but I was more concerned to use a social psychology approach in addressing the questions of the difference between online hate groups and the conventional flesh-and-blood variety. Therefore, the lion's share of my research was devoted to content analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles about the difference in online social psychology vs. ordinary social psychology, in order to address the more general question of how the internet differs -- and whether a text-based rather than face-to-face form of social interaction permits the suppression of empathetic faculties, and might offer hate a chance to thrive. I also developed a specific interest in the social psychology theories of NYU Social Psychologist John Bargh, and refer to four of his peer-reviewed journal articles (under his sole authorship or co-authorship with Katelyn McKenna, and including a separate paper by McKenna in collaboration with others), as someone whose conclusions I was inclined to tentatively endorse.

I decided to select a specific test case, to apply aspects of the content analyzed. So rather than attempt to use Bargh's analysis of online social psychology to apply to hate groups tout court, I decided to limit the analysis to a specific subset of hate groups, namely those that organize around an anti-gay message. I focused on the Westboro Baptist Church, who became a notorious early adopter of online technology to promote hate with their adoption of the internet domain name "godhatesfags.com" in the late 1990s. I chose WBC because they are a group of relatively recent history and provenance, and because I wanted to apply theories of online social psychology as to how and why WBC's founder -- the notorious Pastor Fred Phelps -- managed to achieve the dubious distinction of being a pioneer in the use of the internet to promote hate in the late 1990s, while at the same time continue challenging the limits of free speech sufficiently to have had his case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in the autumn of 2010.

Previous Research

Because my fundamental goal here was content analysis, I went into a substantial review of the general literature on the subject of the Internet's effect on social psychology, which included large-scale survey articles that were able to point me in the proper direction to consider how this might relate to hate groups. My conclusions on how it does relate to hate groups are given later, when I apply the broad insights from my review of the general literature on this subject to a specific test case. For now I will give an account of how social psychology literature since 1998 has handled the issue of the Internet and social organization, including "hate groups."

Howard and Rainie break down users of the Internet into four categories, and they correlated behavior to how long the person had been using the internet and how often he or she logs on from home. Those whose long-term use was purely utilitarian fell into a pattern of greater dependency, until they became the constant users who expressed opinions, whom they term "Netizens." Howard and Rainie would predict that hate-group members belong to the most savvy users, whom they term "Netizens." This category correlates to a much greater likelihood to use the internet to seek information about politics or to pursue political activity (one of the many categories they assembled data for). (Howard and Rainie, 395)

It is important to note at the outset that my focus is predominantly on social psychology. This is the only approach that attempts to account for the specific content of psychological beliefs that would enable us to distinguish a hate group from any other sort of social group. So for example certain types of psychological analysis which may be scientific -- such as the use of evolutionary theory to pose testable hypotheses about human behavior -- aren't very useful when it comes to something as political as hate groups. Piazza and Bering's 2009 study "Evolutionary Cyber-Psychology" adequately predicts certain behavioral facts about hate group, such as the notion that vulnerable marginalized social groups will be the target of aggressive or bullying behavior -- in other words, they sees as inevitable the tendency towards hate. However Piazza and Bering's definition of marginalization is so broad as to be meaningless in terms of social groups -- it includes all "newcomers or acquaintances of core members" of any sort of group behavior to be the predictable target of aggression, which is obvious to anyone who has attended a kindergarten and tells us only the worst about human group behavior while telling us absolutely nothing about, say, the actual political content of any human group's beliefs -- let alone an actively-organized hate group Piazza and Bering 1263).

In terms of a viable approach, our survey of content must begin with Kraut Patterson et al. And their 1998 paper "Internet Paradox." Kraut Patterson et al. employed longitudinal data for the purpose of analyzing the social psychology of users, by examining effect of Internet use on not just social involvement but also overall psychological well-being, and found (in the paradox that gives them the title of their study) that "greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness" (Kraut Patterson et al. 1017).

Kraut Patterson et al. strike us now, over a decade later, with their astonishing prescience about certain ways in which the Internet might change behavior. In some sense, though, their prescience is not so surprising: they are careful to position their analysis of the Internet's increasing importance with earlier analysis of those technologies (like television) that it most resembled. They begin with a large scale survey of psychological literature to date, charting the rise of the Internet in an era of large-scale social disengagement on the societal level in the period 1960 to 1995, but also venturing that -- in terms of both its delivery systems and its potential -- that it might be comparable to television in terms of the impact on social psychology. Study after study is cited which notes a correlation between television watching and increased social disengagement manifest in any number of socially undesirable behaviors, and the authors therefore propose collecting similar data on Internet usage. But their fundamental view is that the Internet is not capable of effecting any truly massive social change. As they write: "Weak ties…are especially useful for linking people to information and social resources unavailable in people's closest, local groups" (Kraut Patterson et al. 1019). Kraut and Patterson are reacting largely -- as they make clear -- to an earlier study by Katz and Aspden which seemed wildly over-optimistic in terms of how the internet might actually change behavior. Katz and Aspden had suggested that "the Internet is creating a nation richer in friendships and social relationships" -- and I would like to suggest later that in certain important ways Katz and Aspden were right, when it comes to the analysis of how hate groups operate online -- but Kraut and Patterson were intent on attacking their fundamentally optimistic assumptions, largely because they see the Internet as capable of producing social "weak" rather than "strong ties." "Weak ties" for Kraut and Patterson seem to perpetuate themselves, which is one reason why they conclude (and their data supports the conclusion) that greater Internet usage may very well increase overall social interaction but only in the limited mediated forms of social interaction that the Internet can provide, while simultaneously decreasing real-world "strong ties."

But in the same year of Kraut and Patterson's study, John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna published the first of several papers which was keen to examine the Internet's power for social change and psychological self-definition for individuals, especially in terms of establishing a group identity. For them, the Internet equals increased visibility for any group who might be separated by geographic distances while feeling isolated in their identity, such as gays. Writing in 1998 in "Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity 'Demarginalization' Through Virtual Group Participation," they were able to note the way in which gays had adopted the Internet early and strongly to establish a virtual community -- but chose as their point of comparison to marginalized sexual identities the virtual community-building efforts of those with marginalized ideological identities, including hate groups and even anti-gay hate groups. Bargh and McKenna are simply looking for appropriate points of comparison, and so they are willing to consider conspiracy theorists, "area 51" and alien cover-up enthusiasts, as well as "groups on the topic of White supremacy, citizen militias, and the cultural group skinheads" (Bargh and McKenna) "Coming Out" 690). As such, Bargh and McKenna offer the earliest examination of the Internet as a tool for hate groups.

But to a certain degree Bargh and McKenna managed to predict in the same year something which Kraut and Patterson miss: the larger cultural trend of how the Internet would affect political discourse, including that of hate groups, such that the term used by Rush Limbaugh for his listeners -- "dittoheads" -- has magnified into a larger "echo chamber" effect that people have complained about in all opinion-based discourse on the Internet, a category which necessarily includes the types of hate groups (mostly strings of anonymous opinion postings) that Bargh and McKenna were examining in 1998. And it would not be a stretch to say that anyone with knowledge of the passions that can elevate hate speech into hate crimes might be able to predict that fringe politics surely can build "ties" that are stronger than those which Kraut and Patterson see the Internet as capable of building.

I find Bargh and McKenna individually and together in their later work to offer a persuasive account for how to address the issue of hate groups online. Bargh and McKenna in their 2000 journal article "Plan 9 From Cyberspace: The Implications of the Internet for Personality and Social Psychology" outlines the four chief differences between the Internet and other communication technologies: greater anonymity, greatly reduced importance of physical realities (such as physical appearance or geographical distance) as barriers to relationship formation, and the Internet user's greater control over the time and pace of interactions. They were the first to address the notion that the structurally-assured anonymity of the Internet) is the most important difference between the Internet and face-to-face interactions, and "some individuals hide behind it to propagate hate" (64) although they emphasize something which I will emphasize later in applying Bargh's work to the analysis of Fred Phelps: what Bargh and McKenna describe as the problem posed by the Internet by "newsgroups and Web sites devoted to the hatred of other ethnic or racial groups, and for the advocation of violence against others….not only are one's negative social beliefs reinforced by the positive feedback and support given by others of similar mind but also there is a reasoning fallacy perhaps unique to the Internet that may be termed the illusion of large numbers" (64), in which an active user base of four thousand users may sound like a large number of people if you imagine them assembled in one place, but when you consider the geographical distribution of membership and the percentage of actual internet users (in reality, less than a tenth of one percentage point) that four thousand people represents. Bargh in "Beyond Simple Truths: The Human-Internet Interaction" distinguishes between differing waves of communication and response on the Internet, based on the personal response, the group response, and the community response. This is his way of warning against magnifying our panic about the influence of hate groups despite the megaphone effect they may seem to enjoy on the web: extreme views will never get beyond a group response, because the larger community response will ensure the marginalization of that group response -- although he also predicts that further "profound changes in social life" are inevitable (Bargh "Beyond Simple Truths" 7). And ultimately by 2004, Bargh and McKenna revisited their earlier predictions in "The Internet and Social Life," and concluded that "homosexuality or fringe political beliefs" were -- in terms of social psychology -- alike in carrying a certain level of stigma, so it should not be a surprise that they find the internet to be the most convenient means of organization. Although it is arguable that gays and bigots alike can often manage to flock together geographically -- whether in West Hollywood or the Westboro Baptist Church -- the overall "safety" that Bargh and McKenna identify in internet anonymity permits expression of social beliefs that others find objectionable. When the Internet is "the only venue to discuss this aspect of their identity, membership in the group should be quite important to these people" (Bargh and McKenna, "Internet and Social Life" 583).

Overall the two most important areas of consideration with online vs. real-world differences in social organization -- and the ones most important to consider alongside any consideration of how online hate groups differ from their real world counterparts -- are the strength of the bond (which is debateable), and the selectivity that permits informational feedback loops of people agreeing with each other. As for the debatability of the bond, it speaks to the power of the Internet that McKenna and Green's laboratory study found undergraduates liked each other more following an Internet compared to a face-to-face meeting: their focus is on the idea that the Internet can allow certain people to "better disclose their 'true' or inner self to others on the Internet than in face-to-face settings" (McKenna and Green 9). Although they allow that not everyone will form strong Internet relationships, their study has conclusions for the analysis of hate groups because they may be the polar opposite of the relationships that McKenna and Green are studying, but they are similarly self-selecting and reliant on the same absence of social stigma that Bargh singles out. Meanwhile DiMaggio et al. do another broad scale survey of where research has focused and they that "an increasing body of literature suggests that the Internet enhances social ties…often by reinforcing existing behavior patterns," (DiMaggio et al. 316) which not only accounts for the "echo chamber" effect but also in their opinion makes the Internet ideal for certain forms of political participation, including those which express "cultural diversity" -- under which heading comes, somewhat ironically, the category of online hate groups.

Data and Methods

My overarching goal in this project was to analyze the difference between online hate groups and their traditional real-world counterparts. But in approaching this question, I realized that the matter that must be addressed was one of the psychological difference between an online experience and a real-world one. The barrier to entry for posting a racist screed anonymously on the internet is far lower than, say, that of attending a Klan rally -- despite the fact that the Klan uses hooded robes to provide a ceremony of anonymity, internet culture can more or less guarantee the anonymity of those who participate in it. It is no accident that hacker-activist Julian Assange found his arrest protested by an online group that calls themselves "Anonymous." In many cases, there is no ready way to track the identity of someone who posts hate speech in an online forum. Did this permit a fundamental psychological difference?

But I wish to specify that my interest was in the fundamentals of social psychology rather than the clinical and neurochemical variety. While there may be valid research in brain differences between those who are inclined to participate in hate or bigotry (whether online or otherwise) and those who are not so inclined, I do not think that sort of psychology can help us grapple with the nuances of specific instances of hate groups in real life. It may provide a fascinating glimpse into the physiological origins of hate, but my interest was more in the actual psychology of interaction, which meant that I had to look to the discipline of social psychology.

A search of relevant libraries and databases presented me with a substantial body of research that had been done on this subject by social psychologists -- published in venues such as the Journal of Social Issues -- which ultimately led me to Bargh as an interesting researcher in this area, whose theories I thought I could reasonably apply to the matter of hate groups.

My methodology for selecting anti-gay hate groups as the specific test case came largely from the important role that online venues have played in anti-gay hate for over a decade, but also the limited number of organized anti-gay hate groups such that a survey of the entire field might be undertaken, and the issues of online vs. real-world activities might be assessed. In my own final analysis of the most notorious anti-gay hate group leader in the U.S. -- Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church or WBC, whose anti-gay campaign brought him to the U.S. Supreme Court just a few months ago -- I decide that clearly we have an example of internet hate activities influencing a person's real world hate activities. The internet allowed Phelps to find his audience and cultivate it, such that the attention paid to him in the media is now well in excess of his actual real-world following.

Research Design

The type of study I undertook here was largely one of content analysis: I wanted to find out what sort of consensus existed currently among social psychologists as to the way that the online experience can shape social behavior. I then followed up by investigating the further theories of one researcher (John Bargh of NYU) who seems to have investigated the social psychology in ways that were most applicable to the analysis of anti-gay hate groups online and in the real world.

Applying Bargh's theories to anti-gay hate groups is in some sense ironic, because Bargh provided a ground-breaking analysis of the ways in which the internet serves as an organizing tool for social psychology and identity was by investigating the use of the internet by gays. To apply his theories to the way that anti-gay hate groups have used the internet to establish themselves may have a bitter irony to it, but it can certainly illustrate perfectly my own thesis on the difference between online and real world hate groups generally: the internet itself is a double-edged sword, and the very same properties that might allow it to be a valuable organizational tool and conduit for information exchange for a vulnerable minority (such as the gay community in America) are available to groups which would organize to persecute such minorities, employing the same means. But as the specific case example of Pastor Fred Phelps and his online and real-world hate activities, it becomes clear that he has used the internet very much to his advantage: he appears to have learned from the gay community as to how to use the internet to increase visibility and catch headlines.

Sampling, Ethical Issues, and Findings

In part Bargh's decision to compare hate groups to gays back in 1998 is precisely what prompted the decision here to limit the sample for analysis to anti-gay hate groups. I was also aware of the significance of the year in which he made the comparison, which was precisely the same year in which the murder of Matthew Shepherd became a cause celebre for greater hate crime legislation -- legislation which would be enacted over a decade later. It is arguable that Shepherd's sudden posthumous fame was only possible in the age of the Internet: certainly the stage drama and HBO film that served as a sort of documentary memorial, The Laramie Project, documents the decision of a group of actors to travel to Laramie in the immediate aftermath of the murder (and before the trial). The weirdly instantaneous recognition on their part that Shepherd's death was a matter of political significance is hard to explain, except in terms of the "echo chamber" effect that Bargh was observing among gay online communities in the same year.

However it was also in the same year (1998) that Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas decided to establish a viciously mocking "online memorial" to Matt Shepherd, which performed a numerical calculation (in a simple Javascript procedure which was omnipresent on crude amateur websites of the 1990s) telling you how many days Matt Shepherd had been burning in hell for the sin of sodomy, while a South-Park-style animated Matt Shepherd bounced around the screen with red flames of Hell burning all around him. Phelps registered the domain name godhatesfags.com, and reacted just as instantaneously as the community group (from New York no less) to Shepherd's death and the media coverage, by announcing his attention to picket Shepherd's funeral. Phelps has managed to grab headlines even as recently as the autumn of 2010, when the United States Supreme Court heard a case which considered Phelps as pushing the limits of free speech -- for reasons that have nothing to do with "hate speech," but merely with Phelps's increasingly extravagant attempts to gain media attention (and a modicum of respectability) for his hellfire and damnation anti-gay message. Although Phelps stops short of calling for the extinction of homosexuals (unlike the high-profile anti-gay hate groups in foreign countries such as Jamaica or Uganda, with attendant assassination of gay civil rights leaders over the past decade) it seems like his inability to go this far and still define himself as "Christian" (let alone "Baptist") means that his murderous sentiments are projected onto the violence attendant upon his wilder pronouncements. Not only did he all-but-endorse the violence against Matt Shepherd, Phelps seemingly endorsed the violence of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the ongoing war in Iraq as somehow representing God's judgment upon America for being insufficiently intolerant of homosexuals.