Group Experiment

and Other Writings

Group Experiment
and Other Writings
The Frankfurt School on
Public Opinion in Postwar Germany

FRIEDRICH POLLOCK
THEODOR W. ADORNO
AND COLLEAGUES

Translated, Edited, and Introduced by

A n d rew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. O lick

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2011
 Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows
of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in~Publication Data

Pollock, Friedrich, 1894-1970.
[Gruppenexperiment. English]
Group experiment and other writings : the Frankfurt School on public opinion
in postwar Germany / Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, and colleagues;
translated, edited, and introduced by Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-04846-1 (alk. paper)
i. Public opinion. 2. Public opinion—Germany. 3. Germany—History— 1945-1990.
I. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. II. Perrin, Andrew J., 1971- III. Olick, Jeffrey K.,
1964- IV. Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) V. Title.
HM1236.P6513 2011
303.3*8094309045—dc22 2010033603
 Contents

List of Tables and Figures vii

Preface ix

Original Publication Information xiii

Translators’ Introduction xv
ANDREW J. PERRIN AND JEFFREY K. OLICK

From Group Experiment

Foreword i
FRANZ BÖHM

Introduction 9

1 The Group Discussion Method 19

2 The Organization of the Discussion Materials 57

3 Quantitative Analyses 72

4 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 109

Afterword 148

Appendix A. Findings of a Study of the Silent Participants 157

Appendix B. From a Monograph on “Aspects of Language” 161

 Contents vi

Final Version of the Basic Stimulus (Colburn Letter) 177

Opinion Research and Publicness 179

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Notes 185

Index 19 9
 List of Tables and Figures

(with original number in Gruppenexperiment)

Tables
2.1 (originally Table 14) 59
2.2 (originally Table 15) 66
3.1 (originally Table 65) 77
3.2 (originally Table 66) 79
3.3 (originally Table 67) 79
3.4 (originally Table 68) 81
3.5 (originally Table 69) 85
3.6 (originally Table 70) 85
3.7 (originally Table 71) 86
3.8 (originally Table y 2) 87
3.9 (originally Table 73) 87
3.10 (originally Table 74) 88
3.11 (originally Table 73) 90
3.12 (originally Table 76) 94
3.13 (originally unnumbered) 96
3.14 (originally Table 77) 99
3.15 (originally Table 78) 102
 List o f Tables and Figures

3.16 (originally Table 79) 103

3.17 (originally Table 80) 106

3.18 (originally Table 81) 108

4.1 (originally unnumbered) 130

Figures
3.1 (originally Figure 7) 75
3.2 (originally Figure 8) 77
3.3 (originally Figure 9) 78

3.4 (originally Figure 10) 81

3.5 (originally Figure 11) 82
3.6 (originally Figure 12) 84
3.7 (originally Figure 13) 87
3.8 (originally Figure 14) 92.

3.9 (originally Figure 15) 94

3.10 (originally Figure 16) 95
3.11 (originally Figure 17) 97
3.12 (originally Figure 18) 98

3.13 (originally Figure 19) 99

3.14 (originally Figure 20) IOI
3*15 (originally Figure 21) IOI
3.16 (originally Figure 22) 103
3.17 (originally Figure 23) 105
3.18 (originally Figure 24) 105
3.19 (originally Figure 23) 107
3.20 (originally Figure 23a) 107
 Preface

his is t h e s e c o n d of two volumes containing translations from

T Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht (Pollock 1955) and addi­
tional related material. The first volume, Guilt and Defense: On the Lega­
cies o f National Socialism in Postwar Germany (Adorno 2010), presented
Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Guilt and Defense,” which appeared originally
as Chapter V of Gruppenexperiment, along with additional materials detail­
ing Adorno’s intellectual engagement with contemporary German affairs.
In this volume, we present the portions of Gruppenexperiment that are
more methodological and theoretical than historical and political. These
materials have enduring relevance for current understandings of public
opinion. In our introduction we reconstruct the work’s lineages with an
eye to the present state of work in the field of public opinion and to the con­
ceptual contributions to be found in that lineage. Inevitably, pieces in
one volume refer to materials only presented in the other, which we never­
theless hope will be a stimulus to curiosity rather than a hindrance to
understanding (a selection here and there—for instance the “Colburn
Letter”—appears in both); each volume is relevant, but not necessary, to
the comprehension of the other.
This project emerged from a convergence of our historical and theoreti­
cal interests in the Frankfurt School’s social scientific work: Jeffrey Olick’s
investigation of the origins of Adorno’s provocative aphorism about the
“house of the hangman,” and Andrew Perrin’s research on the ontological
 Preface x

status of public opinion. Our common experiences in the Sociology and

Anthropology department at Swarthmore College, and the annual Swarth-
more alumni dinners at the American Sociological Association more re­
cently, underwrote our collaboration on this project.
We were fortunate to receive support from the National Endowment
for the Humanities (collaborative grant number RZ-50623-06), from a
Faculty Fellowship to Andrew Perrin in fall 2007 at the UNC Institute for
Arts and Humanities (IAH), and from research funds to Jeffrey Olick by
the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.
Permission to publish the English translation of Gruppenexperiment, the
major text in this book, was graciously granted by Europäische Verlag­
sanstalt of Hamburg. Permission to reprint the translation of “Opinion
Research and Publicness” was graciously granted by the American Socio­
logical Association.
We thank the many family, friends, and colleagues with whom we have
discussed the project both in general and in detail, and whom we have of­
ten queried about translation issues, including Asher Biemann, Craig Cal­
houn, Gaby Finder, Gregg Flaxman, Jeff Grossman, Volker Heins, David
Jenemann, Krishan Kumar, Daniel Levy, Chuck Matthewes, John Mc­
Gowan, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Christiane Sembritzki, John Torpey, Bettina
Winckler, and Heino and Susanne Winckler. Michael Aronson at Harvard
University Press has been an ardent supporter and champion of both books.
Special thanks are due to Natassia Rodriguez, James Knable, Maria Santos,
and Tara Tober for research assistance and to J. Craig Jenkins for archival
help. Kai-Uwe Löser helped greatly with the first draft of the translation.
Natassia Rodriguez also painstakingly re-created the arcane original graphs
in Chapter IV (Chapter 3 in this volume) using modern technology to con­
vey the information better while maintaining the aesthetic sense of the
original. Gregg Flaxman, Dick Langston, and Jeff Spinner-Halev provided
very helpful comments on previous drafts of the introduction. The project
has benefited from critical discussions at the Cultural and Political Sociology
Workshop at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Sociol­
ogy Colloquium at Columbia University; the conference on “Interactionist
Approaches to Collective Memory” at Northwestern University; the Institute
for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia; the Insti­
tute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill; and the graduate seminar in European Social Theory in the sociology
department at the University of Virginia.
Our amazing spouses, Eliana Perrin and Bettina Winckler, have provided
patience and emotional and intellectual support throughout this prolonged
process.
 Preface — xi

Translation N otes

The German of Gruppenexperiment is arcane and difficult in the original,

although difficult in a different sense from many of the other writings of
the Frankfurt School. The writing is not philosophically complex, nor is it
nuanced in the way other writings are (for example, Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory or Minima Moralia). It is complicated because, as a monograph, it
was written cautiously, even tentatively, as a contribution to the nascent
field of modern social science research. The monograph itself had many
authors, complicating the problem of interpreting the intended meanings.
The transcripts of the group discussions are colloquial, raising additional
questions about how best to convey the sense of the speakers. We have
sought to be faithful to that sense, sometimes at the cost of readability.
A common practice in the German text is substituting an adjective for
an active verb. A classic example, discussed in the Translators’ Introduc­
tion below, is vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft, translated as “totally social­
ized society.” Who socialized it? What institutions and actors are respon­
sible for its totally socialized character? Its totally socialized character is
understood to be a property of the society, not the result of work done to
socialize it totally. American students are routinely taught to avoid the
passive voice, a rule that is largely absent from German. Thus terms that
make perfect sense in German—in which meaning is conveyed more through
nouns and their modifiers than through verbs, which is the English norm—
may parse as convoluted to the Anglophone reader. There is no obvious
right answer to this question, either in this case or in similar cases else­
where in the text. Where it is clear from the text who or what is responsi­
ble, we have shifted the sentences into the active voice to maintain an En­
glish idiom; where it is unclear, we have remained with the passive, even
though it reads awkwardly in English.
One concept deserves particular examination. That concept is Öffentlich­
keit. The word—perhaps most literally translated as “openness”—has been
translated in various contexts as “publicness,” “publicity,” “openness,”
“public opinion,” “public sphere,” and even “democracy”! Öffentlichkeit
is utterly crucial to the conception of society and democracy here, and we
have sought to use context to choose the best translation for each particu­
lar case. In the main, though, we have opted to stick with the more literal,
if tinny, “publicness” instead of the more poetic but looser alternatives in­
cluding the most common, “public sphere,” in part because the latter con­
notes at once more and less than is present in the German original. As Stefan
Nowotny (2003) has cogently argued, “public sphere” at once implies a
spatial element not present in Öffentlichkeit and, at the same time, reduces
 Preface — ' xii

Öffentlichkeit to a particular portion of social praxis instead of the over­

arching modality implied in the original. We therefore consider it prudent
to avoid conflating Öffentlichkeit with “public sphere” or the other looser
renderings that have been offered. Nevertheless, we retain “public sphere”
in the title of the introductory essay to highlight the genealogical connec­
tion between Gruppenexperiment and the later theory of the public sphere.
The original monograph contained significant amounts of information—
much of it about mundane elements of the research design—that we have
not translated. We have left out the original Chapter II (Description of the
Circle of Participants) entirely, and we have removed significant portions
of the Afterword and of Chapter IV (Quantitative Analysis of the Discus­
sions). In this English translation, Chapter i was Chapter I in the original;
Chapter 2 was Chapter III; Chapter 3 was Chapter IV; and Chapter 4 was
Chapter VI. We have published Chapter V (Guilt and Defense), written by
Theodor W. Adorno, as part of a separate volume, Guilt and Defense: On
the Legacies o f National Socialism in Postwar Germany (Harvard Univer­
sity Press, 2010). Numbered endnotes in this book are translations of
footnotes in the original text; editorial comments are in footnotes marked
with symbols.
 Original Publication Information

Pollock, Friedrich, hrsg. Gruppenexperiment: Ein Studienbericht. Mit einem

Geleitwort von Franz Böhm. Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie bd. 2. Frank­
furt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955. Translated by permission from Eu­
ropäische Verlagsanstalt.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Meinungsforschung und Öffentlichkeit.” Typescript (1964).
Gesammelte Schriften, hrsg. Rolf Tiedemann, bd. 8. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
(Electronic resource.) Translation by Andrew J. Perrin and Lars Jarkko. Origi­
nally published in Sociological Theory 23, no. i (March 2005). Reprinted by
permission of the American Sociological Association.
 Translators’ Introduction:
Before the Public Sphere

A N D R E W J. PERRIN

JEFFREY K. OLICK

True dialogue, which died out in the Volksgemeinschaft, needs

a long time to come back to life, and the conditions of mass
society are not favorable.
—Appendix B, “Aspects of Language”

o r many read ers, the very existence of this volume—the first large-
F scale English translation of Gruppenexperiment, the Frankfurt School’s
first major project after their return from exile—may seem surprising. The
Frankfurt School of critical theorists—principally Theodor W. Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal—is not mainly
known as an empirically minded group of social scientists. In this intro­
duction we explain the book’s importance in terms of the history of social
science and of current issues in social and democratic theory.
In 1941, Paul Lazarsfeld published an essay in the Frankfurt School
journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (Lazarsfeld 1941), at­
tempting to explain the difference between the kind of work he was pursu­
ing at the Princeton Radio Research Project and that of Adorno, who had
recently left the project because of intractable intellectual differences with
Lazarsfeld. In his essay, Lazarsfeld distinguished between what he called
“administrative” and “critical” research. Administrative research, according
to Lazarsfeld, concerned matters of variation and behavior within an estab­
lished social system, while critical research aimed at comprehending that
social system as a totality. As part of an effort to smooth things over with
Adorno (and with Max Horkheimer, who had sponsored Adorno’s partici­
pation in the project), Lazarsfeld argued that administrative and critical
 Translators' Introduction — ' xvi

research were not fundamentally incompatible, and indeed could be mutu­

ally reinforcing.
Nevertheless, Adorno remained in many ways adamant that the ap­
proaches were incompatible. He had received something of a trial by fire
in his work for Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP),
which sponsored him when he initially came to the United States. The rou-
tinized and commercially compromised nature of the research Lazarsfeld
expected clashed with Adorno’s personal, political, and theoretical com­
mitments, and the two had a now-famous falling out, which Lazarsfeld
sought to redress through the 1941 essay. As Adorno wrote years later in
an autobiographical essay,

I was disturbed . . . by a basic methodological problem. . . . I oppose stating

and measuring effects without relating them to . . . the objective content to
which the consumers in the cultural industry, the radio listeners, react. . . . To
proceed from the subjects’ reactions as if they were a primary and final source
of sociological knowledge seemed to me thoroughly superficial and mis­
guided. (Adorno 1968, 343)

Partly as a result of this social scientific controversy, though even more

as a result of the robust reception of critical theory among literary and
cultural scholars, the picture of the Frankfurt School that circulates most
widely in the Anglophone academy portrays their approach as bordering
on hostility to empirical research. However, the Frankfurt School’s rela­
tionship with empirical work was much closer and more complicated than
this reading suggests. Indeed, the scholars engaged in extensive empirical
work under the auspices of the Institut für Sozialforschung (IFS, which
was the principal institutional structure for what later came to be called
the Frankfurt School) from the 1930s to the 1960s.1
During their exile in the United States, Adorno and Horkheimer were
tightly connected to (albeit often in conflict with) mainstream American
social science on public opinion, mass society, and group processes. They
became well acquainted with the practice of social science associated with
Morris Janowitz, Robert Lynd, Robert Bales, and particularly Lazarsfeld.
Adorno considered the work of the PRRP, and the work he was assigned
to do there, both terribly pedestrian and intellectually compromised. Given
what was going on in Europe during that time (1938-1941), it must have
felt much like fiddling while Rome burned (Jenemann 2007). But as
Adorno and colleagues made clear for decades thereafter, their objection
was not to empirical research per se, but rather to the common practice of
studying apparent variation within society and, therefore, ignoring the
totality—the character of society itself (see, e.g., Adorno 1976; Adorno
 Translators’ Introduction xvii

1970, 42; Claussen 2008, 189; Jenemann 2007, 1-3).2 As scholars, they
cast their lot with social science as an entirely appropriate approach to
ascertaining totality. They identified themselves as social scientists and
wrote largely for an audience of social scientists (Held 1980, 36-37). Their
criticism of social science, however thoroughgoing, was a critique from
within social science and an argument for a radical objectivity instead of
the contrived objectivity of the emerging mainstream (Jay 1973, 224). As
Adorno put it in his autobiographical essay, “We followed what I believed
to be the plausible idea that in the present society the objective institutions
and developmental tendencies have attained such an overwhelming power
over the individual that people . . . are becoming, and evidently in increas­
ing measure, functionaries of the predominant tendencies operating over
their heads. Less and less depends on their own particular conscious and
unconscious being, their inner life” (Adorno 1968, 230).
This critique permeates not just the philosophical work but also the
empirical studies the IFS produced, beginning with its prewar Studies on
Authority and the Family (IFS 1936), through its influential and contro­
versial The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950), and on into the
postwar research agenda beginning with Gruppenexperiment (Pollock
1955), an important yet virtually unknown study of public opinion in
postwar Germany. In this volume we present the core of the public opin­
ion research in Group Experiment in its first large-scale English transla­
tion.3While the intellectual forces behind these projects (and the empirical
work that followed them well into the 1960s) were diverse and perhaps
even contradictory, this body of work demonstrates the extent to which, in
exile, the Frankfurt School and its associates cross-fertilized with the ma­
jor developments of American social science. They used these tools and
approaches toward their overarching goal of locating and coming to terms
with the pathologies of anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe’s recent past
and diagnosing the persistent ills of mass society.

The Frankfurt School’s Productive Exile

Gruppenexperiment, nevertheless, is emphatically a work of critical the­
ory, very much at the heart of the type of scholarship to which the Frank­
furt School was committed. In contrast to their reputations as Manda­
rins of German philosophy, here and elsewhere the Frankfurt School
combined—at some times uneasily, at others synergistically—a critical atti­
tude with a fealty to empirical reality. “Empirical reality,” of course, was it­
self a concept they always subjected to critical interrogation. The critical
attitude, wrote Institute director Max Horkheimer in his essay “Traditional
 Translators' Introduction — xviii

and Critical Theory,” “is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with
which society as presently constituted provides each of its members. The
separation between individual and society in virtue of which the individ­
ual accepts as natural the limits prescribed for his activity is relativized
in critical theory” (Horkheimer 1972, 207). At the same time, consider­
ations both Marxist and pragmatic prevented the Frankfurt scholars from
adopting an esoteric, detached theoretical approach. Thus they produced
a wide variety of empirical work in Germany and the United States,
which ties directly into the intellectual project of twentieth century criti­
cal social science, rather than, as conventionally assumed, standing en­
tirely against it.
The Frankfurt School’s history is complex, reflecting the turbulent envi­
ronment in which its scholarship developed. It originated, for practical
purposes, in 1930, when Friedrich Pollock hired Max Horkheimer to take
over the directorship of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for So­
cial Research, IFS) in Frankfurt, the reincarnation of an Institute for
Marxism founded by wealthy philanthropist Felix Weil (Coser 1984). The
choice of Horkheimer marked the Institute’s recognition that Marxism
was in crisis and endorsed Horkheimer’s ambition of blending social phi­
losophy and social science to address that crisis (Wiggershaus 1994,
36ff. ). Horkheimer quickly assembled a group of intellectuals whose
names remain at the core of the Frankfurt approach: psychologist Erich
Fromm, economist Friedrich Pollock (who coordinated the Gruppen­
experiment),4 sociologist Leo Löwenthal, philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
and philosopher cum sociologist and musicologist Theodor Wiesegrund
Adorno. The group’s famously bleak outlook on the crisis of modern
politics and culture as they had developed since 1914—not an uncommon
evaluation across the political spectrum in Weimar Germany—emerged
out of these scholars’ interactions with one another as well as with their
interlocutors, most importantly Georg Lukâcs, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt
Brecht, and Siegfried Kracauer.
As this eclectic mix implies, from early on the Frankfurt School was
concerned with aesthetics, politics, culture, and media—and, crucially,
with the ways these combined with one another to create and reproduce
what they called the “totally socialized society” (vergesellschaftete Gesell­
schaft). Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (2009, 51-76) makes a strong case
that the concept of the “totally socialized society” is one of the threads
that ties together Adorno’s entire oeuvre; it is “the antithesis of successful
mediation between general and individual interest” (58). The term appears
in several places throughout Adorno’s work, signifying the importance of
the concept in the Frankfurt diagnosis of modernity. We return to verge-
 Translators9Introduction ~ xix

sellschaftete Gesellschaft in more detail below. For now it is sufficient to

note that the concept was coined in the first chapter of Gruppenexperi­
ment to signal the insistence on the social roots of individual opinions.
Forced into exile—first elsewhere in Europe, then in New York, later
in Los Angeles—by the rise of the Third Reich, the scholars turned their
analytic attention to what was obviously the most urgent problem of
the time: the historical, psychological, and social origins of fascism and
anti-Semitism and the associated failure of the working class. Among
them, the work of Theodor Adorno has best expressed the Frankfurt
School’s trademark dialectical tensions and has had the most lasting
influence.
David Jenemann has made a persuasive case for the intellectual impor­
tance of Adorno’s years spent in New York and Los Angeles (Jenemann
2007). Adorno’s first assignments in exile were to carry out the sort of
administrative research on radio audiences for which Lazarsfeld had be­
come famous (see, e.g., Lazarsfeld and Stanton 1944). Lazarsfeld’s ap­
proach to radio research—and, by extension, to social science in general—
was relentlessly empirical and methodologically technical. The audience,
he famously suggested in Personal Influence, was unlikely to be hood­
winked by distant broadcast media when there were nearby opinion leaders
and dense social networks to underwrite more nuanced, locally based pub­
lic opinion (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). This approach to understanding
the audience dovetailed with broadcasting companies’ desires to build and
segment audiences. It also, Adorno claimed, missed the ideological forest
for the trees. The real effect of mass broadcasting was the mass itself, and
diagnosing the objective creation of a mass public, with its uniquely prob­
lematic relationship both to culture and to politics, was the urgent task of
social science.
Despite their disaffection with the conventions of “official social sci­
ences” (Jenemann 2007, 1), the Frankfurt scholars acquired a sense of the
promise of modern empirical techniques as well as the technical expertise
necessary to deploy these techniques. To be sure, their relation to these
techniques was complicated inasmuch as they rejected both positivism and
functionalism, two pillars of American-style empirical research. But they
rejected these as intellectual positions, not as modes of inquiry; indeed, as
Thomas Wheatland puts it, “As long as empiricism does not take the status
quo for granted and assists the social theorists in questioning existing so­
ciety, empiricism remains a useful tool of the critical sociologist.” System­
atic empirical inquiry was an important element of the critical work the
Frankfurt scholars did in the United States and after their return to Ger­
many (Wheatland 2009, 345). Following his separation from Lazarsfeld’s
 Translators' Introduction — ' xx

project, Adorno and Horkheimer—his friend, colleague, and sponsor—

moved to California and took up this more critical social scientific chal­
lenge while maintaining their understanding of, and interest in, the devel­
oping techniques of modern social science. Their disagreement with
Lazarsfeld, though, remained substantive and dramatic (see Gitlin 1978
for a particularly resonant repercussion and Katz 1987 for a rejoinder),
and in many ways animated Horkheimer and Adorno’s California work
(Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002) and the design of the Frankfurt
School’s American empirical projects as well as, eventually, Gruppen­
experiment (Pickford 1997).
Three works from this period delineate the contours of the synthesis of
critical theory and empirical research that eventually marked Gruppenex­
periment. These are the exquisitely detailed Psychological Technique of
Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (Adorno 2000b), completed in
1943 but unpublished during Adorno’s life (Tiedemann 1986, vol. 9, 412);
the well-known Dialectic o f Enlightenment, in one part of which Hork­
heimer and Adorno diagnosed the malaise of mass society (Horkheimer
and Adorno [1947] 2002); and the monumental, survey-based study The
Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950). Together, these works dis­
play a wide range of methodological techniques and an urgent concern
with empirically investigating the relationship among aesthetics, commu­
nication, and modern politics.5
In The Psychological Technique o f Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Ad­
dresses, Adorno systematically dissects the mode of address of an early
Christian Right radio personality. He develops a theory of the mass audi­
ence and the rhetorical tropes of fascism, infused with a subtlety and em­
brace of self-contradiction provided by psychoanalytic theory (Apostolidis
1998). “The ultimate aim of Thomas’ propaganda,” Adorno concludes, “is
authority by brutal, sadistic oppression”:

The future of America of which he [Thomas] warns is depicted in not alto­

gether different terms: “One of these fine mornings you men and women will
arise with no stocks and no bonds and no home and your backs will be
placed against a wall with a machine gun bullet in your heart and in your
head.” One may well expect that the audience projects this image upon their
foes and thus enjoys it. Thomas almost openly professes this ambivalence to­
wards atrocities in one of his anti-Soviet diatribes: “I want to say that you
men and women, you and I are living in the most fearful time of the history of
the world. We are living also in the most gracious and most wonderful time.”
This is the agitator’s dream, the unification of the horrible and the wonderful,
the drunkenness of an annihilation that pretends to be salvation. (Adorno
2000b, 131)
 Translators' Introduction ~ xxi

Thus, as Adorno suggests, the cynical fascist agitator manipulates his audi­
ence by reducing it to a consuming public all too eager to believe the
David-versus-Goliath image of the “Lone Wolf” (Adorno 2000b, 4-6)
struggling against the tide of Communism and moral degeneration.6
The major philosophical work Adorno and Horkheimer produced dur­
ing their California stay was Dialectic o f Enlightenment, a diagnosis of
modern culture and society that has become one of their best-known and
most read works (Hullot-Kentor 2006, 24-25). The audience’s status as a
mass is addressed in Dialectic o f Enlightenment, particularly in the most
famous essay therein, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass De­
ception.” Building upon Adorno’s 1936 rebuttal (Adorno 1977) to Benja­
min’s essay on the mechanical reproduction of art (Benjamin 2008), “The
Culture Industry” argues that industrialization of cultural artifacts—
principally music (see Witkin 2002) and film—totalizes the audience expe­
rience, incorporating all possible critique. This is partially due to the tech­
nology involved. Since the audience for mass art such as radio and film
cannot “talk back,” these technologies become “democratic” as compared
to the “liberal” telephone which fosters interactivity by its very nature
(95-96; see also Klinenberg and Perrin 2000; Fischer 1994). While the
specific claim—that radio and film cannot allow a way for the audience to
respond—is no longer true (Herbst 1995), the ways in which audience re­
sponse has been implemented and channeled bolster the more general
claim that industrialized culture tends to homogenize and “massify” its
audience, thereby neutering potential critique.7 Massification was diag­
nosed by Horkheimer and Adorno in “The Culture Industry”: “film . . .
trains those exposed to it to identify film directly with reality.. . . The re­
quired qualities of attention have become so familiar from other films and
other culture products already known . . . that they appear automatically.
The power of industrial society is imprinted on people once and for all. . ..
Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces
human beings as what the whole has made them” (Horkheimer and
Adorno 2002, 100). A society is massified to the extent that it is addressed
and, therefore, constituted as an undifferentiated mass audience—the re­
sult of a thoroughly industrialized culture industry and a cause of the to­
tally socialized society.8
The audience, in turn, must be prepared to receive these messages as
they are sent out, and it is to that problem that Adorno and colleagues
turned in their 1950 survey analysis, The Authoritarian Personality. Co­
ordinated through the Survey Research Center at the University of Cali­
fornia, Berkeley, The Authoritarian Personality is based on a large-scale
survey and in-depth interviews in which the researchers postulate, identify,
 Translators' Introduction — xxii

and seek to delineate a particular personality type vulnerable to endorsing

authoritarianism under the right conditions. The implication—indeed, the
assumption—of specific, stable authoritarian “types” came in for ideologi­
cal and ontological critiques, both at the time and later (e.g., Jahoda 1954;
Altemeyer 1981; Martin 2001; see also Jay 1973, 246-250).9 From the
perspective of the Frankfurt School’s overall agenda, though, the most
important finding of The Authoritarian Personality is the very fact that
individuals susceptible to authoritarian manipulation existed, and in large
numbers, in the world’s leading democracy. The implication was that al­
though the Third Reich occurred in Germany, the pathologies that brought
it about were widespread, and the potential for fascist psychological ma­
nipulation was present in the West as well. This may be seen as an early
hint of Adorno’s later, famous slogan, from a 1959 speech, that he was
more concerned with the remnants of fascism within democracy than op­
posed to democracy. We delineate the intellectual history of this idea and
the speech in which it appeared in our introduction to the companion vol­
ume (Olick and Perrin 2010).
Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock returned to Germany in 1949 with
these tools and sensibilities—a European critical theory transformed but
not betrayed by its encounter with American empiricism—in their bag­
gage. They sought to use them to investigate the ideological contours of
postwar Germany. The result is Gruppenexperiment: a fascinating, frus­
trating study, ambitious and revolutionary in its substance, questionable in
its findings, and at times maddeningly plodding in its prose, yet prescient
in its dynamic approach to public opinion and democratic behavior. If The
Authoritarian Personality sought to identify the sorts of individuals who
might succumb to authoritarianism given the right material conditions,
Gruppenexperiment sought to demonstrate that such conditions existed
and could evoke proto-fascist responses in “denazified” Germany.
Horkheimer and Adorno also returned to Frankfurt from exile in the
United States committed to establishing a theoretically robust, modern
social scientific community in postwar Germany (Albrecht et al. 1999). In
the process, they hoped to establish the Frankfurt School as the intellectual
center of postwar German social science, a goal they never really achieved,
although they were very much part of German sociology through the mid-
to late twentieth century (Albrecht et al. 1999; König 1987). They were
supported in this effort by luminaries in the American social science estab­
lishment (“Proposal,” 1949)—many of whom had enjoyed less than cor­
dial relationships with the Frankfurt scholars during their stay in America
(Jenemann 2007)—as well as, financially, by the U.S. High Commissioner
for Germany (HICOG), which served as the occupying administration in
 Translators*Introduction — xxiii

West Germany (Jäger 2004; Wiggershaus 1994). That administration was

engaged in a series of public opinion surveys in the new Federal Republic
designed to demonstrate the successful exorcism of the Nazi ghost and the
consequent readiness of West Germany to take its place in the community
of nations (Stern 1992; Merritt and Merritt 1970, 1980; Merritt 1995).
These surveys were being carried out in the service of the official Anglo-
American policy after 1945 °f rehabilitating West Germany as a bulwark
against Soviet expansionism (Olick 2005).
For reasons both biographical and theoretical, Adorno, Horkheimer,
and their colleagues were skeptical of the results these surveys produced.
They doubted the “clean break” with the Nazi past the American research
seemed to imply. They were suspicious of the findings themselves, the
quick cultural turnaround the findings suggested, and the interpretation of
these findings. And, most deeply, they were unconvinced by what they saw
as the uncritical and simplistic theory of public opinion and representation
contained in the surveys’ methodology, insofar as they saw any theory at
all behind them.
The Frankfurt scholars thus designed Gruppenexperiment, and the In­
stitute carried it out, to articulate and demonstrate their critiques. As we
will discuss below, these critiques foreshadowed debates that took place
later—in some cases, much later—on the nature of public opinion, delib­
eration, representation, and democratic citizenship. In addition to antici­
pating the contours of these debates, Gruppenexperimenfs approach ap­
plied modern techniques of empirical research to the task, in the form of
136 focus groups designed to probe the dark recesses of the post-Nazi Ger­
man imagination. The scholars were motivated at once by their admira­
tion for and their critique of American social science. While they employed
the language of contemporary public opinion research, they sought to ad­
dress the concern that such research was, like the consumer society it
served, atomistic, superficial, and passive:

The progress of a science that is able to develop methods with the help of
which it can register and under some circumstances predict the truly subtle
reactions, opinions, and wishes of people is undeniable. It is also an indisput­
able gain that one can check political and economic decisions against the re­
actions of the governed. Nevertheless, one should also not fail to recognize
that the convergence of social-scientific methods toward those of the natural
sciences is itself the child of a society that reifies people. The democratic po­
tential of the new methods is thus not unquestionable, as is so gladly assumed
particularly in Germany after the suppression of public opinion by the Hitler
regime. It is not incidental that modern “opinion research” grew out of mar­
ket and consumer research. It [opinion research] implicitly identifies man
 Translators' Introduction — ■ xxiv

under the rubric of consumer. As a result, the diverse tendencies to social con­
trol and manipulation that can be observed to derive from modern empirical
sociology in the realm of consumer analysis or “human relations” are not
merely incidental to the method itself. While they [opinion researchers] are
led by the principle of the equality of people and allow no privilege in evalu­
ating the attitudes of individual subjects, they nevertheless treat these subjects
as they are constituted by the dominant economic and social relations, with­
out examining this constitution itself. The difficulty becomes obvious when
the point is to convey with representative surveys what opinions and mean­
ings people have toward questions of general public interest—in other words
as soon as one wants to deal with the problem of so-called public opinion
with the techniques of empirical social research (20-21).

The research design was thus framed as a corrective to, not an indict­
ment of, then-current public opinion research. The methodological intro­
duction brims with reference to the latest American techniques, including
those in studies by Hadley Cantril, Leonard Doob, Walter Lippmann,
Lazarsfeld, Harold Lasswell, Bernard Berelson, Janowitz, and Kurt Lewin.

Gruppenexperimenfs Critique of Public Opinion

and Public Opinion Research
What value does this controversial research project, over half a century
old, hold for the theory and practice of public opinion research at the
dawn of the twenty-first century? Far from being a “classic,” the (reread­
ing of which justifies itself (Fields 1995, xxiii-xxiv), Gruppenexperiment
(Pollock 1955) is best described as a lost study. After a flurry of contro­
versy early after its publication in 1955, it settled into its role as a footnote
in German methods texts (e.g., Lamnek 2005) and focus group studies (du
Bois-Reymond 1998). In the rare cases it appears at all in Anglophone
scholarship, it is typically mentioned only in passing as the first project the
Frankfurt School intellectuals took on upon their return to Germany. We
argue that this neglect is unwarranted. Gruppenexperiment was an ambi­
tious undertaking—riddled, to be sure, with empirical problems and logis­
tical limitations, but probably more right than wrong in its conclusions
and certainly prescient in its theoretical approach to democracy and pub­
lic opinion.
In the foreword, politician and lawyer Franz Böhm explains the essen­
tial suspicion of public opinion surveys:
alongside so-called “public opinion,” which expresses itself in elections, refer­
enda, public speeches, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, party and group
programs, parliamentary discussions, and political assemblies, there is non­
public opinion, whose content can differ considerably from the content of
 Translators' Introduction — xxv

public opinion. Its sentences, however, circulate alongside those of public

opinion like the coins of a second currency, in fact, they may even be more
durable and stable than actual public opinion, which we flaunt like a courtier
before the official public, especially to foreign countries, and which we pride
ourselves as being our actual and sole opinion, as if they expressed what we
actually mean even though they are really only the things we say when wear­
ing our Sunday best (3).

These latent, unofficial opinions, Böhm avers, are unsightly but crucial, as
they express the unvarnished political psyche of the research subjects.
Adorno, however, resists assigning pure authenticity to these opinions;
rather, the group method “was meant to call forth real social behavior that
simultaneously reflects and produces ‘public opinion.’ Its medium is the
conversation and the interaction between those who are talking with each
other; official inhibitions (Zensuren) are deactivated, new controls within
the group induced” (Adorno 2010, 200). Thus the study does not actually
claim that the opinions expressed in the focus groups are more authentic
than others. Rather, it pursues a more modest claim: to borrow language
from social science that emerged 40 years later, these opinions are present
in the respondents’ cultural repertoires (see Swidler 2001, 24-25; Tilly
2006) and can therefore be evoked in the presence of particular stimuli
(Merton et al. 1956).
The critique of public opinion research contained in Gruppenexperi­
ment begins with Böhm’s colorful metaphor of the “Sunday best.” Opin­
ions harvested from individuals by telephone or in-person visits—the
bread and butter of conventional public opinion research—are not false or
bad. They are just partial and situational. Like any other social institution,
and doubly so an institution at the time quickly becoming a taken-for-
granted standard (see Igo 2007), public opinion research deserves to be
studied and understood as a modality within which knowledge and ideas
are generated, as Adorno argued later on in “Opinion Research and Pub-
licness,” also reprinted in this volume:

The current identity of market and opinion research in America, which are
also bound together terminologically in Germany, is, throughout, in the sense
of the observation of common sense, that no radical difference prevails be­
tween the preferences for the names of a political candidate and for those of
a brand name, as would be expected according to the theoretical differentia­
tion between the autonomous and mature/responsible folk and the surround­
ings (Umkreis) of the servitude (Kundenschaft) to mass products. Under this
aspect, opinion research would not be a mere technique, but just as much an
object of sociology as a science that inquires into the objective structural laws
of society (Adorno 2005, 122).
 Translators' Introduction xxvi

Mounting the critique of public opinion research required all the tools
in the Frankfurt arsenal: empirical, social-theoretical, philosophical,
even aesthetic as they considered the representative apparatus contained
within techniques of social research. Survey-based public opinion re­
search was ascendant at the time, supported both by its affinity with in­
dustrial statistics and marketing and by its high-modernist scientific flair
(Converse 1987). It is precisely because this apparatus was so daunting
that the critique is so multifaceted and provides an important point of
connection among the Frankfurt School’s diverse themes. It is also why
the critique is of enduring value now rather than simply of historical
interest.
The first element of the critique has become commonplace since Grup­
penexperiment. Essentially, it holds that survey research offers insufficient
opportunity for respondents to express their true beliefs. The authors take
pains to point out that they are not advocating “the conventional organi-
cistic and irrationalistic cliché that surveys would be too mechanistic for
talking about the ostensible totality of the person or of the community”
(Adorno 2010, 200).10 In other words, the authors do not criticize the
closed-choice, reductive nature of survey instruments for painting an in­
sufficiently complete picture of their respondents as complete subjects
(see, in this regard, Perrin 2004). But survey research encourages each
respondent to have an opinion, even on matters about which they may
care little and know less. It also implicitly weighs each of these opinions
as equally important, both in comparison to other opinions held by a
given respondent and in comparison to opinions on similar matters held
by other respondents. As the authors point out in their discussion of the
Gruppenexperiment method, these ideas are the products of modern bour­
geois society, which creates the opinion environment in which individuals
are set (see also Jepperson 1992, 4). “The concept of public opinion pre­
supposes a social organization or group whose members have more or less
the same experiences.” As a result of this principle, Gruppenexperiment
endeavors

to specify the concept of public opinion by considering the structure of the

group forming that opinion. The idea that public opinion is not merely the
sum of individual opinions but contains a transcending collective element
arises here. There can only be talk of public opinion when something like a
consistent group structure exists. (Chapter 1, 24)

The second element of the critique is that survey research necessarily

decontextualizes its respondents and, therefore, the data they provide, an­
other critique that has re-emerged since (see, e.g., Abbott 2004):
 Translators' Introduction ~ xxvii

the blind reduction of the embeddedness, of the variability of reactions, and

especially of the real differences of socio-political power and powerlessness to
a statistical model that is at best appropriate to elections is false (Adorno
2010 , 20 0 ).

Individual respondents, that is, do their responding within the contexts in

which they are set. In an increasingly massified United States, this context
was problematic enough. In immediate postwar Germany the charged
context was an intolerable threat to the validity of the HICOG surveys.
How could the citizens of a recently vanquished nation, its erstwhile na­
tional ideology a worldwide disgrace, honestly explore and articulate their
views on Jews, the war, guilt, and democracy to a stranger conducting an
interview?
Finally, the most complex theoretical critique has an interesting affinity
to the French sociolinguistic strain associated with Ferdinand de Saussure,
Emile Durkheim, and Michel Foucault. Gruppenexperiment specifically
compares the national opinion scripts individual citizens enacted to a lan­
guage (langue): an overarching power that informs, constrains, and chan­
nels the expressive potential of citizen opinions. “The marked surrender to
language is just another expression of the surrender to the reality that
people in industrial mass society can no longer experience themselves as
subjects, only as disposable objects. Their own destiny confronts them as
an object” (162). Language here is at once a measurable instance of social
constraint and, much more importantly, an example of modern Germans’
tendency to reproduce the ideological scripts they inherit. Compare this
position to one expressed by Durkheim, reached via a very different path to
be sure: “the language of a people always influences the manner in which
the new things that people come to know are classified in their minds—
those things must fit into preexisting frameworks. For this reason, when
men set out to make a comprehensive representation of the universe, the
language they spoke indelibly marked the system of ideas that was then
born” (Durkheim [1912] 1995, 73).
Again, many of these critiques have since become commonplace, whether
as concerns about scientific representation, democratic potential, or survey
technique (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1979, 1990, 2005; Ackerman and Fishkin
2004; Ginsberg 1989; Latour 2005; Paley 2001). We detail some of these
critiques later in this introduction and note the ways in which Gruppenex­
periment anticipated them, in many cases years before their better-known
versions. First, though, we turn to what is perhaps the most important facet
of Gruppenexperimenfs critique of public opinion: its use of empirical
methods to illustrate and animate these concerns.
 Translators’ Introduction — xxviii

The Proposed Solution

To address the critiques of public opinion research, Pollock and colleagues
turned to a novel instrument developed in the New York social science
milieu in which they had spent part of their exile: the focus group, the
group version of the “focused interview” technique introduced by Robert
Merton and colleagues (Merton, Fiske, and Kendall 1956). The connec­
tion with ascendant American social science gave the method a kind of le­
gitimacy it might otherwise have lacked, but the representational logic was
in fact not incompatible with the Frankfurt School tradition.
In designing the research, Horkheimer reasoned that people would be
more likely to speak plainly and frankly when they were in a group of
strangers. The ideal metaphor: the compartment of a long-distance train,
in which travelers are thrust together to pass the hours but may let down
their guard as they do not depend on the others for social or material
support.11
With this image in mind, the team assembled 136 focus groups around
West Germany. Some of the groups consisted only of men or women, or
only a single occupational group; others were mixed. They provided each
group with a stimulus: a fictional letter, ostensibly written by an Allied
soldier (a British soldier for groups held in the British section; an Ameri­
can for those in the American section) to the editor of his hometown news­
paper,12 evaluating German character and culture after the War. The letter
(called the “Colburn letter,” and included in this volume as an appendix)
was designed to evoke feelings and concerns about these themes in gen­
eral, in particular about the question of German national guilt, since it was
precisely here that the researchers most distrusted the polling results. This
methodological construction followed directly the American scholarship
of the time. Merton et al. (1956), for example, proposed the use of stan­
dardized stimuli like this in order to control for the environment within
which an interviewee is responding. This technique has become a staple of
focus groups, whether they are used for marketing, political, or academic
purposes (Morgan 1997; Perrin 2006; Schudson 2006).
Gruppenexperiment contains both an extended quantitative treatment
of these discussions and a qualitative analysis carried out by Adorno him­
self, titled “Guilt and Defense.” The “Guilt and Defense” essay is the cen­
tral text in our eponymous companion volume, Guilt and Defense: On the
Legacies o f Fascism in Postwar Germany (Adorno 2010, 51-185). In addi­
tion to these, the émigré sociologist Kurt Wolff did some preliminary
analyses of the interviews with respect, in particular, to attitudes toward
the United States.13
 Translators’ Introduction — - xxix

The sections of Gruppenexperiment containing the quantitative analysis

(included in this volume) address head-on the work’s critique of polling.
They move between individual and group levels of analysis, examining the
likelihood of individual “social types” to make particular arguments and
the types of groups in which such arguments are likely to be made. The
story, which is detailed in Chapter 3 below (Chapter IV in the original
work), is not pretty. In direct contrast to the optimistic interpretation pro­
moted by the American administration (Stern 1992; Merritt and Merritt
1970, 1980; Merritt 1995), the Frankfurt researchers found it relatively
easy to evoke anti-Semitic and anti-democratic responses from a large pro­
portion (albeit a minority) of the participants who spoke. Many more re­
mained silent in the face of such responses, which the researchers inter­
preted as acquiescence if not support, a position similar to that taken by
Noelle-Neumann in her theory of the “spiral of silence” (1984). Interpret­
ing this research phenomenologically—that is, as a model for the practice
of publicness—suggests that, regardless of whether these “Totalschwei-
ger” (respondents who remained totally silent) agreed with the statements
of others, their silent participation in the group discussions offered com­
plicity with these statements.14 As we will see, this issue of how to inter­
pret such silence was a key point for critics.

The Structure of the Argument

The authors’ Introduction, which follows the preface by Böhm, contains
the outline of the study’s critique of empirical social science as it is typi­
cally practiced. The introduction, nevertheless, praises “polished American
techniques of social research” as the grounding for the project. Indeed,
American imports are held to be valuable because their resolutely empiri­
cal focus counteracts a major weakness of German social science: “des­
potic decrees from on high and a style of thinking unconcerned with con­
crete facts,” a style the authors blame for the very “calamity” of National
Socialism and all that it wrought. However, the opposite pole of this anti-
empiricism is “simply imitating” foreign techniques, an approach the au­
thors seek to avoid as well. “It is impossible to glean a social totality . . . by
increasing the quantity of data. It is also impossible to extrapolate a theory
from empirical findings in this world in which individual social realities
conceal their own essence almost as much as they express it.” This is a very
deep problem, which the introduction locates in “society itself, where . . .
the relation [between the particular and the general] is actually antagonis­
tic.” The method to be developed, then, should seek to apprehend the gen­
eral through the particular without assuming a simple relationship between
 Translators' Introduction — ’ xxx

the two: “It would be a bad science that sealed itself off against observa­
tions that emerge from the material for the sake of the chimera of absolute
proof.”
Chapter i (Chapter I in the original) contains the work’s theoretical and
epistemological critique of standardized public opinion research. The chap­
ter begins by acknowledging that polling techniques have a key advantage
over earlier methods. Prior studies had been forced to concentrate on the
ideas and communications of elites because there were no tools for ascer­
taining the views of non-elite citizens; polling thus carried a democratic
sensibility in its capacity to represent the views of the non-elite public. After
acknowledging this advantage, though, the chapter then quickly turns to
the limitations on the techniques’ democratic characteristics. This is no
small matter; analysts from George Gallup (Gallup and Rae 1940) to Frank
Newport (Newport 2004) have argued that the public opinion poll is an
inherently democratic instrument because it considers each respondent’s
opinion regardless of social position, a virtue the Group Experiment schol­
ars praise as well (see also Igo 2007). But their praise is quickly tempered
by an indictment of social scientific methods as “the child of a society that
confronts men as an ossified reality”—that is, as a totally socialized society
whose totality dominates the subjectively held opinions of its members.
It is a “cliché of the Modern,” the authors of Gruppenexperiment argue,
to assume that all citizens have opinions on all matters—a position ex­
plored in much greater detail by Inkeles and Smith (1974) and Jepperson
(1992), apparently without foreknowledge of the Frankfurt work in the
area.15 Beyond the empirical mistake this represents, though, it leads to
“seducing interviewees into . . . accepting stereotypes” instead of articulat­
ing authentic opinions. Goaded by the public opinion apparatus into ex­
pressing an opinion, interviewees just refract the dominant views of the
society of which they are part. Because of the totally socialized nature of
the opinion environment, “opinion research needs to free itself from the
prejudice that opinions are . . . stable properties of individuals” and, in­
stead, “approach as closely as possible the conditions under which actual
opinions are formed, persist, and change.” The critical theorists then pro­
pose the focus group study and the railroad compartment metaphor to
allow subjects to discuss and debate important issues without the con­
straint of a closed-ended question schema. However, the chapter is at
pains to avoid arguing that this “pilot study” is the be-all and end-all of
social research; rather, it is intended to illuminate the psychodynamic pro­
cesses that underlie the overt statements of the participants. Evaluating the
groups’ responses to the Colburn letter provides the material for charac­
terizing the groups both qualitatively and quantitatively.
 Translators*Introduction ~ xxxi

Chapter II consists of a detailed demographic analysis of the partici­

pants in those focus groups. We have elected not to include Chapter II in
this volume because it is mostly technical and therefore of limited interest
to contemporary readers. Extensive tables and graphs detail the gender,
age, education, and class backgrounds of participants. There is also a
breakdown of the kinds of focus groups that made up the study: classes
and working groups; student groups; religious youth groups; political
youth groups; youth homes; other youth groups; Catholic and other
women’s leagues; working women; refugee and camp-dwelling women;
married women’s groups; rural women’s groups; other women’s groups;
refugee groups; inhabitants of barracks and bunkers; unemployed groups;
other class-based groups; rural groups; workers’ groups; groups of former
military officers; and miscellaneous other groups.
Following Chapter IPs detailed description of the participants, Chapter
2 (Chapter III in the original) provides a careful description of the coding
process—both where the codes came from and how to interpret them.
Some of the codes are simply categorical, such as the topic under discussion
and the demographic characteristics of the speakers. Others require the
judgment of the analyst to notice similarities among them and classify them
accordingly, such as the relative negative character of the comments them­
selves. The most important work, though, is cataloging and systematically
recording the positions participants take and the ways they argue for them
in order to discern patterns within and among groups.
Chapter 3 (Chapter IV in the original) provides the quantitative core of
the argument: a careful, at times tedious, recitation of the statistical
“groupings” of participants based on their positive, negative, and ambiva­
lent statements toward important areas of concern. On all the main topics
of interest—attitudes toward democracy, toward the West, toward collec­
tive guilt, toward the Jews—there was considerable ambivalence, relatively
little “positive” sentiment, and substantial “negative” sentiment. (The re­
searchers labeled attitudes “positive” when they were pro-democracy, pro-
Jewish, pro-Western and accepting of complicity for the Holocaust.) Farm­
ers, older people, and university-educated speakers fare the worst on these
measures, while young people and, most strongly, women are the most
positive.
Although the theory in the previous chapters argued against inferring
speakers’ characters from what they say in the discussions—utterances be­
ing the product of the group setting as well as of the individual’s belief
system (see Perrin 2005, 2006)—there is significant slippage on this point
in Chapter 3. For example, when the chapter analyzes anti-Semitic state­
ments, the language casually shifts into a discussion of “anti-Semites,”
 Translators' Introduction — xxxii

referring to the speakers, not their speech, an elision made all the more
significant because critics had taken The Authoritarian Personality to task
for a similar confusion (Jahoda 1954; Martin 2001).16 Although the au­
thors are at pains to delineate the study as being talk-centered and as fo­
cusing on what people can say as opposed to what they will do, at various
places throughout the chapter participants’ statements are called “behav­
ior” (Verhaltung). For example, in Chapter 3 we read, “If we register con­
cession of complicity as a positive attitude within our frame of reference,
the following groups [those older than 50, those younger than 20, and
women] behaved a little bit more positively than the average.” Speech is, of
course, behavior as well, but it is hard to justify the notion that the partici­
pants were behaving as residual Nazis, particularly given that the very
reason for asking the question is that fascism had recently been so very
much more than mere speech. This linguistic slippage, coming as it does in
the midst of overall methodological humility, reveals the underlying con­
ceit of the project, which was to demonstrate the remaining potential for
fascist revival in postwar Germany.
Additionally, the similarity among the groups in their attitudes toward the
Eastern Bloc indicates an “impressive example of what one . . . is expected
to say,” and the increase in ambivalence toward Jews among more-educated
participants is taken as evidence for university-educated respondents being
more anti-Semitic. But ambivalence is higher among higher-educated re­
spondents for most of the areas—perhaps complexity of thought was
misread as ambivalence in the discussions.
Following the quantitative analysis of Chapter 3 comes the intensive
qualitative analysis in Chapter V in the original, “Guilt and Defense,”
which we have not included here, where our focus is on the theory of pub­
lic opinion developed in the Gruppenexperiment rather than on the sub­
stantive findings about postwar Germany. Adorno himself wrote the
“Guilt and Defense” essay; it is the only part of Gruppenexperiment at­
tributed explicitly to him and included in his collected works. In it, Adorno
traces the participants’ discussion of guilt, and the defensiveness that went
along with it, as the beginning of an arc that culminated in his famous
Ï959-62 lecture/essay, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (Adorno
1960). This important intervention in the debate over German guilt and
how—and whether—to “master” the recent past, we argue in the introduc­
tion to our companion volume, cannot be adequately understood outside
the context of Gruppenexperiment and the debates that followed it.
Chapter 4 (Chapter VI in the original) takes the material from an en­
tirely different angle from the previous chapters.17 Pursuing questions aris­
ing from American social science about how groups form, persist, and
 Translators' Introduction — xxxiii

exert social control over their members, the chapter uses the transcripts to
illustrate the process of “integration.” It is most concerned with integra­
tion in groups that did not exist prior to the experiment—i.e., that were
made up of randomly recruited participants thrown together for this pur­
pose. The chapter presents a fictional discussion cobbled together of ex­
cerpts from the real discussions. It uses these to illustrate a six-step model
of integration: strangerhood, orientation, adaptation, familiarity, confor­
mity, and the fading of the discussion. The importance of the argument
here is less clear than in the earlier chapters. In one sense it is an attempt
to contribute to the general progress of social science; the content, it ar­
gues, is secondary to the form of the group integration. The emphasis is on
making connections to American group process social psychology, for ex­
ample that of Robert F. Bales (Bales 1950). But paying attention to the
excerpts selected for analysis demonstrates something else as well. The
chapter is a micro-level investigation of the process by which individuals
observe, test, and adopt ideological positions from the opinion environ­
ment in which they find themselves. It is, in other words, the micro-macro
link for the book’s theory of totally socialized society.
Nonetheless, the chapter is not limited to an abstract social psychologi­
cal investigation of group cohesion. Rather, the authors argue, “it seems as
if the function of the discussion for our participants is more to effect a
certain sociopsychological situation and constellation than to address an
objective question.” Participants’ psychological desire to belong—to con­
form to the group—often trumped their desire to express genuine beliefs.
“If this is true, it implies a warning to be cautious about statements of
public opinion. It would be wrong to interpret them according to their
content as the conviction of the speaker, since they are first and foremost
formed by the person’s attachment to a social situation, by the pursuit of
belonging to a collectivity or by bestowing a certain form on it. These mo­
tives are more important than rationality, which is often used only in the
service of such aspirations.” As additional proof for the participants’ de­
sire to preserve the group, the book notes that even participants who never
spoke during the discussion agreed to have another group discussion. “We
can conclude from this,” the chapter argues, “that the group sessions satis­
fied not only the drive for expression, the wish to have an audience, but
also the desire to be part of an audience.”
A reasonable reader could infer from this finding that the focus group
approach is no better than polling and could even be worse. If subjects are
working to please other members of their specific groups, both by saying
what the others expect and by silent acquiescence, why privilege this
group-mediated expression over scientifically gathered poll results? The
 Translators' Introduction — xxxiv

answer lies in Gruppenexperimenfs insistence on the phenomenological

nature of opinion. If individuals held opinions and the role of research
methods was simply to harvest these opinions, the concern would be ap­
propriate. But if, as Gruppenexperiment holds, opinions are formed in the
contexts in which they are expressed, the dynamics of the focus groups
provide crucial additional information about how such opinions develop.
While public opinion research since Gruppenexperiment has tended to
interpret such integration phenomena as noise or error in its quest to rep­
resent the authentic beliefs of isolated individuals (see Perrin and Mc­
Farland 2008; Latour 2005; Marres 2005; Lezaun 2007), Gruppenexperi­
ment treats them as essential. The authors assume “that opinions on
political ideology usually crystallize only during engagement with the
stimuli and with other people. This process is reciprocal: while group
opinion is reflected in individual opinions, individual opinions contribute
to group opinion” (Chapter 4). This claim is based on the sociological idea
that groups have collective characters that transcend their component
members—what more recent sociological theory categorizes as “emergent
properties” (Sawyer 2001). The analysis of integration phenomena in
Chapter 4 offers an empirical investigation into how group context affects
people’s talk about potentially highly charged opinions. This is crucial
both for the question of the ontological status of public opinion, which the
authors address, but also for more recent concerns with the possibility and
desirability of deliberative democracy, in which democratic decision mak­
ing is a discursive process as opposed to simply an aggregation (e.g., Men-
delberg 2002; Sunstein 2000; Mutz 2006).
The Afterword, and all the more so its Appendix (Appendix B), return
to the question of group influence on individual expression—the effect of
totally socialized society on the opinions participants expressed. Appen­
dix B contains a revealing discourse from an otherwise-unpublished
monograph, “Aspects of Language,” written by Rainer Köhne and Her­
mann Schweppenhäuser, on the ways in which National Socialist lan­
guage so permeated the everyday talk of the participants that they emu­
lated it in form while evacuating it of content.18 Here, again, we see the
connection between vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft and more recent theo­
ries privileging language as a constraining, guiding force, as well as the
distinction between combative and deliberative language eventually taken
up by Jürgen Habermas (1968). “Aspects of Language” builds on struc­
tural linguistics’ speech-language dialectic to argue that the Nazi coloni­
zation of language crippled ordinary people’s ability to express thought
after the war; the very medium of expression itself was tainted by the Nazi
experience.
 Translators’ Introduction — xxxv

Limitations of the Group Experiment

Gruppenexperiment has numerous flaws, both as a result of the historical
moment in which it took place and as a result of its authors’ complicated
relationship with empirical research. Indeed, a scholar of the Frankfurt
School, when one of us (Perrin) discussed the possibility of an English
translation, remarked: “I don’t think they were very proud of it.” Below,
we make a case for considering it an important piece of the Frankfurt
School’s postwar intellectual legacy. First, though, we review several of the
critiques of the project and its presentation.
Immediately after its publication, the book was reviewed in the influen­
tial Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie by the social
psychologist Peter Hofstätter.19 Hofstätter, sometimes referred to as a “con­
servative,” was actually something of an apologist for National Socialism,
remaining unrepentant well into the 1960s (Bergmann 1997, 283-290). In
1941, for instance, Hofstätter had published articles on “German custom”
(“deutsches Brauchtum ”) and the pastoral function of National Socialism,
which perhaps did not reach the level of racial incitement but were never­
theless quite problematic in retrospect (Bergmann 1997, 285). This history
came out in the context of a scandal surrounding the June 1963 publica­
tion of two articles by Hofstätter in the liberal weekly, Die Zeit. In those
articles (“Mastered Past?” [Hofstätter 1963a] and “What Do You Expect
from the School Subject Contemporary History?” [Hofstätter 1963b]),
Hofstätter took highly critical positions on the prosecution of Nazi crimi­
nals taking place in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials begun that year as well as
on the role of the Nazi past in school curricula—the very issue Adorno ad­
dressed in his speeches of 1959-1962. (More details about Hofstätter and
his review may be found in Bergmann 1997 and in our introduction to
Adorno 2010.)
The strongest and most convincing critique Hofstätter leveled at Grup­
penexperiment, however, is ontological in character. It takes the work to
task for implying that its method allowed a kind of revelation that was
more authentic than that accessed through public opinion surveys. In
snide tone, Hofstätter accused the Gruppenexperiment project of adopt­
ing the ontological position in ira, veritas: truth through anger, building on
the familiar adage in vino, veritas (truth through wine). To the extent that
Gruppenexperiment claims that its participants’ true identities were those
revealed through active speech or silent acquiescence in the group discus­
sions, this critique is apt. Indeed, there are places in the book where it
seems to imply just that. In Chapter 4, however, the authors acknowledge
the problem: “As has been highlighted several times, Colburn's remarks
 Translators' Introduction — xxxvi

had to provoke many to resist; thus the division between the in-group and
the enemy was predetermined by the stimulus. By presenting an outsider,
Sergeant Colburn, in the central function of setting the provocative terms
of the discussion, the experimental design at the same time offered a target
for latent aggression.”
Nevertheless, the theory advanced in Gruppenexperiment is actually con­
sistent with much more recent repertoire-based theories of action articulated
by cultural sociologists (see, e.g., Swidler 2001; Lamont and Thévenot 2000;
Perrin 2006). These theories understand cultures as providing a collection of
resources upon which subjects may call to interpret and approach matters
with which they are presented. Cultures differ in the content of these collec­
tions, the relative weight of elements in these repertoires, and the elements
that fail to make it into the collective repertoire (Perrin 2005). Thus the prin­
cipal finding of Gruppenexperiment is not that ordinary Germans, in 1949,
remained actively fascistic—a claim that would have been both empirically
indefensible and anathema to the dialectical, even anti-essentialist, thinking
that pervades the Frankfurt School’s scholarship both before and after Grup­
penexperiment. Rather, the crucial finding is that, given the right social set­
ting and linguistic cues, ordinary Germans in the immediate postwar occu­
pation were able to enact elements of fascism with distressing ease. Fascist
elements, that is, remained in the postwar Federal Republic’s repertoire, and
subjects were all too ready to wield these tools when pressed. It is precisely
this defense that Adorno raises as the basis of his response to Hofstätter’s
critique:

in the practice of opinion research, very often the participants’ statements

produced in the interview are taken, without any further specification of their
origin and validity, as the “solidly fixed meanings of the individual,” and the
statistical averages distilled from them are taken as public opinion. (Adorno
2010, 200)

In making this claim, Adorno and Gruppenexperiment situate the practice

of opining in its cultural context. This claim is echoed more recently by
arguments that the opining individual is a distinctly modern creation and
a deeply social one at that, a view that was already articulated clearly in
the Gruppenexperiment (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1979, 1990, 2005; Jepperson
1992; Jepperson and Swidler 1994; Inkeles and Smith 1974).
Beyond Hofstätter’s claims, other concerns about the study are more
directly methodological. Throughout Chapter 3, the study seeks to mount
a modern, quantitative analysis of the data from the discussions. But the
quantitative analysis is clunky, even quaint, by twenty-first century stan­
dards. At various points, percentile thresholds are set in ways that seem ad
 Translators' Introduction xxxvii

hoc or even arbitrary. For example, Table 3.1 (table 65 in the original)
lists demographic groups that deviate from the average by 9% or more,
while Tables 3.2 and 3.3 (tables 66 and 67 in the original) used 6 % and
7%, respectively. Similarly, the aggregated system for scoring overall
“positive” versus “negative” attitudes, while not technically wrong, is dif­
ficult to interpret because the authors did nothing to standardize the scale.
In other words, the index runs from a minimum of -658 to a maximum
of +292. Scores are presented as numbers along this scale (see Table 3.11
[table 75 in the original]). This makes it difficult to evaluate how positive
or negative a given group is relative to others, since the scale’s midpoint is
not zero.
The analysis is also exclusively bivariate—that is, no attempt is made to
evaluate the ways multiple characteristics of speakers and groups might
interact. While multiple regression—the standard tool for handling such
problems in later social science—had not yet become widely available,
other, simpler techniques could have allowed for such controls had the
researchers’ quantitative sensibilities been stronger. The overall sense one
gets is that the authors were at once taken by the potential for modern
quantitative techniques and deeply suspicious of hypostasizing these
methods—a reality we know to be true from other writings (see, e.g.,
Adorno 1976). For example, in his introductory sociology lectures much
later (1968), Adorno said,

if you consider the problems of empirical social research—with which we of

the Frankfurt School also concern ourselves very extensively—the specific
difference which emerges between our practice and what is done generally is
that we try not to conceive the method of sociology in absracto, as some­
thing instrumentally separate from its subject matter. We constantly try—
with varying success but, I should think, with the right idea—to attune the
methods from the outset to the subjects to which they are applied. (Adorno
2000a, 69)

Once again, Gruppenexperiment anticipates and provides a strong re­

joinder to the rebuke. Indeed, from the beginning of the text its authors
are at great pains to avoid methodological hubris, even if the substance of
the study’s claim to see Nazi behavior in group discussions pushes the
boundaries of appropriate inference. This is in part the result of their own
critical theory—it would hardly do to have the principal critics of total­
ized, hypostasized theory (Horkheimer 1972) making bold empirical
claims based on fancy statistics—but it is also the appropriate stance
based on the training the authors had received at the hands of American
social science while in exile in New York and Los Angeles.
 Translators' Introduction — ' xxxviii

Gruppenexperiment in the Frankfurt

School’s Oeuvre

The conventional wisdom in the history of the Frankfurt School is that,

soon after Horkheimer and Adorno’s return to Germany and the reestab­
lishment of the IFS, the scholars were able to fulfill their pre-existing de­
sires to disclaim empirical research (Held 1980, 36; Neumann 1953; Jay
Ï973, 252-253) and swore off empiricism of any sort, preferring the kind
of abstract, even esoteric, criticism for which they are largely known to­
day, and which has resulted in their work’s marginality both to philosophy
and to social science. In this narrative, Gruppenexperiment is the last hur­
rah of the School’s connection to empiricism, conducted largely for reasons
of financial exigency (a significant portion of the research having been funded
by the U.S. authority [Wiggershaus 1994, 435; Jäger 2004]) and forgotten as
soon as possible.
We contend that this narrative is incorrect in at least two ways. First, the
Frankfurt scholars repeatedly referred to Gruppenexperiment in particu­
lar (e.g., Adorno 2005) and empirical work in general (Adorno 2000a) in
their later work. Summative works on sociology in Germany at the time
refer to the study as one of several ambitious attempts to animate a post­
war social science agenda (see, e.g., Stendenbach 1964), and the IFS capi­
talized on its social scientific status in other publications at the time such
as Aspects o f Sociology (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 1956). In­
deed, reading Adorno’s introduction to the infamous Methodenstreit (The
Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, Adorno 1976), one comes away
not with a whole-cloth dismissal of empiricism but with a careful, rea­
soned, and nuanced—that is to say, dialectical— relationship with it. This
impression is reinforced through Adorno’s 1968 lectures, published in En­
glish as Introduction to Sociology (Adorno 2000a). Second, the logical
structure of Gruppenexperiment mirrors closely not just the social theo­
retical work the scholars had done, but also their philosophical and aes­
thetic ideas. Below, we consider each of these claims, concluding that em­
pirical work in general—and Gruppenexperiment in particular—deserve
to be understood as very much in the mainstream of the Frankfurt
School’s intellectual legacy. That legacy should be understood in terms of
the growing interest in the philosophy of Nietzsche during the course
of the scholars’ work in America: particularly in Dialectic o f Enlighten­
ment, the fragment as a mode of considering an otherwise-totalizing society
takes an increasing role. Thus the apparent disconnect between the scholars’
empirical work and their other modes of social thought mirrors, in a
certain sense, their commitment to a fragmentary (not to say eclectic)
 Translators’ Introduction — xxxix

approach to social critique and analysis rather than an idealist rejection of

the material world.

Gruppenexperiment and German Social Science

As a premier training ground for social scientists in postwar Germany, the

IFS provided an early research home for many of the twentieth century’s
German intellectuals. The front matter to Gruppenexperiment acknowl­
edges 37 people’s contributions to the work, including Adorno; Adorno’s
wife Gretel (identified by her unmarried name, Margarete Karplus); philoso­
pher Helmuth Plessner and his wife Monika Plessner, who later wrote
something of an exposé on Gruppenexperiment (Plessner 1991) that forms
the basis of Jäger’s (2004) later ad hominem criticism of it; Dr. Herta Her­
zog, Lazarsfeld’s one-time wife, who had worked on the radio research but
remained friendly with Adorno and the Frankfurt approach as well (Herzog
1944; Adorno 1994, 55; Herzog 1941); journalist Peter von Haselberg;
sociologists Köhne and Heinz Maus; theater writer Ivan Nagel; novelist
Hans Joachim Sell (also known as Nikolaus Steigert); philosopher Schweppen-
häuser (whose son, Gerhardt, wrote a contemporary introduction to Adorno
[Schweppenhäuser 2009]); Wolff; and sociologist and politician Ludwig
von Friedeburg. Two additional assistants to the project, who, interest­
ingly, are not named in the volume but deserve special mention here, were
sociologist cum politician Ralf Dahrendorf and philosopher and social
scientist Jürgen Habermas. Dahrendorf—who became an eminent scholar
and center-right politician—has little kind to say about the time he spent
working on Gruppenexperiment, which he derides in his memoir as “in
the end neither methodologically nor substantively particularly produc­
tive” (Dahrendorf 2002, 170). Indeed, Dahrendorf snidely calls the Frank­
furt School the “holy family,” accusing the scholars of insularity and ideo­
logically driven thinking, a critique he has leveled elsewhere as well (e.g.,
Dahrendorf 1967, 366-383; 1997, 119-120), and he left the Frankfurt
School circle quickly. Nevertheless, the problematics he investigated at the
IFS continued to be the themes he pursued during his later career (see, e.g.,
Dahrendorf 1990 on the problem of postwar political culture).
Neither was the Gruppenexperiment experience uncomplicated for
Habermas, who has become (although not without controversy—see Hullot-
Kentor 2006, 24, 27-32) the best-known heir to the Frankfurt School
legacy. Just after completing his work as an assistant on Gruppenexperi­
ment, Habermas continued with another study designed to ask similar
questions. Based on interviews with a random sample of students at the
 Translators' Introduction — ’ xl

University of Frankfurt in 1957, Student und Politik (1961), co-authored

with von Friedeburg, Chrisoph Oehler, and Friedrich Weltz, was Haber­
mas’s first book publication. In their introduction to Student und Politik,
“On the Concept of Political Participation,” Habermas and his co-authors
take a distinctively Gruppenexperiment-style position against participa­
tion as “a value in itself.” Indeed, they argue that “the formalization of
democracy into a set of rules of play bespeaks the fetishization of civic
participation in political life” (15). The interpretation Habermas pursued
in Student und Politik and elsewhere followed, in many ways, Gruppen-
experimenfs indictment of totally socialized society with respect to demo­
cratic politics. Nevertheless, Student und Politics combination of brash
political commitment and impressionistic epistemology so incensed Hork­
heimer that Horkheimer drove Habermas away from the IFS and, with
that, away from the deeply negative dialectics that characterized Frankfurt
School work (see Wiggershaus 1994, 547-555, for a thorough treatment
of this incident).
Still, Habermas’s career, more so even than Dahrendorf’s, built on the
problematics, if not the solutions, pioneered in Gruppenexperiment. In the
work for Gruppenexperiment, Habermas encountered two crucial con­
cerns, each of which runs through his later thought and work as well. The
first of these is the central relevance of communication to democratic citi­
zenship and thought. A central idea in Gruppenexperiment—that opinion is
best studied in statu nascendi, in the process and context of development—
shows a clear affinity with Habermas’s later emphasis on deliberative ethics,
both historically and normatively. Of course, there are huge differences be­
tween the tenuous nature of the claims in Gruppenexperiment and the more
sweeping claims to authenticity in Habermas, but these are matters more of
degree than of kind.
The second important affinity for Habermas is in the very notion of
publicness (Öffentlichkeit) explored in Gruppenexperiment and which
forms the bedrock for Habermas’s most famous work, The Structural
Transformation o f the Public Sphere (Habermas [1962] 1989). Indeed, in
Adorno’s much later lecture on publicness and public opinion research, he
specifically credits Habermas for his thinking on Öffentlichkeit (this vol­
ume, 180). That lecture also refers unmistakably to the problematics ex­
plored in Gruppenexperiment: the partiality of standardized modes of
public opinion research, the communicative nature of opinion, and the af­
finity between survey research and market choices.20
It is not only through trainees, though, that Gruppenexperimenfs leg­
acy continued. Far from abandoning their empirical heritage, the Frank­
furt scholars pursued many of the same issues, and with a similar combi-
 Translators' Introduction — xli

nation of critical bite and fealty to the real world, throughout their postwar
careers. Consider Adorno’s aphorism from “The Essay as Form,” in his
decidedly non-sociological Aesthetic Theory: “Nothing can be interpreted
out of something that is not interpreted into it at the same time” (Adorno
1996, 4-5). This insistence on the creative role of interpretation owes its
meaning to the same socio-Freudian sensibility (for more on that concept,
see Hullot-Kentor 2006, Chapter 1) that underlies more political Frank­
furt writings ranging from the writings on Martin Luther Thomas to “The
Stars Down to Earth” and Gruppenexperiment, namely its search for “ob­
jectivities.” An essential claim in Gruppenexperiment is that, to oversim­
plify it, things are not always as they seem. Citizens interpret into—not
just out of—messages, discussions, experiences, even fictional letters from
foreign soldiers. What people interpret into such messages, then, is what
deserves analysis. Scholars must interpret into their responses through a
depth hermeneutic that reveals the objectivities behind the subjectivities.
This strategy was not new to Gruppenexperiment, of course. But its affin­
ity with Frankfurt scholarship from before and after the project estab­
lishes the extent to which the empirical portion of the IFS’s agenda was
linked with the rest of the Institute’s work.
Consider, too, the concept of “totally socialized society” (vergesell­
schaftete Gesellschaft), which we introduced above. This phrase bears
clear resemblance to earlier Frankfurt work such as The Authoritarian
Personality; but perhaps none so clearly as Dialectic o f Enlightenment, in
whose most commonly read essay (“The Culture Industry”) total sociali­
zation by culture disables creative thought. The phrase itself was appar­
ently first used in Gruppenexperiment, but it returns elsewhere in Frank­
furt writings, sometimes much later. After having introduced it here,
Adorno returned to the concept several times during his career, including
in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Adorno
1976, 55; originally written in 1969); in “Culture and Administration”
(Adorno 1978, 101; originally written in i960); in Negative Dialectics
(Adorno 1973, 284; originally written in 1966); and, perhaps most reveal-
ingly, in volume 1 of Notes to Literature (Adorno 1991, 44; originally
written in 1958). Horkheimer, too, had used similar themes, as in his 1947
“Rise and Decline of the Individual” (Horkheimer 1947, 140-141), as did
Herbert Marcuse (e.g., Marcuse 1964) in his diagnosis of the overwhelm­
ing power of ambient ideology over individuals.
Translations of vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft have varied somewhat. It
has been rendered as “totally socialized society” (as in Adorno 1976, 55),
“wholly socialized society” (Adorno 1991, 44), and simply “socialized
society” (Adorno 1978,101). The translation offered in Negative Dialectics
 Translators' Introduction — xlii

is somewhat more subtle: “a socialized society in which men are tirelessly

rounded up, rendered both literally and metaphorically incapable of soli­
tude” (1973, 284). The German prefix ver- in vergesellschaftete indicates a
destructive quality or a negative connotation to what comes after (in this
case, -gesellschaftete, or “socialized”). So a vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft
is not only totally socialized, it has been entirely overtaken by the collec­
tivity; “utterly socialized” might better convey that sense. Kellner (1989,
121) renders it as “totally administered society,” presumably to highlight
the destructive nature of conformity. We follow this reading, rendering it
as “totally socialized society” in order to remain consistent with prior
translations of the concept, to denote its comprehensive nature, and to sig­
nify the connection with the concept of totality (Jay 1984), with which the
study’s theoretical and methodological discussions are deeply concerned.
The qualitative analysis in Gruppenexperiment, Adorno’s essay “Guilt
and Defense,” is literally a key to understanding Adorno’s later corpus.
There he establishes the socio-Freudian analytical mode that characterizes
his life’s approach to the individual-society dialectic and the problematic
of postwar German culture (see Hullot-Kentor 2006: 10-13; Olick and
Perrin 2010, 6-11). Perhaps more important, in his scorched-earth reply to
Hofstätter’s scathing review of Gruppenexperiment, Adorno introduces
among his most famous aphorisms—“in the house of the hangman one
should not speak of the noose” (Adorno 2010, 2008)—the echoes of
which persist throughout his repeated considerations of the role of culture
and education in the democracy/authoritarianism dualism (Olick and Per­
rin 2010; Olick 2005).
The substantive attention granted to Gruppenexperiment by the Frank­
furt scholars (particularly Adorno) in the decades after its publication sug­
gests that, far from being the neglected stepchild it is often misunderstood
to be, Gruppenexperiment represented an important advance in social
theory and research and a landmark moment in the development of the
Frankfurt School approach to social science. It was cut from the same
cloth as other Frankfurt work. Empiricism was not just forced upon the
Frankfurt School but had an important place within their expansive inter­
disciplinary system. The philosophical concepts operative in their more
speculative philosophy and aesthetics were equally at work in the empiri­
cal strain. Neglect of Gruppenexperiment in interpretations of the Frankfurt
School’s thought is thus a more significant oversight than it might at first
appear.
Gruppenexperiment—the study itself and the controversy it stirred
up—is all but unknown in contemporary social science on both sides of
the Atlantic. Even for scholars well versed in the work of the Frankfurt
 Translators' Introduction — xliii

School, the first major publication after the scholars’ return to Germany
has received virtually no attention. This is a major difference with other
works. Indeed, in recent years, even secondary material such as Adorno’s
notes on his dreams (2007) and letters to his parents (2006) have been
translated and published, making the lack of such a generative work as
Gruppenexperiment all the more puzzling. The disappearance of Grup­
penexperiment raises three questions. First, why did a major empirical
study, with important theoretical and political implications, carried out by
famous (if controversial) scholars, fail to influence social science research
in the decades that followed? This question may offer insight into a sec­
ond, broader question: why has the Frankfurt School been remembered so
much more for its speculative and philosophical work and less for its em­
pirical research, which was to have had an equal place at the table accord­
ing to Horkheimer’s original program for the IFS? Third, how might post-
war survey research, and the critiques that have emerged since, have been
different had the critique in Gruppenexperiment been more central to sur­
vey research’s representational ontology?
As we show in the companion volume to this one, Gruppenexperiment
was not ignored upon its arrival. The response to Hofstätter’s hostile re­
view framed Adorno’s postwar approach to the question of guilt. Further­
more, this controversy echoed through the later work of the IFS as well as
that of Habermas and Dahrendorf, among others. We can only speculate,
though, as to the reason it retreated so quickly from public and scholarly
attention. One cause, surely, is the increasing specialization of academic
work in the postwar period, such that critical work in the ontology of
public opinion was often strictly separated from the everyday scientific
practice of public opinion research. And since the Frankfurt School was
assigned to the first category (The Authoritarian Personality notwithstand­
ing), a large-scale empirical study seems peculiarly out of step with the
work of a group generally believed to have been hostile to empirical re­
search altogether.
This view, again, relies on a mistaken understanding of Adorno’s—and,
by extension, the Frankfurt School’s in general—relationship to empirical
work. As noted above, throughout the controversy documented in The
Positivist Dispute in German Sociology and into Adorno’s 1968 lectures
on sociology, the Frankfurt scholars maintained a consistent epistemologi­
cal stance. Specifically, they reiterated the approach that critical theory
could exist only in dialogue with observed reality, but that at the same
time the technics of observation themselves worked to shape what was
observed. Indeed, Adorno’s late (1964) acknowledgment of Habermas for
uncovering the critical history and theory of the public sphere highlights
 Translators’ Introduction xliv

Adorno’s continuing insistence that empirical research, properly done, was

essential to sociological work. Although Adorno was not, himself, engaged
in empirical work in the last decade of his life, he was far from dismissive
of it, his critique of it notwithstanding.
To be sure, the specific findings of Gruppenexperiment were uncomfort­
able, particularly in the context of the fledgling Federal Republic of Ger­
many. In his retort to Hofstätter, Adorno attributes Hofstätter’s dismissal
of Gruppenexperiment to precisely this discomfort: “The method is de­
clared to be useless so that the existence of the phenomenon that emerges
can be denied” (Adorno 2010, 208). Strangely, the proper role of educa­
tion and culture in rebuilding postwar Germany became a question for
philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals, but not for social sci­
ence, even though (as this volume demonstrates) key social scientific ques­
tions underlie claims about guilt and defensiveness. Beyond these issues,
moreover, memory of the early postwar years—and scholarship from and
about it—was problematic from virtually every side. As many later critics
(to say nothing of critics at the time) argued, a virtual obsession with re­
covery and reconstruction worked against too much attention to the moral
destitution of the war years and the physical devastation of the postwar
ones. By the late 1960s, the dominant political tone characterized the post­
war years in a rather undifferentiatedly negative fashion. As much as crit­
ics like Hofstätter charged Gruppenexperimenfs authors with a sort of
accusatory muckraking, the study’s findings were substantially more nu-
anced than some of the politicized characterizations of the postwar years
in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, when the dominant characterization
of the late 1940s and 1950s was once again more sympathetic, such de­
tailed evidence of attitudinal continuities as Gruppenexperiment provided
became even less desirable than it had previously been (Olick 2005).
Whatever the reasons, it is clearly the case that this enormous research
effort made only the briefest of splashes before its ripples outside the
Frankfurt circle quickly dissipated, though its aftereffects could be felt im­
plicitly in the later development of German social science (Albrecht et al.
1999; König 1987; Stendenbach 1964). Yet the study contained, explicitly
or implicitly, several trenchant critiques of the mode of public opinion
research precisely as that mode was becoming canonical. In many ways,
the disappearance of Gruppenexperiment signaled the disappearance of
these critiques, although many of them re-emerged, apparently indepen­
dently, in the half-century since. As already hinted above, these concerns
are ontological, epistemological, and methodological, and in combination
constitute a far-reaching critique, but emphatically not a thoroughgoing
indictment, of survey research.
 Translators*Introduction — xlv

The O ntological Critique

Ontologically, Gruppenexperiment insists that the way people think

about important public matters is not just conditioned but wholly struc­
tured by the circulation of opinion and ideas in their environs. Public
opinion is, to paraphrase Durkheim, an eminently social thing (Durkheim
[1912] 1995, 9). Its public character emerges not from its declarative
openness—the naive recounting of positions on hypostasized “issues” to
anonymous interviewers—but from its appropriate relation to the his­
torically and environmentally defined public. Indeed, as noted above, in
his later essay on the topic Adorno returns specifically to this theme,
crediting the work of Habermas with developing this idea of the public.
This sense of the public has continued in the humanities, particularly in
the work of Michael Warner tying publics to audiences (Warner 2002)
and prior feminist critiques of Habermas’s mostly bourgeois account of
the public sphere (e.g., Fraser 1989; Young 2000), and in that of Bruno
Latour and his associates recognizing how the work done by polling and
other techniques of representation constitutes publics (Latour 2005; Marres
2005).
The ontological critique, then, can be summed up as the charge that
public opinion research is the symptom, not the measure, of public opin­
ion. Standard public opinion research takes for granted that atomized in­
dividuals have authentic, individual-level opinions on the issues of the day,
and that these opinions can be evoked with relative disregard for the spe­
cific social context of that evocation. This decision to disregard context
is, of course, highly contrived. It is construed as a problem if significant
others, colleagues, strangers, etc., are present to pollute the one-on-one
interview situation. The authentic self implicitly hypothesized by such an
approach is isolated in time and space from its public, an isolation that
can be sought physically or, potentially, be corrected for later in the statis­
tical analysis of the results. But its ontological claim is so clear as to be
articulated only rarely: the true citizen, reporting her authentic beliefs,
does so in the presence of as few other citizens, observers, and interlocu­
tors as possible.
In its most critical mode, Gruppenexperiment argues for understanding
public opinion research itself as an object to be studied. While it does not
entirely connect the dots with French theories that credit the social environ­
ment with evoking a particular kind of subject (such as those of Durkheim
and, later, Foucault), the critique in Gruppenexperiment is suggestive
of the idea that it is the opinion environment that produces individual
opinions—particularly in the context of a vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft, a
 Translators9Introduction — xlvi

totally socialized society, in which authenticity itself is manufactured. As

the authors put it in Chapter i, “That everyone possesses his own opinion
is a cliché of the Modern.” To be sure, the opinion environment is concep­
tualized more dialectically and as more tenuous than Durkheim’s organic
social whole, a difference Adorno clarified and refined in his later writings
addressing Durkheim in particular; while offering substantial credit to
Durkheim for his insistence on conceptualizing society as a totality (Adorno
1970), Adorno also argues against hypostatizing society through “false
wholism” (Adorno 2000a). Foucault, for his part, acknowledges the affin­
ity between his work and that of the Frankfurt School: “I should have un­
derstood them much earlier. Had I read these works, there are many things
I wouldn’t have needed to say, and I would have avoided some mistakes”
(Trombadori 2000, 274).
The epistemological challenges raised by Gruppenexperiment are no
less trenchant than the ontological ones. Böhm writes in the preface that
nonpublic opinion circulates sub rosa, as a “second currency.” There are
important connotations of exchange and symbolism evoked by the cur­
rency metaphor. The available language, as Appendix B claims, is the sec­
ond coin of the realm, available to structure exchange of ideas and posi­
tions. How best to access the presence, contours, and content of this
shadowy ideology? Here, too, the project was prescient. Standardized sur­
vey research, it argued, encourages standardized answers. It is an opportu­
nity for impression management, and, therefore, its results document re­
spondents’ desired image, not their genuine or certainly subconscious
selves. This is not an indictment, just a plea to refocus research. After all,
to measure who respondents want to appear to be is an excellent way to
ascertain social patterns of desirability in the contexts in which those re­
spondents live.
As noted, the Frankfurt scholars’ approach to addressing these prob­
lems was to adapt a then-nascent American technique—focus groups—to
the problem of observing opinion in statu nascendi, or during the process
of its development. Since opinion is dynamic, dependent upon its environ­
ment, and expressive of the vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft, the best way to
evaluate such opinion is to watch as it unfolds in response to a novel chal­
lenge or stimulus. Gruppenexperiment is anything but silent on the ratio­
nale for using focus groups in this way. Opinions are formed and evoked
in social contexts. In order best to observe this formation, it makes most
sense to simulate social contexts in which speakers are likely to be unin­
hibited and organize discussion around a common stimulus. This is the
basic methodology advocated by Merton et al. (1956) in their classic The
Focused Interview; which takes a very similar social psychological posi-
 Translators’ Introduction — xlvii

tion: evoking authentic views requires setting up a social environment in

which these views can emerge.
This approach to gauging the development of opinion in group contexts
has since developed independently from Gruppenexperiment in works on
politics (Gamson 1992), crime (Sasson 1995), and democratic engagement
(Perrin 2006), and has been theorized by Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003),
among others. In both its recent and its Gruppenexperiment instances, it
avoids the most trenchant recent critique of focus groups as a mode of
public opinion research, that of Javier Lezaun (2007). Lezaun notes that
now-conventional focus group research involves “using a group to engen­
der authentically individual opinions” (130). In other words, opinion is
held to be individual in character but revealed in a group setting. By con­
trast, in Gruppenexperiment (and in the more recent strain noted above)
opinion is held to be essentially social—developed, expressed, refined, and
potentially changed by reference to others through discussion, learning,
and debate. Indeed, in a revealing contrast, Lezaun critiques the practice,
standard among focus group moderators, of avoiding silence and encour­
aging constant discussion. In Gruppenexperiment, silence is an important
matter for analysis and forms a key point of disagreement between the
Frankfurt scholars and their chief critic, Peter Hofstätter.
Still, the critiques of public opinion Gruppenexperiment enumerates do
not lead inexorably to focus groups as a research method. Other approaches
include media and discourse analysis, in-depth interviewing, and more. The
Frankfurt scholars’ choice of focus groups is not just the result of their cri­
tique of public opinion surveys; it is, again, also a statement of a specific
ontology of public opinion. Gruppenexperiment does not simply reject
survey-based research and its assumption about the individual character of
opinion; it offers a substitute, methodologically and theoretically, that places
publicness at the center of public opinion. It thus simultaneously anticipates
a host of late-twentieth-century critiques of public opinion, and offers an
early forerunner to much more recent, deliberation- and communication-
centered theories of democratic practice. Below, we highlight some of the
most important such theories that have emerged and consider their affinities
with Gruppenexperiment.

M ore Recent Critiques and Amendments to

Public Opinion Research

Despite its theoretical and methodological ambition, Gruppenexperiment

did not establish either its critique or its method as an accepted mode of
 Translators' Introduction — ' xlviii

public opinion research. Instead, as the twentieth century progressed,

closed-answer, random-sample polling via telephone, mail, or in-person
interviews (and later the Internet) became the overwhelming standard not
just for measuring public opinion but for conceptualizing it (Converse
1987; Igo 2007). Standardized survey polling encourages citizens to un­
derstand their opinions as being individual in character, not a property of
the publics or groups of which they are members. As several of the cri­
tiques to which we turn next demonstrate, the concentration on the atom­
ized individual and the analogy to market behavior may contribute to the
“totally socialized society” the Frankfurt scholars diagnosed.
What value, then, does Gruppenexperiment hold for twenty-first-century
practitioners of public opinion research? To answer this, we very briefly
explore recent theories of public opinion from a point of view informed
by our reading of Gruppenexperiment. In the half-century since Gruppen­
experiment appeared on, and then left, the scene, a number of important
critiques of public opinion have emerged. These include, perhaps most prom­
inently, Pierre Bourdieu’s “Public Opinion Does Not Exist” (1979), which
takes public opinion polling to task for three hidden assumptions. These
are the ubiquity of opinion (i.e., that all citizens have opinions); the equal­
ity of opinion (i.e., that each citizen’s opinion is equally important to each
other’s opinion); and the set agenda (i.e., that which questions should be
asked is a matter of common agreement). Popular critiques of “governing by
polls” are common in public discourse, so much so that political scientists
Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro defend politicians against the charge
of pandering by examining the behavior as listening to the public (Jacobs
and Shapiro 2000), a position adopted by Erikson et al. as well (Erikson,
MacKuen, and Stimson 2002). Similarly, polling leaders have grown very
defensive about critiques of polling (see, for instance, Newport 2004), with
one accusing a scholar of “poll-bashing” (Kohut 2008). Here we enumerate
several critiques emerging both from Gruppenexperiment and the more
recent critiques as a way of imagining what opinion research might look like
had Gruppenexperiment been a more central part of postwar thinking about
public opinion.•

• The expressivity critique. This critique holds that polling allows for
too little information to flow from the public to the pollster. Citizens
are not allowed to engage in creative or expressive activity, since
their only role is making a choice among a predetermined set of
options. Polling thus changes the state of having an opinion from
being an active decision (expressing an opinion) to a passive one
(having an opinion at the ready when asked). This concern is quite
 Translators’ Introduction ~ xlix

commonplace, and indeed public opinion scholars (e.g., Zaller 1992;

Page and Shapiro 1992) have argued explicitly that poll answers
should be understood as expressions of latent, considered judgments.
Adorno specifically disclaimed this critique in his reply to Hofstät-
ter’s review for reasons that resonate with his aesthetics as well as his
political theory: ease of communication, whether in listening to a
work of music or espousing a position, is implicated in fetishization
(see Hullot-Kentor 2006; Adorno 1982b). Thus the absence of easy
opportunities for self-expression is not, in itself, a problem for
Adorno and colleagues.
The performativity critique. Building on Austin’s (1962) insight that
certain forms of language are performative—that is, that they create
situations instead of merely representing them—recent work has
demonstrated, for example, that economic behavior often follows
economic theory instead of leading it (MacKenzie 2003). Wendy
Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder demonstrate that law school
rankings are reactive—that is, law schools change behavior in
response to widespread ranking practices (Espeland and Sauder
2007). To generalize this point, many measures, emphatically includ­
ing polling (see Igo 2007), affect the behaviors of the people or
institutions being measured. In the realm of democracy and public
opinion, several scholars have claimed convincingly that publics are
formed through the act of their being conceptualized and measured
(see, e.g., Warner 2002; Latour 2005). Thomas Osborne and Nikolas
Rose offer an interesting twist on this critique, arguing that while
survey research does indeed help create the public it purports to
measure, this is essentially a positive development, as it demonstrates
survey research’s utility as a technology (Osborne and Rose 1999).
Either way, the performativity critique argues that polling produces a
particular kind of citizen-subject, both linguistically and ontologically.
This subject is effectively a choice-making one (Paley 2001, 135-140)
or an opinion-having subject (Jepperson and Swidler 1994; Jepper-
son 1992). One byproduct of this shift is that the “cost” of opining is
shifted from the opining subject, who would be tasked with choosing
to express her opinion, to the poll-taker, who is tasked with extract­
ing an opinion from the subject (see Ginsberg 1989).
The psychological/interactionist critique. Unlike the others thus far,
the psychological/interactionist critique has gained a strong following
within mainstream survey research. Essentially, this approach holds
(as did Gruppenexperiment) that opinions, and therefore survey
answers, are generated in particular interactional contexts. Perrin
 Translators' Introduction — ’ /

(2005, 2006), for example, demonstrated that the specific contexts

(“microcultures”) in which citizens expressed views had an indepen­
dent effect on how they expressed those views (see also Eliasoph and
Lichterman 2003). There is therefore an extensive technical (al­
though, importantly, not epistemological) literature, for example, on
techniques for measuring question-order effects, wording effects,
interviewer race and gender effects, and other ways of making the
interview environment neutral or transparent. The ideal in this
literature is to “control for” the interview environment in order to
simulate the isolated, autonomous individual.
• Finally, the deliberative democratic critique (e.g., Habermas 2006),
which in many ways has its contemporary roots in the agenda
launched by Gruppenexperiment, takes seriously the idea that an
individual citizen’s opinions may change based on her interactions
with others—in other words, that there is a public in public opinion
(see also Adorno 2005). This approach, therefore, incorporates the
expressivity and performativity critiques but at the cost of recogniz­
ing the interactionist concerns that plague deliberative experiments
large and small (see, e.g., Sunstein 2000; Leib 2004; Ackerman and
Fishkin 2004). Scholars who put great stock in the promise of
deliberative democracy would do well to heed the findings of Chap­
ter 4, which demonstrates that group dynamics mold individuals’
views, but not necessarily toward a common, rational, or contempla­
tive position.

Gruppenexperiment anticipated, in various ways, each of these later cri­

tiques and developments and sought to address them at least provisionally.
Unlike many of the critiques, though, Gruppenexperiment contained a
large, if flawed, empirical base upon which it based its concerns and sought
to remedy them.
Current public opinion researchers are far from blind to these issues;
indeed, the history of public opinion polling is shot through with attempts
to work around them. These include experimental approaches such as
question-order effects, vignettes, and question wording variation (see, e.g.,
Sniderman and Piazza 1993; Greenberg and Skocpol 1997) as well as ap­
proaches that claim that large-scale aggregation of individual opinions “av­
erages out” to provide reliable population-wide estimates of authentic pub­
lic opinion (e.g., Zaller 1992; Page and Shapiro 1992; Erikson, MacKuen,
and Stimson 2002). While these techniques make polling increasingly precise
and useful, they do not address the ontological or representational critiques—
these critiques are based on the underlying nature of publicness itself.
 Translators' Introduction li

There is a strong link between democratic institutions, democratic citi­

zenship, and public opinion research. Gruppenexperimenfs claims, were
the study better known, would presumably have produced a different kind
of research, more self-reflexive, less authoritative, and perhaps less in­
vested in the coherent individual as the unit of analysis. In a sense the on­
tology of Gruppenexperiment demands that we think about the origins of
opinions as both super-individual (in the collective) and supra-individual
(the situation in which an individual expresses opinions) instead of as rela­
tively stable properties of coherent individuals. We hope that the greater
availability of the Gruppenexperiment—its successes and its pitfalls—will
encourage such efforts.

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N otes

1. Our introduction to the Frankfurt School’s empirical work follows Olick’s

(2007) earlier work.
2. Martin Jay argues that totality has been a central organizing concept through­
out the history of western Marxist theory (Jay 1984).
3. A short excerpt from Group Experiment, translated by Thomas Hall, appeared
in Paul Connerton’s edited volume Critical Sociology (Pollock 1976). To our
knowledge, that is the only other English translation of any substantial segment
of Group Experiment other than ours here and in the companion volume, Guilt
 Translators9Introduction — - lx

and Defense: On the Legacies o f National Socialism in Postwar Germany

(Adorno 2010).
4. Pollock had previously succeeded the Institute’s first director, Carl Grünberg,
when the latter suffered a heart attack. Pollock, an economist by training,
lacked the prestige and intellectual ambition to lead the Institute, of which he
was more an administrative director.
5. Another important work, “The Stars Down to Earth’’(Adorno [ 1974] 1994),
which Adorno conducted on a return visit to California in 1953 (toward the
end of the work on the Gruppenexperiment), demonstrates the same degree of
theoretical/empirical integration as well.
6. These themes, of course, resonate in similar situations more recently as well
(Apostolidis 2000; Wagner-Pacifici 2000, 53-55).
7. See Böhme 2001 (Böhme 2003 for an English-language treatment) for a con­
temporary reconstruction of the concepts in Dialectic o f Enlightenment
through the lens of the “aesthetic economy.”
8. Indeed, in “Guilt and Defense,” which was a major section of Gruppenexperi­
ment and which we present in our companion volume, Adorno explicitly
charges the culture industry with “impos[ing] the politically neutral cult of
celebrity . . . on the population,” a cult that shows “affinity . . . with totalitar­
ian forms of domination” (Adorno 2010, 143).
9. These critiques did not prevent the Frankfurt scholars from implying a similar
concept in Gruppenexperiment, in part because the most important of the
critiques at the time did not appear until 1954.
10. Ethnographer Mitch Duneier (1999, 343ff.) has further analyzed the failing of
this position, naming it the “ethnographic fallacy.”
11. The same fascination with the temporary sociality of the long-distance train is
also the opening premise of Hitchcock’s famous film of roughly the same time
period, Strangers on a Train (1951). See 2 izek (1991,42) for more on the com­
municative paranoia of Strangers.
12. On the interesting form of the letter to the editor, see Perrin and Vaisey 2008;
and Boltanski et al. 1984.
13. These analyses amount mostly to concatenated excerpts from the interview
transcripts along with the text of a talk Wolff gave to the Sociology Club at
Ohio State University, where he was a professor. While it appears he planned
at one point to do more such work and publish it, in fact Wolff’s work re­
mained only in manuscript form (Wolff 1953; Roth and Wolff 1954; Etzkom
and Wolff 1954; Wolff 1955).
14. The authors do suggest in the Afterword that “the more their [the silent par­
ticipants’] number can be reduced, the more reliable the findings will be.” This
position seems inconsistent with their general treatment of silence as an inter­
pretable category.
15. Jepperson’s very insightful argument cites Habermas on the public sphere, but
not Pollock, Horkheimer, or Adorno. The fact that Gruppenexperiment is
missing from Jepperson’s otherwise very wide range of reference lends further
credence to our claim that the study simply disappeared from common social
scientific knowledge.
 Translators' Introduction — Ixi

16. Although the Jahoda volume containing these critiques did not come out until
1954, when Gruppenexperiment was nearly complete, similar criticisms had
circulated since the original publication of The Authoritarian Personality.
While the book was generally reviewed positively upon its release, a recurring
concern was the question of the stability and ontological reality of the authori­
tarian “types” it identified (Bunzel 1950; de Grazia 1950; Eulau 1951; Lass-
well 1951; Shibutani 1952).
17. Wiggershaus (1994, 473) attributes Chapter 4 to Volker von Hagen, an associ­
ate of the IFS at the time. While Gruppenexperiment’s preface credits von Ha­
gen with writing a monograph, it does not link him specifically to Chapter 4.
18. A similar point, though made in very different form, can be found in Victor
Klemperer’s LTI (Klemperer 2000), written in the mid-193os but first pub­
lished in 1946.
19. Hofstätter’s review, and Adorno’s reply, appear in the companion volume
(Adorno 2010).
20. On the latter concern, see Schudson 2006 for a thoughtful corrective.
Group Experiment
and Other Writings
 Foreword

FRANZ B Ö H M

eading t h i s a s t o u n d i n g r e p o r t , one cannot help simultane­

R ously admiring and being puzzled by it. Which aspects are admirable
and which are puzzling?
Well, this report compiles prevalent opinions about certain particular
questions, for example, about guilt for what happened in the Third Reich,
about democracy, about the Jewish question, etc. Before we are shown the
findings of these surveys, we are informed about how the Institute for So­
cial Research’s working group went about the project, which was aimed at
determining what opinions are in circulation and which groups tend to
hold which of these opinions—whether one aggregates the groups or
whether one distinguishes them from each other, for example, the young
and the old, the college-educated and not, the urban and the rural, those
who were in the war for just a few years and those who were in it for
many years, housewives, unskilled workers, white collar workers, inde­
pendent business men, the self-employed, etc. We learn how the surveys
themselves were conducted in such a way that the respondents could ex­
press themselves candidly and without inhibitions. In short, the entire ex­
perimental design is spread open before us so that we are in a position to
form our own impression of how conclusive the results are.
What is admirable is this account of the methods used, the actual devel­
opment of a new method for interviewing, [and] the intellectual effort that
was involved in the investigation of the results. For researchers working
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — - 2

in completely different fields—lawyers, for example, or economists or

physicists—it is particularly fascinating to get to know the methods of a
relatively young science, which experimental sociology certainly is. It is
also impressive because it is a matter of a science that deals with a subject
that is so important for our existence as citizens of a state and members of
society: namely, ascertaining what our fellow citizens and fellow men be­
lieve. One would not imagine how difficult it is to bring this out, what
preparations and precautions have to be taken for this purpose, how de­
manding and obstinate the gnome* is that is to be conjured, and what a
marvelous apparatus has to be constructed for this gnome to deign to ap­
pear at all and to register its tidings. The “scientific” high priests (Spiritisten)
with their “controls”are complete amateurs in comparison; it appears to
be easier in the realm of research to get a handle on the extraordinary
than on the ordinary, which we presume to understand from our daily
lives.
To reiterate: what is to be admired lies in how living beings were chan­
neled into the ark of experimental sociology, and what was then done to
them in this ark in order to induce them to reveal the opinions they held,
even though they are hardly among those whom God endowed with the
skills to express their feelings.
But what, we now ask, has emerged from these difficult and ingenious
inquiries? What do the opinions that came to light look like?
If we open ourselves to the findings, we can hardly claim that the menu
of opinions is admirable. It is, however, puzzling or, to quote Hamlet,
strange, very strange. Not that it was a surprise to us; all of us vaguely
suspected that something similar would emerge, because we, too, are ac­
customed to talking to our fellow men and to hearing various things when
traveling by railway, waiting in the anteroom, eating in restaurants, work­
ing in businesses or offices, or when children talk about school, play, or
their way home. But most of us will be truly shocked reading all of this in
black and white, in a well-documented report endorsed by the official seal
of a scientific institute.
There are many things we tolerate, even perceive as entirely natural or as
self-evident, as long as we know them only privately from everyday experi­
ence, but that disconcert, frighten, and alarm us when communicated to us
officially, in such a way that reality confronts us with increased urgency. We
then feel like the diplomat Questenberg in Wallenstein's Camp: “What

* The Erd-Geist (spirit of the earth), which we render with “gnome,” refers to Goethe’s
Faust, volume I.—Eds.
 Foreword — ’ 3

have I not been forced to hear .. . what fierce, uncurbed defiance! And were
this spirit universal—

Friend, friend!
O! this is worse, far worse, than we had suffered
Ourselves to dream of at Vienna. There
We saw it only with a courtier’s eyes,
Eyes dazzled by the splendor of the throne.
We had not seen the war-chief, the commander,
The man all-powerful in his camp. Here, here,
‘Tis quite another thing.
Here is no emperor more”1

What is it then in reading the investigation at hand that evokes this shock?
I suggest that there are two things.
First, it is the more than clear perception that alongside so-called “pub­
lic opinion,” which expresses itself in elections, referenda, public speeches,
newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, party and group programs, parlia­
mentary discussions, and political assemblies, there is non-public opinion,
whose content can differ considerably from the content of public opinion.
Its sentences, however, circulate alongside those of public opinion like the
coins of a second currency; in fact, they may even be more durable and
stable than actual public opinion, which we flaunt like a courtier before
the official public, especially to foreign countries, and which we pride our­
selves as being our actual and sole opinion, as if they expressed what we
actually mean even though they are really only the things we say when
wearing our Sunday best. Yes, it almost seems as if what circulates among
us as public opinion represents the sum of opinions (in themselves contra­
dictory) we wish people believed we had as our real opinion, while non­
public opinion is the sum of (in themselves equally contradictory) opin­
ions we truly have.*
The second shocking thing is the more than clear description of what
non-public opinion actually looks like. It was exactly what many of us
actually think!
In other words, one shock comes from the perception that we have two
opinion-currencies, each of which comprises a whole bundle of different
opinions. And the other shock befalls us at the sight of the values that
make up the unofficial currency.

* Böhm here deviates from the epistemological position staked out in Adorno’s discussion
elsewhere (Adorno 2010, 200) by suggesting that non-public opinion is more authentic than
public opinion. Adorno’s position takes a more situational approach.—Eds.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ' 4

This latter shock raises the uneasy question of whether it can be justified
to disclose to the public a scientific investigation into the quality, quantity,
and circulatory speed of unofficial opinion-currencies. Could such a publi­
cation not harm our prestige, our good political and social reputation? Is
there not a great danger that such a publication could do damage if mis­
takes were made in the scientific investigation of unofficial opinion? Should
one wash the dirty laundry of one’s questionable opinion completely in
open in front of the entire domestic and international public? Does it not
just boil down to a denunciation if one reveals these actually circulating
opinions, which are not even allowed—presumably deliberately— into the
inventory of a nation’s official public opinion? Should one not keep the re­
sults of scientific research of such a nature secret, that is, merely pass them
on to the government, away from the public? And how do things stand
with the Parliament? Is not promulgation to the parliament tantamount to
public disclosure?
Just to pose these questions is to reject them. In a liberal state, what is
going on among the people and in society must be known openly. The only
concerns that legitimately require secrecy are in the sphere of government
planning, such as the date a currency reform will be put into effect or cer­
tain diplomatic negotiations. In these cases the government has to answer,
so to speak, for its actions, but need not disclose the preparations and
bases for the decision in statu nascendi.
Secondly, it would be more than foolish to conceal something that any
visitor traveling to Germany, every tourist or journalist, can hear shouted
from every rooftop if he only pays a little attention. If this visitor now notes
that such overt issues are officially hidden from the outside or are treated as
secret, even by science, then the effect is even worse than that created by the
most unfavorable consequence of knowledge of the fact itself. Thirdly, it
plainly violates the task and ethos of science to conceal findings. Tactical
and diplomatic considerations have no place in science. And, fourthly, one
can no longer speak of a liberal constitution where there is no longer a
lively belief that frank talk and self-expression, discussion itself, is a remedy
for all kinds of public damages. If the people themselves, if even science
retreats behind the curtain behind which “top secret” governance takes
place and “prescribed terminology” rules, then we have taken a step from a
free and open society to an organized army of “political soldiers.” This is
true even though no totalitarian state is imminent; this would require a
second aspect, namely an ice cold stratum of associates with the talent,
brutality, and willpower required to play on such a wicked organ.
It is, thus, imperative to make the non-public opinion of a people an
object of public political and scientific discourse. In this way, non-public
 Foreword ~ j

opinion will be dragged out of its shadowy environment, which seems to be

a precondition for its formation, its claims, and its self-defense. For how
does a people’s non-public opinion differ from its public opinion? I believe
the answer can only be that to become part of actual public opinion any
view has to pass through the control of real public discourse. Only views
that can survive their reproduction by ink and broadcast, their adoption
into the program of a political party in the parliamentary sense, their inclu­
sion into public discourse, become part of public opinion in a liberal state.
This enforces a minimum of reason and morality, because what is made
known openly on the market has to confront educated criticism. Non-public
opinion is made up of those views which are not able to pass this process of
critical selection.
Until now, we have lacked an ability to determine with sufficient reliability
the state of opinions that remain stuck in the realm of the non-public. Here
the interview methods of experimental sociology are intended to produce a
change. It has today become possible to spotlight non-public opinion in such
a way that it has to expose itself to general discourse but especially to the
criticism of reason and morality. Only time can tell, though, whether this will
fundamentally inhibit its ability to circulate as effective opinion-currency.
This primarily depends on the self-confidence, the engagement, and the devo­
tion of those who consider it a matter of conscience to pick a bone with one
or another group of non-public opinions. This task, however, must not be left
to scholars, lecturers, and graduate students; it concerns all of us.
Insofar as experimental sociology undertakes to work out methods that
make it possible to summon non-public opinion before the forum of pub­
lic discourse, before the forum of reason and morality, it has achieved its
first victory over non-public opinion as over a political-social life force.
“Let there be light!” is the first phrase of every creative act.
Romantic thinking might tend toward assuming that non-public opin­
ion is the precursor of political and social opinion formation, in other
words a generative process from the depths of the national spirit ( Volks­
geist) such as takes place in the creation of fairy tales, myths, folk wisdom,
and sayings. Supporters of this way of thinking perhaps become resentful
if they hear that someone wants to drag this process of emerging life pre­
maturely out of the security of the mother’s womb and display it on the
dissection table to the profane gaze of scientists, intellectuals, politicians,
bureaucrats, and journalists. Perhaps they see in this effort nothing other
than the irreverent intrusion into hidden developmental processes driven
by the despicable desire for muckraking.
Such a view, though, presupposes two things. First, namely, it assumes
that non-public opinion is so shy in nature that it seeks hidden security
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 6

and requires it to prosper. And second, it assumes that the opinions mak­
ing up non-public opinion are original creations of the thoughts and ef­
forts of the people, i.e., of the entire nation. Both of these are errors.
The faithful of non-public opinions are anything but shy and reticent.
They are by all means inclined to articulate their opinions in a highly pro­
vocative manner or to state them to others’ faces with smoothly penetrat­
ing urgency, if the environment is such that they need not be bashful. The
merit of experimental sociology is not simply that it investigates, that is to
say extracts, these opinions from the people at all (indeed the interviewees
happily made friends with the tape recorders and spoke quite willingly
into them). Rather, the merit lies in the establishment of the concrete form
of this non-public opinion, in the insight into some of its core structures
and typical views, which distinguish particular selected groups.
Nevertheless, it is also a mistake to assume that this treasure trove of
non-public opinions is a creation of the national spirit, as for instance in
the development of language, fairy tales, common law, sayings and similar
manifestations of folk wit and wisdom. One need only consult this report
to see that, with enough time, people believe and assert all sorts of differ­
ent things. These are not expressions of the thoughts and feelings of ordi­
nary people trying in their own way to orient themselves in the complex
whirl of events and relationships in a modern industrial nation and a mod­
ern constitutional state. Rather, these are, almost without exception, dis­
carded clothing from the wardrobe of maxims, slogans, and idea scraps of
an age of industry and of science, deformations of real coins of opinion
that once had official value and then, on the way from barroom discus­
sions and miscellaneous forms of political hot air, made their way into the
ordinary vocabulary of discussions within families, with children, and with
colleagues. It is a body of thought that over a greater or lesser period of
time has been run through the mills of a kind of intellectual and emotional
assembly line until it took a cookie-cutter form*among those who not only
refuse reflection but who have a downright marked aversion for those of
their fellow citizens who feel the need for such reflection. Moreover, many
of these opinions refer not to judgments about facts and events but to the
content of these facts and events themselves. The people do not want to
know how Frenchmen, Americans, Russians, etc. are or think, what the
occupying powers did, what happened in Hitler’s concentration camps,
etc. Instead, they have a preconceived and surely thoroughly false opinion

* Böhm’s original language refers to a “warehouse operation” ( Warenhausbetrieb) that

produces a “cast-iron token” (gußesierrten Rechenpfennigen). —Eds.
 Foreword ~ 7

about this and fight tooth and nail against learning the plain truth. They
also do not accept any instruction on these facts. In general they do not
form their judgments starting with facts, but they turn around the facts so
as to fit their preconceived judgments. Some of them even know this, but
consider it a virtue in accordance with the principle that objectivity is a
sign of decadence. Here we have, for example, one of those maxims typical
of the treasure trove of non-public opinions. A very large proportion of
them have a pronouncedly Machiavellian character, that is, the character
of a lesson and a mode of thought that were originally in no way popular,
but instead were the modes of thought of renaissance courts, masters, and
conquerors who could not care less about individual suffering and the fate
of people who occupied social spheres below the aristocratic level. Here we
have a master mentality, a master mentality of the crudest and most heart­
less sort, that has spread to every Tom, Dick, and Harry over the course of
centuries.
The reader will notice another very strange thing in this report. Namely
this: how ineffectively actual public opinion bounced off the hearts and
minds of a very large proportion of our population. Most of these people
read their newspaper every day and listened to the daily radio broadcasts,
which exposed them to this public opinion. Not even continuous repeti­
tion in the years after the war was able to demolish the non-public opin­
ion, which was supplied in a completely different manner, even though
neither the press, nor radio, nor parliamentary debates, nor party meetings
were at its disposal. Only in the editorial department wastebaskets did the
mostly anonymous expressions of non-public opinion accumulate into
significant piles; and they were—quite rightly—thrown into the trash and
did not reach the publicity channels for transmission of official opinion. So
there must be other more effective channels through which non-public
opinions course. These channels probably consist of discussions in fami­
lies, in train cars, and among colleagues, among which family discussions
seem to me to be by far the most important ones. For the thought of par­
ents imprints itself indelibly onto children, and the prejudices that fathers
express emphatically at the table sound like venerable wisdom to their
children’s ears. Even if the children later recognize the error, they still feel
hurt again, in memory of the beloved authority, when such opinions are
sharply criticized in their presence. I myself remember quite well the flood
of prejudices and overwhelmingly hateful maxims with which I was show­
ered by 6-year-old fellow pupils in my first school days. Most of these
children and their parents were thoroughly good-natured children and adults
throughout, but their views were despicable, and I took away quite a shock
at the time.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 8

Two problems arise in this context: What are the prospects for the better
refined perspectives of actual public opinion to prevail over the poorly
washed and often articulated noxious perspectives of non-public opinion?
And what are the chances, in turn, that the poorly washed perspectives of
non-public opinion will finish off the better refined public opinion along with
the group that works honestly on its behalf and on its further refinement?
I want to close with that question. What was merely intended to be a
preface has become the improvised cry for help of a reader who was all
too profoundly impacted by the reading, and who has not yet succeeded in
processing his impressions.
 Introduction

his volu m e, presented by the Institute for Social Research at the

T Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, reports on investigations con­
ducted in 1950-51 and analyzed subsequently. It describes opinions, atti­
tudes, and behavioral patterns of the Federal Republic’s population con­
cerning essential social and political questions. The whole study’s object
can be characterized as a contribution to research on “public opinion.”
However, it is only a first step, and the findings must be considered provi­
sional with respect to content as well as method. Despite its remarkable
breadth, the investigation remains essentially a “pilot study.” The methods
could only be developed and evaluated during the course of the work, and
many of the difficulties became clear only gradually. A coherent, system­
atic overview was impossible due to the project’s experimental and incom­
plete character. We do not claim to have definitively answered the study’s
motivating questions.
The book conveys a sense of these difficulties as well as of the method
itself. For a pilot study, the methodological discoveries are just as impor­
tant as the substantive findings, and perhaps more so. The findings are
necessarily tentative and provisional; the methods, though, and the critical
reflection they are based on should prove useful for future research. The
material is not completely analyzed in all potentially revealing respects.
The matter of the very selection of material is meant to shed light on the
central problems of the study. Also, many of the methodological questions
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 10

remain unresolved. Crucial issues such as a strictly controlled comparison

between the group discussion method and standard forms of opinion polls
are not considered here;1the Institute has contributed to this topic in later
research.
The limits and shortcomings of the whole study emerge, in part, from
exogenous issues. We started the research immediately after the Institute
was reconstituted. Its associates had to be trained in the methods of em­
pirical sociology. The approach was novel, although group discussions had
been conducted in America, e.g., in the research of R. F. Bales.1 We could
not, and did not want to, draw upon well-established procedures. Further­
more, we had to contend with deeper difficulties not just because of the
situation of sociology in postwar Germany but because of the topic itself.
In its area, our Institute is meant to serve international communication in
a scientific spirit. Hence, part of its task is to contribute from within to the
unification of the isolated and almost hopelessly divergent directions of
sociology. After the calamity—for which Germany’s despotic decrees from
on high and a style of thinking unconcerned with concrete facts were espe­
cially responsible—it goes without saying that empirical methods had to
be used far more emphatically than this country had become accustomed
to. In particular it was necessary to master the polished American tech­
niques of social research.
On the other hand, however, it was imperative that we not stop at sim­
ply imitating these techniques, which is also a specifically German danger.
We had to advocate for critical themes, which arose from the tradition of
German social science, against one-sided social research based on the
model of mathematical natural sciences, on the doctrines of evolutionary
and behavioral psychology, and on immediate practical applicability. Em­
pirical work should reflect on itself, its limits, and its intellectual precondi­
tions. Only by such a process can empirical research overcome the naïveté
that condemns so many of its results to superficiality. Research must not
conceal the provisionality of its findings under an appearance of precision.
From the beginning, our intention was to avoid bowing before reified so­
cial conditions and processes, to which the ideal of countability and mea­
surability as the simple classification of reality is devoted. Rather, we
sought to use theoretical reflection to link the data to underlying social
processes and in this way to illuminate the data.
As plausible as that plan seems in general, there are still many obstacles
to its realization—it is hardly exaggerating to liken it to squaring a circle.
The two scientific tendencies—precise quantitative analysis demanded in
today’s empirical sociology on the one hand, and, on the other hand, interpre­
tive understanding and insight transcending mere hypothesis formation,
 Introduction ~ ii

which Max Weber considered the actual task of empirical sociology—do

not, as even Weber might have thought, complement each other harmoni­
ously. In fact, they spring from two impulses of knowledge so far apart
from each other, so deeply bound up in contradictory philosophies, that in
many ways they exclude one another. Today the tension between their
aims has become extreme, and the popular talk of their integration ex­
presses the urgency of the situation, not the possibility that they might ac­
tually find common ground. Anyone who has worked social-scientifically
on concrete material knows how large a distance there is between social
theory and precise, verifiable statements on certain social sectors. This gap
stretches far beyond the common statement that more material has to be
gathered before theory construction or synthesis, or beyond the affirma­
tion that social theory formation, which has more than two thousand
years of history, is ahead of its scientific aspirations, which have only re­
cently begun. It is not a matter of chronological differences, but of cate­
gorical ones. It is impossible to glean a social totality—on which all real
individual experience depends—by increasing the quantity of data. It is
also impossible to extrapolate a theory from empirical findings in a world
in which individual social realities conceal their own essence almost as
much as they express it.
This breach thus emerges from the incompatibility of the findings pro­
duced in various studies. Even if it is not always correct, it is often tempt­
ing to think that every advance in precision and objectivity in research
techniques comes with an accompanying loss of meaning and, conversely,
that every immersion in theoretical insight comes with a loss in succinct
verifiability. This alternative enters into the daily work of the social re­
searcher, who is constantly forced to choose between generalizing and en­
lightening insights, and who desperately tries to achieve both at the same
time, even when formulating questionnaires and interview schemes. There
is reason to assume that this methodological aporia is not just the result of
sociology’s form and conceptual apparatus. It emerges from society itself,
where there is no purely logical relation between the particular and the
general; indeed, the relation is actually antagonistic.
Such considerations self-evidently support our experiment’s conception,
without making claim to a solution. The group investigation is neither a
standard “case study” nor an experiment controlled under laboratory con­
ditions,3 although it shares traits with both. Its attempt to come as close as
possible to the interdependent processes of real life is reminiscent of the
case study approach. It deliberately abstains from disentangling isolated
variables in a quest to conform to the research ideal of natural science
rather than to the complex conditions of actual society and subjective
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 12

opinion formation. By the same token, the group investigation shares two
traits with the experiment. The participants are not simply observed in
their everyday context, but are brought together specifically for the purpose
of the study. The group investigation, in particular, works with a standard­
ized “basic stimulus” and a series of similarly standardized arguments and
counter arguments in order to ensure comparability between the individual
sessions.
Our research design was guided by the experience that a study only
yields productive results if one reflects on the process and allows it to
change over the course of the research. Insofar as our research aim was
social-psychological—that is, related to how socially relevant behavior
comes about within individuals—this study was based on depth psychol­
ogy in the Freudian sense. Freud accepted the characteristic collective be­
havioral patterns worked out by authors such as Le Bon and McDougall,
but did not base them on an independent group-subject; instead he derived
psychological mass phenomena from the psychodynamic of individuals
within the group. Identification with the collective as such is the decisive
mechanism. Our material contains a surfeit of evidence for the power of
such mechanisms of identification.4
The study builds upon American investigations, including our own re­
search on prejudice,5 which in many cases shed light on social phenomena
with the help of Freudian categories. Like these investigations, the group
experiment does not use psychoanalytic ideas only in its design. Its find­
ings also confirm psychoanalytic statements. We found evidence for mech­
anisms like projection, reaction formation, repressed feelings of guilt, etc.,
all of which belong to the zone of defense of the unconscious by the ego.
Furthermore, we constantly came upon examples of subjective opinion
and opinion formation that literally called for such concepts due to their
contradiction of objective reality and their irrational character. They es­
sentially demanded psychoanalytic interpretation.
The interpretive problems only became completely clear after the dis­
cussions themselves were finished and the transcripts were available. Just
one of the many questions we had to face was how to quantify spontane­
ous, essentially qualitative material at all.6 The quantitative part of this
report shows how we tried to answer this problem. Even weightier was the
question of how to consider free, qualitative categories rather than mate­
rial that was already coded and categorized. One has to expect objections
such as “reading things into the material” and “subjective arbitrariness.”
Today, such objections are so automatic that they often lead—in contrast
to their original critical, antidogmatic impulse—to a prohibition on think­
ing (Denkverbot). The whole area that Max Weber called understanding
 Introduction ~ 13

(Verstehen) is questioned by the insatiable demand for evidence. We have

in no way taken this demand lightly. A certain protection against the dan­
ger of free association already resides in the staying power and consistency
of the theory. It is important to remember the accumulated knowledge and
experience that the formulation of the problems yields: in the case of our
current investigation, for example, the findings of related works of the In­
stitute on the problem of authority.7 A further element securing the inter­
pretation is the principle of not relying on isolated opinions in individual
statements, but instead on the overarching context within individual dis­
cussions as well as between the different discussions. When, for example,
lynching is compared to the murder of the Jews (despite the evident absur­
dity of such arguments), this illustrates a social tendency—one of auto­
mated, irrational defensiveness and aggressive retaliation—which could
never have been inferred offhandedly from a few scattered individual state­
ments on lynching.
One should not, however, be scared off by the defamation of the subjec­
tive component. Great philosophy from Plato to Hegel has at its core the
demonstration that there are no “mere facts,” no unmediated immédiates
(;unvermitteltes Unmittelbares). This was only forgotten in the later part of
the nineteenth century, and if anywhere the desire for alienation from this
era is legitimate, then it is here. In all facts—even in the allegedly merely
sensual impression—resides a piece of intellect in formation. Correctly
understood, this includes even our interest in a specific tree or house. Any­
one who wants to discern what this specific tree or this specific house actu­
ally is has to transcend isolation. Something all-encompassing plays a role
in both experiences—actually the whole society, the whole history of man
passing judgments about objects, a history that at the same time is embod­
ied in the objects themselves. This subjective element of objects and knowl­
edge about them is part of all knowledge that transcends mere classifica­
tion and registration. We do not submit to residual theory, according to
which truth is what remains when subjective additions are taken away.
This might apply where the object itself is not a human being, mediated by
intellect—but not in the ambit of the social. In psychology in particular the
exact opposite holds. Its insights become richer, more precise, and deeper
the more the judging subject contributes its sensations and its receptive­
ness for experience. Social sciences possess just as little a recipe for pro­
tecting against bad subjectivism, against the arbitrariness of a construction
imposed on the object from the outside, as, conversely, meaningful inter­
pretation can ensure that the irreducibly subjective element, on which the
spontaneity and productivity depends, does not proliferate into the delu­
sional; increasingly sophisticated experimental designs cannot do it. It
 Group Experiment and Other 'Writings 14

would be a bad science that seals itself off from what emerges out of the
material for the sake of a chimera of absolute provability. We are by no
means blind to the fact that a shadow of relativity clings just as much to the
quantitative as well as the qualitative interpretations: there the inevitable
residues of rigid computational methods do incomplete justice to the life of
the discussions and the meaning of individual statements; here the danger
that the idea overshoots what the facts support according to the relevant
interpretive norms, which demand the verifiability of every intellectual op­
eration through every other researcher in the same discipline.
The question of validity of interpretation is inseparable from the rela­
tionship between quantitative and qualitative analyses. The more qualita­
tive material and qualitative interpretation comes to the forefront due to
the special question of the investigation, the more urgent it becomes to
check the qualitative findings in a quantitative way if at all possible; or, in
the face of the limits we faced statistically in this regard, at least to point
out possibilities for such an examination. Obviously, the more statements
that can be extracted from a case, the more possible it is for the qualitative
analysis to draw conclusions beyond the individual case.
By the same token, it would be futile in the case of our material to con­
duct the quantitative analysis without the qualitative categories of under­
standing. By using techniques such as the elaboration of a codebook that
was highly differentiated qualitatively for the quantitative examination,
the attempt was made—following American efforts—not only to let quan­
titative and qualitative methods complement one another, but to unify
them to a certain degree. We are, of course, aware that the basic divergences,
from which our considerations emanate, also remain to date unresolved by
such attempts, if they can be resolved at all. Statistically this problem takes
the form of the problem that, in the case of qualitatively rich research instru­
ments, the resulting numbers for each individual category are so small that
they can hardly be assigned any relevance. A theoretically sufficient, qualita­
tively defined matrix of categories for quantification makes virtually impos­
sible the generalization on behalf of which one originally undertook the
quantification, and leads one right back to qualitative analysis again. Hence,
in the final report, we maintained a separation between the quantitative and
qualitative parts, and indicated their relationship only occasionally.
The relationship between quantitative and qualitative examination con­
stitutes only one aspect of a broader problem, which is actually the deci­
sive problem for the value of this research. That is the question of how far
one may generalize the findings. Let it be emphatically highlighted here
that the numerical findings, taken in isolation, must not make any claim to
validity beyond our circle of participants. In the text there will be several
 Introduction — 15

further references to this limitation on our quantitative study’s validity. A

certain character of consistency in the whole material, as well as the find­
ings of other research conducted by the Institute, however, lead us to as­
sume that the possibility for generalization reaches beyond the limits we
have to set, and which one would principally expect for a method aiming
predominantly at spontaneous statements.
Make no mistake, though: in all likelihood, changes in the objective so­
cial and political situation during the last four years have reduced the
contemporary validity of the findings. A recently concluded investigation
by the Institute showed in particular that the attitude toward democracy
in Germany has changed considerably in a positive way, even among ex­
tremely conservative groups like the farmers. For this reason and others, it
would be advisable to repeat this kind of group discussion at certain
intervals.
 Part O n e

AIM, M E T H O D S , A N D
CIRCLE OF PARTICIPANTS
 C H A P T E R O N E

The Group Discussion Method

Compared with Other Methods
of Empirical Sociology
and Its Application in the
Study at Hand

I. Theoretical Preliminaries
i. Subject and Method o f Empirical Sociology
During the last two decades, sociology has experienced an extraordinary
upsurge due to the systematic development and refinement of its methods
of data collection. Sociology today lays claim to assertions about subjects
that were previously left largely to theoretical construction or even non­
committal speculation. This is particularly true of research on the opin­
ions, attitudes, and behavioral patterns of large groups or the total popu­
lation. It is supposedly possible to ascertain reliably not only objective
social conditions but also the ways people respond to them.1 Based on
this, the hope arises of understanding modern industrial mass society bet­
ter by adopting an epistemic paradigm modeled on the exact sciences and
thereby approaching a practical solution to established problems between
man and his society.
Social scientists of all disciplines and practitioners from all areas of the
economy, administration, and social welfare have been extraordinarily im­
pressed by the accomplishments of modern data collection methods. By set­
ting strict boundaries on researchers’ idiosyncrasies and prejudices by con­
fronting them with facts, these methods also contain a democratic potential
compared with old-school sociology such as institutional analysis. Every­
body counts equally in sampling techniques. This opens up the possibility
 Group Experiment and Other Writings -— 20

of ascertaining the distribution of attitudes within the population far be­

yond the abstract electoral process and, therefore, of orienting government
policies accordingly. At the same time, these techniques open an avenue
for addressing a concern that has continuously challenged older German
sociology: to be able to investigate subjective issues objectively instead
of subjectively. The widely discussed problem of sociology based on
“understanding,”* which investigates patterns of meanings, was replaced by
a method that claimed to be able to objectify even phenomena of conscious­
ness as countable, measurable, and mathematically classifiable facts. Such a
method was all the more appropriate since, in the web of totally socialized
people (vergesellschaftete Leute)ythe individual confronted an increasing
quantity of structures and relations that were no longer understandable
other than as overwhelming fact, as blindly relentless existence. The more
contemporary society confronts its constituent members as second nature,
the more appropriate it seems to study it by methods borrowed from
science.
The progress of a science that is able to develop methods with the help
of which it can register and under some circumstances predict the truly
subtle reactions, opinions, and wishes of people is undeniable. It is also an
indisputable gain that one can check political and economic decisions
against the reactions of the governed. Nevertheless, one should also not
fail to recognize that the convergence of social-scientific methods toward
those of the natural sciences is itself the child of a society that reifies people.
The democratic potential of the new methods is thus not unquestionable,
as is so gladly assumed particularly in Germany after the suppression of
public opinion by the Hitler regime. It is not incidental that modern “opin­
ion research” grew out of market and consumer research.2 It [opinion re­
search] implicitly identifies man under the rubric of consumer. As a result,
the diverse tendencies to social control and manipulation that can be ob­
served to derive from modern empirical sociology in the realm of con­
sumer analysis or “human relations” are not merely incidental to the
method itself. While they [opinion researchers] are led by the principle of
the equality of people and allow no privilege in evaluating the attitudes of
individual subjects, they nevertheless treat these subjects as they are con­
stituted by the dominant economic and social relations, without examin-

* The reference is to Max Weber’s emphasis on Verstehen (understanding) as the basis for
sociological analysis as compared with other, principally Marxian, concerns with objective,
systemic analysis. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociol­
ogy, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
vol. i, pp. 8 -1 1. —Eds.
 The Group Discussion Method — z i

ing this constitution itself. The difficulty becomes obvious when the point
is to convey with representative surveys what opinions and meanings
people have toward questions of general public interest—in other words
as soon as one wants to deal with the problem of so-called public opinion
with the techniques of empirical social research.

2. The Problematic o f the Concept o f Public Opinion

Individual Opinion and Public Opinion Under the old paradigm it was
by no means beyond dispute that one could determine reliably what public
opinion toward certain questions was. Today, on the other hand, it is as­
sumed that public opinion can be elicited and measured everywhere.3 We
put trust in a standardized technique. Interviewers from polling institutes
pose a number of questions to a statistically representative cross-section of
the population. The answers obtained are grouped according to their con­
tent and analyzed in relation to objective characteristics of the respon­
dents. The findings are then presented in tabular form and interpreted as
public opinion. Depending on the method applied and the size of the sta­
tistical cross-section, public opinion is considered reliably ascertained within
a set margin of error.4 The problem of the concept of public opinion is
hardly considered. Instead, it is simply postulated as known by stating the
percentage of the sample—and, hence, of the entire population for which
the sample is representative—that answered a question in one way or
another. Yet the legitimacy of this procedure obviously depends on the
concept of public opinion itself. The problem is only elided, not solved, by
simply tailoring the definition beforehand to match the possible results of
sample polls.
Even the concept of individual opinion poses considerable difficulties,
and would have to be clarified in order to understand the concept of pub­
lic opinion in a concise way. Traditionally, “opinion” refers to the contents
of a person’s consciousness, without judgment as to its truth or untruth. If
a person believes that two times two equals four, that is his opinion just as
if he believes that two times two equals five. Both types of judgment, how­
ever, differ not only in their objective content (which is independent of
opinion), but also in their internal structure. Only one of these judgments
contains an adequate relation to the facts. The act of holding an opinion
varies accordingly; in the first case it is an actual synthesis, a logically
legitimate evaluation of experience. In the second case psychological, if not
outright pathological, determinants prevail. The concept of opinion under­
lying opinion research does not account for this difference. The relation of
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 22

consciousness to objectivity does not come to the fore. Beliefs are treated
as if they are final, not traceable to a deeper source of legitimacy. In fact,
the individual’s thinking-in-that-way really depends on aspects of what is
thought that are not reducible to the subjectivity of opinion holding. Com­
mon opinion research’s concept of opinion, which deems itself to be scien­
tifically devoid of assumptions, actually presupposes a nominalistic episte­
mology. It operates with a subjective concept of truth,5 without even
targeting the problem of objectivity at all. The much-heralded objectivity
of this concept is nothing but a generality aggregated from these subjec­
tivities, the common denominator of the opinions irrespective of their
objective coherence.
But the concept of opinion is not problematic merely because it cannot
actually separate opinion from truth. Indeed, the assumption of the exis­
tence of an opinion of every individual is questionable. That everyone pos­
sesses his own opinion is a cliché of the Modern. In earlier social epochs,
the spiritual cosmos was, on the one hand, much too strongly constructed
and strictly controlled for everyone to be able to have or to have been able
to develop a private opinion about everything—the expression itself is
specifically liberal; on the other hand, the information and communica­
tions possibilities were too limited for the overwhelming majority of peo­
ple to have been in the situation to have an opinion about everything
imaginable. Today, when in the large industrial states information about
nearly everything is widespread, the mass of informational material has
grown to such an extent with the complexity of all social relations that it
is even difficult for the expert himself to form an opinion about everything
in his own most narrow field. The oft-lamented indifference of the demo­
cratic individual toward public issues might come in part from his feeling
powerless in this respect, from his not having enough time, energy, or
schooling to familiarize himself with the data necessary to form an opin­
ion. Insofar as opinion research proceeds from the assumption that one
has to have an opinion about everything, it succumbs to the danger of
misleading people in its interviews to statements about which they have no
real conviction, which are not even their opinions.6 Exactly this contradic­
tion between being compelled to have an opinion and being incapable of
doing so misleads numerous individuals into accepting stereotypes. These
relieve them of the futile effort to opine, but, nonetheless, bestow upon
them the prestige of joining in.7 This contradiction proves effective in the
discussion of general questions across all social strata. In any case, modern
means of transportation and communication have generally facilitated the
formation of opinions, no matter how they come into being. Precisely be­
cause of the immeasurably increased possibilities for communication,
 The Group Discussion Method 23

however, it is no longer possible to understand every individual as a

monad whose isolated opinions crystallize and then linger as if in a vac­
uum. Realistic methods of opinion research need to approach as closely as
possible the conditions under which actual opinions are formed, persist,
and change. Opinion research has to free itself from the prejudice that opin­
ions are to a large degree stable properties of individuals and that their
changes are of secondary importance. In the face of the findings of modern
social psychology, it is just as problematic to assume a constant, unproblem­
atic individual in modern society8 as it is to conceive of an individual’s opin­
ion as existing at baseline and shifting in predictable situations. Opinion
research has to account for the dynamic aspect not only after the fact, as
through repeated interviews with the same individuals, but prospectively,
through its methodological design. It needs to recognize that, in a totally
socialized society (vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft), the objective conditions
of society play a decisive part in the formation and content of individuals’
opinions9 without eliminating the subjective process of responding to objec­
tive social facts.10

Public Opinion— An Aggregate Phenomenon? All of these questions sur­

rounding such a seemingly elementary concept as individual opinion pre­
cede the actual problem of public opinion. The dominant idea in empirical
social research is that public opinion is the aggregate of all individual
opinions. Since it is impossible to ascertain the opinion of all elements of
the statistical universe—all individuals in a population—one should at
least use reliable methods of selecting a sample to draw conclusions about
the whole population. Whether public opinion is the opinion of all or of
the majority, however, is not beyond doubt. At least in the German tradi­
tion the concept is not always understood in the same way as in contem­
porary opinion research. In the first place, common methods of counting
and measuring recognize neither the significance of minorities for the for­
mation of the majority opinion, nor even the crucial tension between ma­
jority and minority in opinion formation. Most of all, however, it is im­
portant to raise the objection from social theory, which is articulated
more and more urgently in today’s America: that opinion research’s meth­
ods of counting and rating all individuals as equal—as points devoid of
particular qualities—disregard the actual differences of social power and
powerlessness.11
Discussions of the concept of public opinion usually solve these prob­
lems naively by resorting to elite theory and privileging education. Thus,
W. A. MacKinnon,12 for example, calls public opinion the view held by the
best-informed, most intelligent, and most ethical members of a group,
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 24

since their views prevail in the end—albeit gradually—and are accepted by

at least the majority of the group. Other authors supplement their notions
of public opinion by formal sociological criteria. Thus, Leonard W. Doofc13
says that one can speak of public opinion only insofar as the attitudes of
members of the same social group are in tune with one another. The con­
cept of public opinion presupposes a social organization or group whose
members have more or less the same experiences. This is an attempt to
specify the concept of public opinion by considering the structure of the
group forming that opinion. The idea that public opinion is not merely the
sum of individual opinions but contains a transcending collective element
arises here. There can only be talk of public opinion when something like
a consistent group structure exists. One objection to this view is that there
is still something like public opinion even in a totalitarian (and therefore
atomized) society.
Finally, some authors count opinions spread through newspapers and
broadcasts as public.14There is undeniably some justification for this view.
All such organs understand themselves as public opinion, and they are of­
ten enough understood as messengers of public opinion, particularly in
politics. But public media, more than anything else, spread the dominant
views in society: what is in the air, so to speak. The centralization, concen­
tration, and technology-based standardization exert extraordinary power
over consumers’ consciousness. What these consumers parrot as their own
is really just a reflection of what is produced by the social power standing
behind the means of communication. While it is of course necessary to
figure social power into the analysis of public opinion, such analysis can­
not be content with simply studying the outputs of that social power.
All the theories treated so far are similar in that they capture either the
sum of all individual opinions or isolated sectors but not public opinion as
a totality. The difference between this whole and what is accomplished by
the aforementioned definitions of public opinion is reminiscent of Rous­
seau's famous distinction between “volonté générale” and “volonté de
tous”* Today, volonté de tous is the dominant understanding of public
opinion as the sum of all individual opinions, while volonté générale refer­
ences the whole that is more than the sum of its parts.15 Tönnies identified
this problem and pointed out that public opinion as a unitarily effective

* French in the original, translated as “the general will” or “the will of the people” (volo­
nté générale) and “the will of all” (volonté de tous). See J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract
and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole and J. M. Dent (London: Everyman, 1913), p. 203; and
Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
p. 31.—Eds.
 The Group Discussion Method — 25

force and power must be distinguished sharply and clearly from the pub­
licly articulated aggregation of multiple contradictory tendencies.16 The
conception of public opinion as analog to the volonté de tous is based on
a model of a purely competitive society. Everybody is supposed to enter
social life as if he has nothing but his own mind and to proceed to form his
views as an autonomous being. However, just as homo oeconomicus en­
ters competition with far more than the diligence of his own hands, the
judging intellect is far from a tabula rasa. From early on every individual
carries with him a group of uncountable views, mostly solidified by the
dominant intellectual climate and accepted without thought. Later on,
the individual is subject to the pressure of this same intellectual climate,
the more so since resistance against it requires a strength of ego few can
muster. Individual opinions, which appear to be the elementary* particles
of standard opinion research, are in truth highly derivative and mediated.
What was initially introduced here as “intellectual climate”—German
classical philosophy calls it the “objective spirit”—actually predates indi­
vidual opinions. This is not some speculative construction but an effect of
the tangible domination of the economic and social apparatus of produc­
tion over consumption—including over supposedly intellectual consump­
tion. This domination—and not a gestalt-theoretical organic conception—
stands behind the “entirety” of public opinion, behind the Tönnian “unitary
power”17 which other authors have identified as a collective factor or
group opinion with its own independent existence.18 While it is borne by
the individuals and based upon their thinking and feeling, it is not built up
from their individual opinions. Rather, it confronts every individual as
something already preformed, solidified, and often overwhelmingly pow­
erful. Making public opinion into a kind of intellectual “thing in itself” is
only the reflection of a social state in which the individual experiences
conditions as autonomous, forcing him to adapt to them.
True public opinion would epitomize this objective spirit, mirroring the
social conditions and tendencies of power, the gestalt characteristic of the
entire society. Since this consciousness exists above the heads of all indi­
viduals, it does not mesh with each individual’s consciousness; in fact, it
contradicts that of many. In their attitudes and opinions it is modified,
sometimes changed beyond all recognition by the whim of individual intel­
lectual fate. Nonetheless, public opinion exists objectively, an expression of

* The reference is to elementary in the Durkheimian sense, that is, as an elementary par­
ticle. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995); see
also Fields’ “Translators Introduction” thereto, pp. lix-lxi.—Eds.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 26

social totality; at the same time, though, it is also an expression of the so­
cial facts* washing over the individual.
This conception of public opinion is attached to the dominant relations
of power in society. Yet this fact is not acknowledged by an empirical and
positivistic science incessantly appealing to “facts.” It is often conceded
that public opinion has a supra-individual character. Public opinion re­
searchers acknowledge that traditional ideas, feelings, thoughts, customs,
and behavioral patterns exist in public and continuously mold people’s
opinions. They also do not deny the interrelations between individuals and
these institutional powers of intellect, nor among individuals themselves.
Yet, in the end, they call public opinion the sum of individual opinions re­
sulting from all these processes of influence. This sum and not the objec­
tive spirit becomes the substrate of opinion research because only individ­
ual opinions can be counted and measured. Although the principle “science
is measurement” is far too stark for American scholars today, it continues
to function as an implicit criterion for the scientific method. Therefore, no
one can simply declare that the positivistic-atomistic conception of public
opinion does justice to the issue. That discontent is counteracted by agnos­
ticism: “the nature of public opinion is not something to be defined but to
be studied.”19 People are consoled by the idea of a future in which so much
empirical material will be gathered that the question of the nature of pub­
lic opinion can be decided. This blinds us to the fact that the collection of
material for this clarification presupposes an inadequate, unrealistic con­
cept of public opinion. When speaking of theory, one does not mean a
theoretical conception of the entire society within which the concept of
public opinion is situated, but one limits oneself to formulating and to
testing hypotheses that can only be verified or falsified using atomistic-
additive methods. This insufficiency of the “philosophy” underlying opin­
ion research is based on a problematic notion of society and therefore calls
into question the reliability of the seemingly objective research methods.

3. Capacity and Limits o f Precise Research Methods

Sampling as a Tool for Sociological Research The survey method owes its
existence to administration’s need for information about the conditions
and people to be overseen and the desire of large-scale economic enter­
prises to be informed in advance about the extent and kind of demand

* The original refers to “gesellschaftliche F a tu m presumably a typographical error. We

have rendered it as “social facts” (gesellschaftliche Faktum).—Eds.
 The Group Discussion Method ~ 27

they face. Population growth, industrialization, and increasingly complex

and confusing social structures increased the need for reliable surveys.
Since the second half of the eighteenth century such surveys have been con­
ducted more and more often, and in the twentieth century the questions
extended far beyond the original objectives. The original model of applied
methods was the census. Complete surveys were limited by the expenses of
time and by costs demanded by surveys that include every individual ele­
ment of the statistical universe, alongside manifold technical difficulties.
Thus, in the past 20 years or so, particularly in America, methods have
been developed to allow gathering empirical material about many types of
social phenomena in a relatively short time and with less expenditure of
money. Here in particular, economic needs were particularly important.
Clients from industry and trade were less concerned about fully accurate
findings than about spotting market tendencies with a high probability. For
this purpose, it is sufficient to determine customers’ preferences through
samples.
After this method proved itself, the need for accuracy and reliability in­
creased in the interest of steadily reducing risk, and the methods were
more and more refined. Above all, the selection of interviewees was con­
sidered and planned more carefully in order to be sure that one could
draw conclusions with mathematical stringency and according to the rules
of mathematical probability about the entire population from the circle of
interviewees.20
Sampling caused a public stir for the first time when in 1936 George
Gallup correctly predicted the outcome of the American presidential elec­
tion by interviewing a sample of only 6,000 voters.21 Since then the survey
method has found its way into empirical sociology. A relatively small num­
ber of people selected with the greatest statistical refinement are inter­
viewed, the answers are categorized, coded, transferred to punch cards,
and counted, and the answers are correlated partly among themselves,
partly with characteristics like age, sex, profession, income group, religion,
residency, etc. Every single step is continuously examined for sources of
errors by statisticians, psychologists, and sociologists. The sample selec­
tion, formulation and arrangement of interview questions, and the inter­
viewers’ questioning technique are strictly systematized. Methods were
developed to check the primary material provided by the interviewers,
scales were constructed to ascertain depth, intensity, and stability of atti­
tudes, and researchers proceeded to clarify the dynamic character of pub­
lic opinion by repeated interviews of the same interviewees.22
As has been shown, these technical achievements are accompanied
by the positivistic attitude’s indifference toward the philosophical and
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 28

social-theoretical premises about the whole method. The frequent discus­

sions of “frame of reference” [English]23 are occupied with providing ad hoc
axioms, a series of more or less arbitrary definitions for operative, technical
ends, rather than critical reflections on the ideas of society and knowledge
implied by the method. In accordance with the scientific division of labor,
such concerns are passed off to the study of logic, and the decisive basis—the
material theory of society—falls between the cracks of the system of estab­
lished science. Only gradually do the findings and contradictions of the sur­
vey method itself compel reflection on its foundations. They also compel
modifications such as more consideration of the interviewees’ differential
social power and the role of those who form the opinion.

The Instability of Attitudes and Opinions There are, no doubt, questions

on which most people have a firm opinion. In general, everybody will be
able to say which familiar cigarette or soap brand he prefers, to which
party he feels closest, what his favorite color is, whether he prefers theater
or cinema, and whether or not he is interested in sports. But the relation of
individuals to social reality is not limited to these questions. These prob­
lems already exist in questionnaire form, which offers a choice among
precoded possibilities. They conceive humans in the mode of a customer
who has to decide between the reified and fixed alternatives put forward
by an organized economy and society. Although the general social ten­
dency is certainly toward reducing people to such predetermined and lim­
ited decisions, even those decisions are not exhausted by “multiple choice”
[English].24 There are countless questions toward which people behave in
a less fixed manner, that is: more finely differentiated and more vividly
expressed. They are too far removed from other issues to crystallize a clear
opinion at all. Often they waffle, and their opinion swings from one ex­
treme to the other. Yet, just because their opinion cannot be objectified in
the way the survey method wants, it cannot be said that they lack an
opinion—just that their opinion is of a different, more vague, and fluctuat­
ing character than the sharply contoured one of the interview.
Particularly when people are passionately involved in a question, it is
plausible that they might hesitate and that the most divergent motives
would come into play. By the same token, it might be easier for them to
proclaim a seemingly firm view when they are less committed to the view,
when they are more indifferent, when their own affective charge and with
it their psychological ambivalence influences their judgment less. Depth
psychology has proven that the strongest psychological ambivalence sur­
rounds the strongest affective charge.25 This persists in opinion formation.
Clear attitudes cannot be expected in the case of multilayered, complex
 The Group Discussion Method ~~ 2 9

questions that arouse the emotions of the interviewees, and when the in­
terviewee himself is conscious only superficially (if at all) of the implica­
tions of such questions. Contradictory tendencies in an individual’s opinion
do not mean that he lacks an opinion, but that these opinions are multilay­
ered or antagonistic in themselves. Since such antagonisms are intertwined
in the most diverse ways with the objective antagonisms of society, it is
particularly important for sociology to follow them if empirical surveys are
to gain as accurate a picture as possible of the relation between people and
their social environment. It is obvious that one method alone does not suf­
fice for this task; a combination of several methods is necessary for ap­
proaching the complex phenomenon of opinion formation.

The Interview Situation In a social scientific interview situation, the inter­

viewee faces the interviewer, usually a stranger, who reads him a number
of questions and encourages him to reply directly. It is obvious that, par­
ticularly outside of market research, this is not a realistic simulation of a
conversation. Instead, it is a laboratory experiment in which the question
functions as a stimulus. Yet it is sometimes assumed that the reactions to
these stimuli, the coded answers, have the same value as utterances made
under conditions of reality. The dubiousness of this assumption and the
source of error therein are examined in detail by Hofstätter26 among
others. We only want to point out that even when a participant is entirely
willing to answer to the best of his knowledge and belief, the interview
situation still influences the findings because it requires decisiveness even
where it may not exist. This is all the more true the more the questions are
affectively charged or concern social taboos, or when they concern things
the interviewee regards as his private sphere, about which outsiders have
no business asking. The depth-psychological concept of rationalization
adds to this.27 Under the influence of unconscious psychological defense
mechanisms, narcissism in particular, participants often give incorrect or
retouched answers, without being clear about them. Especially in this case
the affective charge of the issues will assert itself most drastically. The par­
ticipant’s unconscious will be careful to keep its cards close to the chest,
and the same repression mechanisms to which the participant’s drives are
subjected are mobilized to prevent more being revealed than psychological
censorship allows. Even with especially sociable interviewers, who create a
particular kind of transmittal situation, these defensive mechanisms can­
not be fully neutralized.28
It is not rare to encounter cases in which the interviewees are only quali-
fiedly willing to grant interviews for the reasons above. This limitation gen­
erally leads to less openness in answering the questions. Fear of admitting
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 30

ignorance in particular shows up here. There are counteracting forces,

though, which explain the fact that year after year countless people across
the free world join in the question-and-answer game of an army of inter­
viewers. Prominent among these are the personality and skill of the inter­
viewer, curiosity, satisfaction at having been chosen as an organ of public
opinion, the prestige of the survey organization, actual helpfulness, and,
particularly in the U.S.A., the habit of participating in all kinds of surveys.
However, beyond market research or interviews about relatively innocent
issues, these factors only completely overcome the artificial character of
the interview situation in exceptional cases.

The Antinomy of Empirical Research and the Institute's Pilot Study This
critique of survey methods is not nullified by specifying exactly the statisti­
cal error of representation according to the rules of mathematical proba­
bility. That is because one can only calculate the extent to which the com­
position of the sample corresponds to that of the universe from which it
was taken. But one cannot specify the degree to which the problems of
the interview method affect its reliability and then eliminate these er­
rors.29 The critique refers not to the technical precision of the method but
to its epistemic adequacy, the matter of inferring public opinion from
standardized questions posed to statistically selected individuals. Such
criticism is not meant to discredit the survey method as such. Its achieve­
ments are beyond doubt the closer its questions are to market and con­
sumer research and to less affectively charged topics. It is only problem­
atic to hypostatize the method, because of its mathematical presentability,
as a privileged instrument of objective knowledge across opinion research
and to exceed the limits of the method that inhere in the form of its rela­
tion to the object.
Empirical social research faces a kind of antinomy. The more exact its
methods become, the more these methods are at risk of replacing the ac­
tual object of interest with one defined in “operational terms,” in other
words, narrowing the issue itself to whatever can be ascertained by survey
methods and neglecting what is socially relevant. The sterility of some em­
pirical studies, and the frequent sense that one would have expected the
results ahead of time—a critically justified observation cannot be refuted
simply by the counter argument that there is a difference between what is
expected and what is actually known— is not just the result of a lack of
imagination or theoretical conception in designing studies. These prob­
lems are fundamentally connected with the method itself. By the same to­
ken, the history of sociology has often enough demonstrated the opposite
risk: arbitrariness and untested dogmatic claims. We are far from demand-
 The Group Discussion Method — 31

ing that science should refrain from including the new methods of “fact
finding” [English]. All the same, in the excitement of discovering the new
method, one must not forget that it is vulnerable on particularly important
questions of knowledge about society. This is true exactly where the
method holds itself in highest regard: in objectivity or knowledge about
the true object. Because of this contradictory situation, corrective tech­
niques to help the new method understand its own problem have to tie in
to the state of empirical social research. Empirical social research needs to
overcome the underlying reasons for its own shortcomings with tools de­
rived from it, and to nudge social research into being a tool for real social
insight. It must not content itself with safe but irrelevant claims about
dead, reified templates of reality. It is a matter of merging scientific objec­
tivity with meaningful insight into the essential, which often eludes precise
methods.
The undertaking of the Institute for Social Research reported here is an
experimental contribution to this task, with all the preliminary and ques­
tionable aspects that can hardly be avoided given the paradox of the task
itself, and certainly cannot be avoided during the first steps. The goal is a
procedure that will eventually lead beyond the limits of quantitative meth­
ods. In no way is the claim made that this is the first attempt in this direc­
tion. For a long time, depth-psychological interviews, projective tests, de­
tailed case studies, and other techniques have been applied to correct and
supplement common survey methods.30 The group technique discussed
here differs from all these attempts, however, by not being content with
post hoc modifications. Instead, it investigates an earlier stage: studying
opinions in statu nascendi.

II. The Practice of the Group Discussion M ethod

i. The Hypotheses
The hypotheses on which the group experiment is based emerge directly
from the criticism of representative quantitative survey methods. The fol­
lowing considerations underlie them:

FIRSTLY: People’s opinions and attitudes toward topics that claim general or
public interest and which can therefore become objects of public opinion do
not form and act in isolation but in continuous interrelation between the in­
dividual and the society that affects him both directly and indirectly. They are
often not specifically fixed, but have an only vague and diffuse potential.
Often they become clear to the individual only in interaction with other
people. They may be present latently, but they do not really take shape until
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 32

the individual feels compelled to assert and maintain a viewpoint—for example,

in a discussion. In this process of interaction, during which the attitudes them­
selves might change, the opinions emerge more clearly, only to revert after­
ward to something latent, unclear, and blurry and evade measurement. To re­
veal them it is therefore necessary to create a situation as similar to reality as
possible, in which attitudes can be both activated and formulated by their
exponents.
SECONDLY: People’s opinions and attitudes about matters beyond the
most immediate are also determined by the personality structure, and to a
great degree they are subject to people’s affective vicissitudes. They change
according to people’s mood and the situation, and the most diverse tendencies
can appear in the foreground of consciousness. The method has to seek to
register all aspects and to do justice to the contradictory tendencies. Narrow­
ing the range of reactions should be avoided if possible.
THIRDLY: The interviewees’ frequent inability to utter an opinion can be
built on resistances of which they are not consciously aware. Surveys often
register such interviewees as not having an opinion. But even if the interviewees
are unable to communicate their attitudes in an articulate way by answering
one of the questions posed to them, they still usually have more dispositions
toward the problems than one would imagine from survey results. Hence, it is
an aim of the new method to overcome these psychological barriers and to
register attitudes whose expression they inhibit.
FOURTHLY: Answers to questions against which one has conscious or
unconscious resistances are often rationalizations. Understanding the content
of such rationalizations and their frequency among the population is of great
psychological interest. The epistemic value of a study will be that much higher,
the more it helps to reveal what these rationalizations actually represent. There­
fore, one of the pressing tasks in the area of opinion research is to find a way to
circumvent rationalizations (the manifest statements) to reveal their actual
meanings and to make a clear distinction between the superficial and the latent
contents of a statement.2

2. The Experimental Design

In Winter 1950-51 our Institute undertook an experiment based on these
considerations. In groups of approximately 8-16 participants, around
1,800 people from all strata of the population discussed31 questions which,
as has already become apparent, could not be satisfactorily resolved with
currently available survey techniques. This “pilot study” [English] exceeds
the scope of what has been done elsewhere. It was conducted by three re­
search centers in Hesse, Bavaria, and Northern Germany. Our goal was to
understand important aspects of German public opinion—what is in the
air in the realm of political ideology—by studying the “trans-subjective”
factors, and especially to understand the ways and the extent to which
 The Group Discussion Method — * 33

these take hold in the individual. Equally important, however, was the de­
velopment and the testing of the “group discussion method,” a new method
whose conception emerges from the critique of contemporary survey
methods. The goal was to reveal the participants’ attitude and the interre­
lation between individual and group which importantly co-constitutes this
attitude in dialogue insofar as one participant attempts to persuade the
other group members of the truth of his own view, and by the influence the
group opinion (the group standards) exerts on individuals’ attitudes: in
short, by the dynamic nature of dealing with the topic. The project avoided
studying attitudes, opinions, and patterns of behavior in isolation—a state
in which they almost never occur. In addition, the group discussion should
allow for apprehending multiple aspects of the opinions and attitudes si­
multaneously in their multilayered, contradictory complexity.
The study sought to create a situation in which people could speak sponta­
neously and frankly in order to provide for the necessary range of reac­
tion, to cater to the different reaction rates of individuals, and to eliminate
everything in the experimental design that might strengthen internal resis­
tance. Therefore, the discussions could not follow a preset agenda or a list of
points to be systematically discussed. Rather they had to be conducted as
freely as possible, without rigid topical restrictions, and without forcing the
participants to express themselves. The often prolix breadth of the discussions
of particular themes was usually allowed because only this made it possible
to obtain the free associations crucial for assessing the stated opinions and
attitudes. These associations were of especially crucial significance for the
analysis of the discussions since they made it possible to infer the utterances’
latent content. It is, in turn, only from these that information can be gained
about the attitudes that reside below and underlie the surface opinions.
The question of how the participants were to be confronted with the
objects of research was resolved after great initial difficulties by including
the topics in a letter written for the project and recorded on audio tape [See
the Colburn Letter, 177-178.—Eds.]. After a short opening address from the
investigator, the text was played to the participants and put up for discus­
sion. This foundation mainly had the task of raising the topics for discussion.
Apart from that, it was designed to exert a stimulating effect by touching
on psychologically sore spots and breaking through the participants’ re­
serve, which is often observed in discussions of affectively charged topics.
In the first place, therefore, it was supposed to mobilize mechanisms of
defense and rationalizations in order to reveal what they usually conceal,
as in psychoanalytic techniques.32
The situation in a train compartment served as a kind of model for the
group discussions. It frequently happens that strangers talk about the most
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~~ 34

delicate questions with surprising openness in such situations. Similarly,

the group discussions ensure the nonbinding character and the informality
of the talk as well as the freedom to participate in the discussion or to
withdraw from it. Only under these conditions could we count on the par­
ticipants to speak spontaneously and without inhibition and without feel­
ing irritated by a fixed scheme of questioning.
In order to best approximate reality, it seemed important to eliminate all
inhibiting factors evoked by external conditions. In general the partici­
pants were invited to a place familiar and known to them, or at least to a
completely neutral place. Thus, the discussions took place in back rooms
of small restaurants, in rooming houses, in barracks, in the canteens of big
enterprises, in bunkers, club houses, in short anywhere where groups of
people naturally come together and are used to talking to each other. As
much as it would have lowered the cost to conduct the discussions in the
Institute’s building or in another public building, such a venue was unac­
ceptable. Such a venue, which for many of our participants is unfamiliar
and charged with feelings of significance, would have been too great a
distraction.
Before the beginning of the meeting the participants were given pseud­
onyms, which they maintained during the entire course of the experiment.
This dispelled the anxiety some individuals had about later identification
and created sufficient anonymity for the participant to actually come out
of his shell while discussing the different topics. To protect participants’
anonymity we therefore had to decide from whom they should remain
anonymous. Above all, it seemed important to promise that their anonym­
ity would be carefully protected vis-à-vis the Institute and its assistants, as
well as from any authorities or the occupying powers and even from the
police apparatus of a future Russian invasion.33 One must not forget that
in the winter of 1950-51 there was still widespread fear that a candid po­
litical statement could bring persecution by German or foreign security
organs. From the Institute’s side, everything that seemed necessary to keep
the promise to our participants was done.
Anonymity vis-à-vis the other group members is a different story. Natu­
rally, it was only possible when the participants did not already know each
other or could not easily discover their identity through other channels
(employee of the same business, residence in the same area, living in neigh­
boring accommodations). In artificially assembled groups whose members
were homogeneous only based on a general social category (e.g., refugees,
youths, etc.), using pseudonyms also proved a practical tool to overcome
the inhibitions of distrustful or particularly anxious individuals. Here the
name card put up in front of each participant served as a symbol for the
 The Group Discussion Method — ’ 35

fact that his true name was not recorded and could not be known to his
fellow participants without his consent.
One objection could be that the anonymity granted in the discussions
encouraged irresponsible drivel, since speakers were not bound to what
they said. In some cases there were indications that participants played cer­
tain roles in the discussions that prompted them to say things that were at
odds with their other attitudes and seemed at times to be clearly contradic­
tory to those attitudes. Such contradictions between normal attitudes and
expressions of opinion during the group discussion can be explained pri­
marily by the fact that in most people several tendencies struggle for domi­
nance. One of these usually prevails, while others are visible only in excep­
tional cases. That such phenomena can be observed in the discussion
suggests a positive interpretation of our experiment—the experimental de­
sign caused a reduction of the controlling function of consciousness and,
thus, granted access to deeper layers of consciousness.34
Depth psychology long ago disproved the common view that a person
who knows himself to be free from responsibility would just talk, without
any particular goal, for the sake of making himself appear important or to
malevolently mislead the listener. In the same way that wine reveals but does
not invent, the irresponsible drivel in the discussion can be very informative
for those attitudes which are rarely visible and are hidden in an interview
based on multiple-choice questions. One can even assume that people whose
political opinions are the object of research are rather more likely to give
irresponsible answers to an unknown interviewer (for example, to get rid of
him) than to chatter about something irrelevant in a carefully organized
group discussion.
After distributing pseudonyms, short statistical questionnaires were
handed out. These asked for common information such as age, marital sta­
tus, profession, education, etc. The questions were formulated in such a way
that answering usually led to some questions, through which more personal
contact between the participants and the staff could be established before
the beginning of the discussion. After a short introduction from the investi­
gator and the playing of the basic stimulus, the discussion generally fell into
two parts of 45 minutes to 1 hour each. The first section was entirely free
discussion. In the second part the investigator inserted “standardized argu­
ments” into appropriate sections of the discussion. The aim of this part was
to give participants the opportunity to make their statements more precise
and most importantly to gain further insight into the process of opinion
formation and change.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 36

3. Carrying Out the Experiment

Character and Composition o f the Groups After some experimenting with

randomly composed groups, it proved practical to limit the discussions to
groups that were sociologically or ideologically homogeneous to some
extent. The criteria for this homogeneity had to be worked out first. We
assumed that, as in reality, opinion formation tends to take place in pre­
structured groups. Preliminary tests were meant to determine what kind of
group was best suited for the experiment while still corresponding to natu­
ral conditions.3>
The number of participants was generally not supposed to be smaller
than seven or larger than seventeen. Groups that were too small were too
closed to permit true opposition to emerge. In too large of a group, it
would have been difficult to avoid disintegration and a feeling of coldness
and foreignness.
It was neither planned nor possible to base the research, conceived as
a pilot study, on a statistically representative cross-section of the population.
This, however, does not mean that the experiment was a shot in the dark.
Rather, we sought to be very realistic in the selection of participants so that
the groups would not be composed only of members of one social circle. It
seemed equally unacceptable to conduct the discussions in only one city.
Hence, within the limits of time and resources, we included members of
many important population strata from different districts of the Federal
Republic.36

The Function o f the Moderator Based on the above, it should be clear that
the discussions—and in particular the first part—were not steered substan­
tively but only moderated formally. The best way to do this could only be
determined experimentally. Thus, we experimented with different methods of
moderation in the first research phase. From the experience gained, we finally
developed a technique that differs crucially from the usual ways of moderat­
ing discussions. As a result of this experience we compiled the “moderator
instruction,”37 according to which the rest of the study was conducted.
The preliminary tests showed that the investigators alone were not able
to record the observations necessary for interpreting the discussions. The
necessary concentration on the discussion and constant interaction with
the participants did not permit them to take notes at the same time. Thus,
after the first pretests an assistant was assigned to each investigator. The
assistant was charged with the task of recording the topics of the discus­
sion in shorthand and recording observations on the behavior of the group
and of individual participants.
 The Group Discussion Method ^ 3 7

Recording the Discussions It was clear from the beginning that only elec­
tronic recording would suffice for the group discussions. It was the only
way to reproduce the complete course of the discussion and the intensity
of the speakers’ affect. In addition, participants almost invariably got used
to the microphone and recorder quickly, while the presence of a secretary
writing feverishly can severely affect the realism of the discussion.
Now, it would be wrong to assume that the tape recording readily al­
lowed a complete transcription of the discussions. Even in the most favor­
able case it was not possible to identify and transcribe all statements with
the help of the audio tapes; a few remained unintelligible. This is essen­
tially because the group discussions proceeded with little organization
due to their spontaneity. Numerous participants speak unclearly or in a
dialect hard to understand, and many participants often talk at the same
time. These difficulties could have been avoided by more rigid moderation
but had to be accepted since the frankness of the statements clearly de­
creases with increasing discipline of discussion. This would therefore have
strengthened the controls whose effects the experiment was designed to
limit.

The Individual Interview From the beginning, it was assumed that the
group discussions, conceived and developed as tools for opinion research,
would not fail to affect the participants. Thus, we sought to try to gain
some insights into these effects. It was particularly important to determine
the consistency of the articulated opinion: to find out whether opinion
changes observed in the discussions were “stable,” or whether the partici­
pants reverted to their initial attitude at some point after the discussions.
A survey of approximately one quarter of the participants (400 total)
was conducted 4 to 6 weeks after the completion of the discussions as an
attempt to consider this direction. The questionnaire was developed after
a detailed review of around 50 discussions.38 It included questions relating
to the main topics of the research as well as some to provide additional
information about the psychological structure of the interviewees. The in­
terviews were principally conducted by the moderators and their assistants
in order to utilize the trusting relationship which had developed between
them and the participants in the course of the discussions, to gain as open
and sincere answers as possible. These interviews were therefore not inqui­
sitions by strangers as criticized above, but talks between two people who,
as a general rule, had gotten to know each other under particularly favor­
able circumstances.
These individual interviews yielded an abundance of valuable material,
but their goal was achieved only to a limited extent. This is, in part, because
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 38

the participants surveyed were not representative of the participants, be­

cause contact could be reestablished with only some of the discussion
groups. It proved to be even more troublesome that the survey results
could only be partially linked to the contributions to the discussion, be­
cause the questionnaire design was based on a plan of analysis that turned
out to be impracticable. Therefore, the results of the survey were used as
additional material for the qualitative analysis but not integrated statisti­
cally into the findings of the main analysis.

4. Analysis o f Stimuli
When the following discussion refers to the “stimuli” used, this should
not be understood as an attempt to determine with scientific rigor indi­
vidual differences in reactions to the same stimulus. We consider stimuli
as those conditions set up to induce the participants to talk and make
their attitudes and motivations known where they would otherwise have
been inhibited. We also do not consider factors that influenced the partici­
pants’ reactions in particular ways without having been planned and
standardized as part of the experimental design; these act as stimuli as
well. Among those are, for example, the effects of the respective composi­
tion of the group, the specific group climate resulting from the composi­
tion, the personality of the moderator, etc. The combination of these fac­
tors excludes from the outset any thought of experimental methods,
which always require the isolation of stimuli so that the reactions can be
measured.

The Basic Stimulus The basic stimulus was of central significance for the
group experiment. It not only had to stimulate, to induce the partici­
pants into talking, but also had to set the topics for discussion insofar as
this could be done without coercion. It was a functional analog to the ques­
tionnaire in survey methods, but without its rigidness. Hence, great care
had to be devoted to the construction and extensive testing of the basic
stimulus.
A number of criteria were set up for the formulation of the basic stimu­
lus. These arose in part from the study’s topic and in part from the meth­
ods intended for its execution.

FIRSTLY: The basic stimulus had to relate directly to the subject of the re­
search, i.e., to questions of political ideology. Among those questions were,
for example, Germans’ relation to foreign countries and the occupying
powers, attitudes toward democratic and totalitarian forms of government
 The Group Discussion Method — 39

respectively, the residues of national-socialistic ideology, particularly the ra­

cial theory, the question of anti-Semitism, and, finally, the question of German
collective guilt, a question discussed with great vehemence in all strata of the
population when this undertaking was conducted.
SECONDLY: It had to be concrete enough to evoke specific reactions and
to exercise a stimulating effect on members of the most diverse professional
and educational groups.
THIRDLY: It had to be stable enough to be used for the entire period of the
survey, which lasted half a year, without losing the reality and intensity of the
effects.
FOURTHLY: It had to touch psychologically sensitive spots to reach deeper
layers of consciousness, but should not overexcite the participants, which
would cause them to take a defensive stance and provoke them to react
unnaturally.

In the construction of the basic stimulus, we proceeded from the experi­

ence of what was generally said about those topics and made it an object
of criticism. We expected that the participants would mobilize exactly
what was criticized—the ideology—against this very mild criticism. In this
way the basic stimulus was meant to help release the ideology. The underly­
ing hypothesis was that the discussion would spontaneously show through
the manner of countercriticism what kinds of attitudes existed—at least la­
tently—in the people. The basic stimulus was presented to the participants
as an open letter written by an American sergeant to his newspaper after 5
years of service in the occupation army [The Colburn Letter.—Eds.].39
The letter is composed of three parts clearly distinguished from one an­
other. In the introduction, the writer defends his right to judge Germany
and the German people by his having lived in Germany for 5 years and,
thereby, having had the chance to get to know Germans firsthand and un­
der favorable conditions for objective observation, namely at work. The
statement that much nonsense has been said and written about Germany
is meant to assure the reader that he will not judge lightly. Its effect is fur­
ther strengthened by the rejection of supposedly common generalizing
judgments among his countrymen, which follows. The first part of the let­
ter concludes with the captatio benevolentiae* that the writer is a sober
(unemotional) and not vengeful observer, albeit one who does not let any­
one pull the wool over his eyes.
In the second part the depiction of the Germans starts with a description
of positive characteristics. The good points are partly qualified by state­
ments: “They are very interested in technology, even though they, naturally,

An effort to secure the good will of a listener or reader.— Eds.

 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 40

are behind us,” “of course, I do not know to what extent they are indepen­
dent or just recount what they have heard,” “often they just say what they
think we want to hear,” etc. These statements qualifying the depiction of
good characteristics of the Germans were meant to increase the sense of
objectivity, since unqualified praise would easily have seemed unnatural, as
clumsy flattery, or as pro-German bias. We were surprised by what oc­
curred: the qualifications were often interpreted as attacks just as the criti­
cal statements were later on. The psychic reservoir from which many of the
participants drew was largely collective narcissism. Although they were
gathered in small groups, they acted as members of a mass or at least be­
haved as if they were in a mass as soon as there was talk of “we,” which, for
them, replaced the notion of Germany.
Among many participants their entire reactions seemed to be set up ac­
cording to the binary scheme of for us vs, against us. This behavioral pat­
tern should remind us that the problem of mass psychology is in no way
limited to times when masses are immediately present. Phenomena of mass
psychology can also occur in social situations in which individuals find
themselves relatively isolated. Stubborn and unreflective reactions can
occur whenever the psychic zones characteristic of mass psychology are
touched. These reside in the domain of collective identification.
The third and longest part comprises a detailed criticism of character­
istics and behavioral patterns of Germans. Again, the critical comments
are qualified with the aim of developing rapport with the group. This
third part of the letter is the focus of the basic stimulus, as it concen­
trates the arguments that are designed to break through the partici­
pants’ reserve by means of their content, formulation, and psychological
approach.
The categories used in the analysis of the basic stimulus arise from the
main topics of the object of investigation mentioned above. It is important
to recognize, though, that these are not separate phenomena independent
of one another, but rather question complexes forming structural wholes.
Thus, even though the following isolates individual questions and, hence,
breaks apart from this structural whole, one should not overlook that such
a methodological operation must not lead to hypostatizing the crystallized
factors as independent variables.
The structural whole of the third part is best characterized by “ethno-
centrism.”40 By this we mean the attitude that contrasts the (good) in­
group with the (bad) out-group, distinguishes between “us” (the Germans)
and “them” (the foreigners), and projects all imaginable bad things onto
the latter. The basic stimulus touches on five sensitive spots of ethnocen-
trism, namely:
 The Group Discussion Method ~~ 41

1. the dogma of German cultural superiority,

2. the myth of the invincibility of the German soldier,
3. the overestimation of one’s own technological accomplishments and
inventions,
4. moral condescension, and
5. aggression against nations that were supposedly more politically
mature, arising from the cliché of one’s own political immaturity.

These sensitive spots corresponded to the following phrases from the basic
stimulus:

“They believe they have exclusive rights to culture and are, thus, vastly
superior to us.”
“Even though we beat them, they believe themselves to be better and
more capable than us.”
“.. . they have a hard time accepting that now they are no longer in
charge in the world.”
“. . . even though they, naturally, are behind us (in technology).”
“. . . that they attempt to learn as much as they can from our modern
techniques.”
“. . . they cannot understand at all that one admits the mistakes of
one’s own country and talks openly about them.”
“. . . that the Germans are learning from the ground up what practical
democracy actually means.”
“The risk is that, tomorrow, they will again follow a Hitler or Stalin, as
soon as they convince themselves that they can come to power again
that way.”

Anti-Semitism is a special case of ethnocentrism. That anti-Semitism

persists in Germany even after the collapse of the Third Reich is supported
both by theoretical reasoning and by direct experience.41 We considered
anti-Semitism as of special importance among the surviving elements of
Nazi ideology.42 Anti-Semitism was probably less affected by the collapse
of national-socialistic dogmas than were other ideological elements such
as the cult of the Führer.
Since we could not count on open acknowledgment of crassly ethnocen­
tric attitudes, it seemed prudent not to refer directly to anti-Semitism in
the basic stimulus. Thus, only indirect statements about anti-Semitism
were included in the stimulus. One could, however, assume that these
statements would induce the participants to intense discussion. The stimuli
touched on ethnocentrism on three levels in order to achieve a sufficiently
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 42

wide range of reactions and to reveal the hidden and repressed manifesta­
tions of ethnocentrism. These levels were:
the ideology of the superiority of the “German race,”
the bitterness against the DPs,4^
the degree of recognition of the extent of the persecution of the Jews.
These three topics are introduced here as levels of ethnocentrism be­
cause of possible differences in the degree to which particularly anti-
Semitic attitudes are conscious. We assumed that participants who identi­
fied partially or completely with national-socialistic racial theory during
the discussions would likely also have conscious anti-Semitic attitudes. For
the other two groups—those participants who thought German bitterness
against the Jews was justified or that the extent of the persecution of the
Jews is generally greatly exaggerated—we assumed that less conscious,
hidden forms of ethnocentrism were at work. In the first case, we sus­
pected a suppression of feelings of guilt leading to the projection of aggres­
sion onto the victims; in the second case, the effect of a defense mechanism
resulting in a distortion of reality. According to these hypotheses, the fol­
lowing arguments were formulated:
“They imagine that their good traits, which I do not deny, grant them
a sort of privilege in the world.”
“They are still not free from the Nazi view that they are a master
race.”
“They are also still bitter toward the Jews.”
“One only hears . .. complaints about the DPs’ trading on the black
m arket. . .”
“They act especially strangely when there is talk about racial persecu­
tion in America.”
“I have always explained to them that among us it is a matter of 10 or
20 cases a year, while among them it involved millions . . .”
“. .. while their state, however, managed lynching itself and in a
disproportionally higher scale.”
We have to note again here that breaking apart the structural whole of
the study question and the isolated examination of subproblems, al­
though unavoidable for the analysis of the stimuli, is only partially pos­
sible. This is particularly true of the guilt complex, since the question of
guilt can never be discussed outside the context of the actions constitut­
ing guilt. Thus, it was impossible to avoid the fact that the stimulus argu­
ments, particularly those aimed at the guilt complex, touched two sensi­
tive spots at once. This reality would have to be judged as a deficiency in
 The Group Discussion Method 43

quantitative survey methods due to the lack of a clear separation of vari­

ables. Here, though, it demonstrates the impossibility of splitting complex
phenomena into cleanly delineated factors and underscores the necessity
of coming to grips with the different dimensions of a multilayered prob­
lem all at once.44
Prior experience suggested that unresolved guilt in the majority of Ger­
mans was a key problem for understanding public opinion and political
potential in the Federal Republic. We expected that German guilt for the
war, for the cruelties committed during the war, and for the persecution of
Jews would be partially repressed, partially denied due to narcissism as
well as real reasons, and that even mild reproaches would be rejected, over-
compensated, and returned. We also anticipated that repressed guilt would
return as aggression, and that manifold projections, shifts, and rationaliza­
tions could occur in the discussion of the question of guilt. More arguments
relating to the guilt complex were maintained than for the other categories
in order to preserve the range of reaction. Moreover, the letter included
phrases that did not relate to one of the three topics mentioned above but
aimed in a very vague, general manner at the question of guilt. In the order
of topics the stimulus arguments were:
“They do not want to hear anything about the fact that they started
wars with other people time and again, this time too.”
“. . . yet this does not change anything about Hitler’s setting the world
on fire and alone bears the responsibility for the mischief, which,
since then, has not come to an end.”
“Only a small minority is said to be guilty. In a certain way this is true,
but in general one finds only very few Germans who unambiguously
renounce the deeds.”
“Instead, they always say that such things are unavoidable in war.”
“When they hear that a Negro was lynched in the South, they crow
and say: ‘You’re not any better’ . . .”
“Some think that all are Nazis and all bear joint guilt for the cruelties.”
“Most act as if we did the greatest wrong to them.”
“They don’t want to be guilty of anything.”
“When one listens to them, there are no Nazis at all. I didn’t see
anybody admitting that he was one.”
“They are always prepared to rail against all the others, only in order
to distract.”
“Instead, they tell you . . . that the Russians are even much worse.”
The arguments of the letter relating to the authority complex hinted at
Germans’ apolitical character and tendency to submit to authority, which
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 44

is time and again advanced as an excuse for political developments.

Authoritarian submission is understood here in the sense of the “authori­
tarian syndrome,”45 the wide spread of which among the German popula­
tion is often considered a reason for the lack of true democratic develop­
ment,46 and which decisively influences the attitude of Germans toward
to the question of the form of government. In regard to contents, the argu­
ments related to both manifestations of authoritarianism, namely, servility
and aggression.47
The corresponding phrases in the letter are:

“They are . . . only rarely insubordinate.”

“Of course, I do not know to what extent they are independent or
just recite what they have heard.”
“Often they just tell us what they think we want to hear.”
“To me and to most of my acquaintances they are generally friendly.”
“The risk is that, tomorrow, they will again follow a Hitler or
Stalin . . ”48
“They are always prepared to rail against all the others . . .”
“. .. that the Germans learn from the bottom what practical
democracy actually means . . .”
“instead of always being prepared to attack the other and insist that
one is in the right in a one-sided way.”

The Further Development o f the Basic Stimulus The question of whether

the basic stimulus was well designed, that is, whether it animated the par­
ticipants to discuss the objects of the research uninhibitedly, could only be
answered empirically. The course of the study showed that the participants
were more ready and able to respond even to very emotionally charged
questions than we expected. By the same token, the basic stimulus pro­
voked too much objection and forced some participants into defensive­
ness. It therefore had to be somewhat weakened.
Some phrases of the letter, such as the comment about the technological
superiority of the Americans, proved too specific and narrowed the range
of reactions. Above all, mentioning technology evoked a highly emotion­
ally charged dimension among many participants, particularly workers.
They could not get away from this topic, even though it was rather far
from the specific interest area of the study. Moreover, the basic stimulus
seemed not to be balanced in all respects. Some topics, such as anti-
Semitism and authoritarianism, were considered too strongly, while others
like attitudes toward democracy were considered too little. Finally, the
surviving elements of national-socialistic ideology were so close to the
 The Group Discussion Method — ~ 45

surface of consciousness that we had to avoid provoking an all-too-easy

verbalization with the help of these clichés.
Based on these consistent observations in all three experimental centers
during the pretests,49 we created a new version of the basic stimulus. Later
in the experiment the question arose whether we could further weaken the
content and formulation of the stimuli without the participants’ reactions
losing spontaneity and intensity. The problem was how to determine the
minimum stimulus content that would result in maximum reactions. A third
version of the basic stimulus was developed to answer this question. This
final version of the basic stimulus differed from the second one in its shorter
length, achieved by removing more material from the section including the
negative judgments. These deletions, which consisted essentially of nega­
tive judgments, already mitigated the content of the letter significantly. It
was further weakened by formulating the negative judgments less crassly,
yet more firmly, while retaining the number and intensity of the positive
statements.
In general, we tried to mitigate the stimulus’s provocative effect, to bet­
ter balance the relation between positive and negative judgments, to
shorten it, and to formulate the content in a vaguer way. The psychologi­
cal sting of the Allied sergeant’s criticism of the Germans was increasingly
dropped in the later versions, while the stimulating effect shifted from the
psychological to the objective.

The Standardized Arguments According to the design, the investigator

begins in a purely formal role, then toward the end of the first or the be­
ginning of the second hour begins to contribute standardized stimulus ar­
guments and counter-arguments at suitable points. It goes without saying
that he does not advance new topics but follows closely what is said in the
“Colburn letter.” The following four pairs were selected on the basis of a
list of forty proposed arguments identified from the pretests.
The first stimulus argument relates to the Germans’ self-assessment, to
the question of guilt (an example of shifting guilt is presented in order to
encourage appropriately minded participants to express their opinions),
and to the restrictions imposed on Germans. It also touches on the am­
bivalent attitude toward the occupation powers and the tendency to rein­
terpret facts to put one’s own position in a favorable light.

“The Ami is quite right saying that the Germans should just be left alone and
that they will rise again by themselves. Everything else he says, like that the
Germans think they are better than others, the thing with guilt, etc., is just
babble.”
 Group Experiment and Other Writings —' 46

The first counter-argument is initially presented as purely rational. It

points to Germany’s inability to solve its current economic difficulties with
its own resources and to the fear of war. Yet the argument also touches on
the participants’ less conscious psychic strata, such as their fascination with
the underestimated strength of the former enemy right up to the point of
the collapse.
“If the Amis were not here to help us, we would have much less to eat. Is it
not better for the Amis to be here than for the Nazis to return or the Russians
to invade and we would have to be afraid when the doorbell rings at 7 in the
morning?”

The second stimulus argument advances another typical defensive reac­

tion. It works with the stereotypical idea that “everything is decided be­
yond our control” and we “are just moved back and forth like chess
pieces.” This alludes to feeling helpless against anonymous powers, which
so often serves as an excuse for unwillingness to act responsibly. Again, the
corresponding counter-argument uses rational argumentation by citing an
example from the very recent past as evidence for individuals’ opportuni­
ties to hold their ground against such anonymous powers. Besides the di­
rect mention of the question of form of government (and by extension also
the authority complex), the selection of the American example hints at
feelings of hatred and resistance against the Americans and their attempt
to democratize Germany.

Stimulus Argument:
“How can one speak of guilt at all in the face of these huge processes? All
these are processes decided beyond our control. We are just chess pieces
moved back and forth. The individual does not have any say in that.”

Counter-Argument:
“Well, democracy really is not as powerless as you think it is. Just consider
America. In the last election the whole apparatus creating public opinion, the
press, broadcasts, enormous financial means, were against Truman. Yet he
was elected because the majority of the population, the little people, believed
they would fare better under him as president. Is that really nothing?”

The third stimulus argument is dedicated to the projection of negative

traits onto other nations. It ties into the age-old thesis of Anglo-Saxon ri­
valry and envy alongside Germany’s being surrounded: a thesis often used
to explain the First World War. The argument thus provokes a correspond­
ing nationalistic attitude as well as the inclination to view historical con­
texts in particular ways in order to improve one’s own weak position. The
second part (“cannon-fodder argument”) was heard frequently back then,
 The Group Discussion Method ™ 47

but cannot be taken literally: it is based only on Realpolitik, the will to

strike the best bargain for oneself. The corresponding counterargument
ties directly into these. On the one hand, it argues against a narrow group
egoism by pointing out the indivisibility of German and American inter­
ests, and, on the other hand, by mentioning the Korean War, it encourages
participants who viewed its first phase with Schadenfreude* to express
this view.
Stimulus Argument:
“It is nonsense that the Germans bear guilt alone. The Anglo-Saxons were
against us. They still only want us as cannon-fodder against the Russians.”

Counter-Argument:
“Well, should one just throw Europe down the throat of the Russians? And
are the American soldiers in Korea not also fighting for us today? We can no
longer separate our interests from those of America.”

Finally, the fourth stimulus argument returns to nationalism and the ob­
session with power by authoritarian personalities. The counterargument
tries to ascertain how possible it is to counteract such an attitude by ap­
pealing to a desire for peace.
Stimulus Argument:
“We should not be bothered with all this prattle about international under­
standing. The only thing that counts is power, and everybody tries to seize as
much power as possible.”

Counter-Argument:
“Why are you so opposed to the idea that the world could become beautiful
and peaceful? One of the reasons it doesn’t work could be that people are so
opposed to it.”

The fact that stimulus arguments were only used after a trusting relation­
ship was established may have contributed to the arguments’ fitting natu­
rally into the discussion. This makes them a useful tool for revealing impor­
tant additions to the opinions expressed in the first part of the discussions.

5. The Interpretation

The Quantitative Analysis In order to process the discussion we had to

develop a method as different from common methods of quantification as

A German expression referring to joy at the misfortunes of others.—Eds.

 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 48

the aim of this study was from other group experiments. These are not
primarily concerned with ascertaining opinions and attitudes but with in­
vestigating communication between members of the group as well as with
group phenomena like integration, cohesion, influence of the “group
leader,” behavior toward outsiders, etc. It is therefore adequate in those
cases only to record the participants’ statements that directly relate to the
objects of investigation; everything else is extra. Thus, American studies of
group dynamics usually limit themselves to registering the participants’
reactions in a few categories, without recording the actual wording and
drawing on their whole depth and complexity for interpretation.50 Even
Bales, w h o undertook to examine the entire communication process in
order to gain insights into the effect of the group situation on group mem­
bers and the principles of behavior within groups, made do with only
twelve very abstract observational categories.
Our investigation, by contrast, was not primarily concerned with study­
ing such group phenomena. Rather, we sought to observe the attitudes and
reactions of individuals in group situations. Understanding the group dy­
namics was not the main aim of the investigation but a step on the way to
better understanding opinion formation. Accordingly, the interpretation
had to be geared to categorizing the reactions of individuals as completely
as possible in order to gain insights into their attitudes toward problems
that were not posed by the group situation as such but by reality. This
meant that the content of the contributions to the discussion had to be
considered with greater completeness and complexity than other group
experiments.
This is not the place to describe in detail the differences between the
categories used in other experiments and those used in this investigation.
As an indication of our attempt to register every particular it is enough
to point out that the content of the discussions was processed with the
help of a coding key comprising hundreds of categories, while other stud­
ies use only a small fraction of that number. The difficulties arising from
the development of a suitable method for quantification were corre­
spondingly high. In the beginning, the material to be processed seemed
to defy coverage by relatively simple, quantifiable categories because it
was too varied. After reviewing more transcripts, however, it became
apparent that the material was not amorphous. Rather, it was already
pre-structured to some extent by the basic stimulus and the standardized
arguments. Moreover, a set of topics was objectively important. An anal­
ysis of all of these factors and the resulting categories provided the first
starting points for compiling the index, which allowed us to process the
discussions quantitatively.
 The Group Discussion Method — 49

Descriptive and interpretive categories were used. The descriptive cate­

gories were used to record content and to count statements. We mainly
used the techniques known as “content analysis”52 for this task. The inter­
pretive categories were a scalelike judgment of the participant’s general
view on each topic.
The third chapter [Chapter 2 in this volume.—Eds.] gives an account of
the development and application of the quantifying methods.53 Here we
only note that the use of interpretive categories already introduced a quali­
tative component into the quantitative analysis. This is based on our con­
viction that the distinction between quantitative and qualitative social re­
search is not based on the object of research and must therefore not be
hypostatized by the method.

The Qualitative Analysis Qualitative analysis is of central significance for

the meaning and correct understanding of the discussions. According to
Lazarsfeld,54 qualitative analysis does not use counting and measuring, but
tries to interpret unquantified findings directly from the material itself and
to consult them to verify a hypothesis or to develop new hypotheses. Until
very recently, the social sciences depended almost exclusively on this
method. They owe their crucial insights and successes to it. Qualitative
analysis of a relatively small number of individual cases inspired Freud's
theories, which are also crucial for sociology. Comte, Marx, and Max We­
her conducted mainly qualitative analyses when they tried to interpret so­
cial conditions and to use the findings to derive theoretical insights about
the principles according to which social processes take place.
Yet today the majority of empirical sociologists prefer to use the exact
methods at their disposal for gathering and processing their material in­
stead of adjusting research methods to their objects. This happens because
scientific reliability is doubted if the findings cannot be verified, counted,
measured, and specified in their percentage distribution within a popula­
tion. Findings not fulfilling these desiderata are said to be unreliable, their
generalization to be impermissible. Empirical social researchers mainly
only concede the formation of hypotheses to qualitative investigations in­
sofar as these are suited to verification by quantitative survey methods.55
Certainly, numerous questions cannot be resolved without using quantita­
tive techniques. But the most suitable method for a specific case should be
decided solely based on the object of research. Our investigation also in­
cludes quantifying the material.
Now, the analysis of the irrational content in the discussion certainly
cannot be mastered by common methods of categorization. Depth psycho­
logical categories need to be applied to the material of the discussions,
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 50

beyond merely systematizing the manifest meaning of statements. This can

never be objective in the usual sense of exact investigations: the applica­
tion of the categories to the material necessarily has to give more weight to
subjective judgment than in the case of quantitative processing of survey
results. This qualitative analysis is the only way to include the depth and
complexity of the discussion material in the findings. It offers a better op­
portunity for discerning the underlying issues of the problems than mere
quantitative analysis because it can study the entire structure including
the most differentiated details. It is precisely the material crucial for in­
sight into the social dynamic that resists analysis by exact quantitative
methods. As with every scientific endeavor, there is only one definitive test
for the fruitfulness of the findings gained by qualitative analysis: proof in
practice.''6
The introduction already pointed out that we were conscious of the
problems of any social-psychological interpretation. We reiterate here that
the analysis should not rely exclusively on the analyst’s intuition. The in­
terpretation relies instead on a base stock of theory and on experience in
daily practice as well as on the findings of prior scientific investigations.
Furthermore, the interpretation in our study never uses isolated individual
statements, but focuses instead on the overall contexts in all expressions of
the participants’ speaking at a given instant as well as in the analysis of the
entire material at hand. The criteria for the interpretation’s objectivity are
theoretical coherence as well as inner consistency. In our case, many state­
ments that were expressed in the most diverse discussions, completely dis­
connected by time and participants, are so closely linked that they demand
interpretation. Finally, it is part of every investigation of important quali­
tative data to repeat the analysis with similar, more refined methods and
new documents gained in a similar way. Comparing the findings of several
such investigations of the same topic—which are still to be accomplished
for the study at hand—offers further tools for objective control. As an ex­
ample of qualitative analysis of our discussion material we present a mono­
graph on “Guilt and Defense” [Adorno, Guilt and Defense, Harvard Univer­
sity Press 2010. —Eds.] as well as a report of the investigations on group
dynamics in Chapter 4 [This volume.—Eds.]. The following pages give some
information on the phenomena that were the objects of qualitative analyses.

Internal Contradictions o f the Attitude In numerous cases we could ob­

serve that opinion formation takes place only in the process of debating
with others. These cases show, moreover, that one would receive arbitrary
and even wrong answers if one tried to determine the opinions via ques­
tions before they have actually developed. The participants often responded
 The Group Discussion Method ~~ 51

initially as if they were answering a question posed to them. They gener­

ally offered what they regarded as dominant opinion or what they thought
was expected from them or was morally or politically advisable. Only in
the further course of the discussion—and mostly without the speakers be­
ing conscious of it—did they express their actual opinions. This is not re­
ally a contradiction, though, only the appearance of one. It is only an ex­
pression of the reality that internal inconsistency is often a crucial element
of attitudes.

The Brittleness o f Language One of the most striking findings is that people
virtually speak two languages. This appeared in all groups and with the
same clarity among former officers and farmers, tram conductors, and ur­
ban merchants. In the language of their profession and of daily contact,
they are able to express themselves rationally and somewhat clearly. The
language shows certain objectively conditioned symptoms of decline, yet
within this language the speakers succeed in reacting coherently and mean­
ingfully to all problems posed to them. When they are confronted with
highly emotionally charged problems, however, this language fails them,
and they are forced to resort to a second one, which has in common with
language only the use of words. Actually, it is stammering. This second
language seems to be much less a means of expressing thoughts or even
emotions than to serve the effort to suppress manifestations of the uncon­
scious. It is characterized by a certain brittleness. This is caused by the
conflict between the intention to argue rationally and the irrational im­
pulses activated by the basic stimulus. The conflict situation appears to
destroy language; it reduces the ability for meaningful, intelligible expres­
sion. By doing just that, however, it unearths the real psychological layer.
The irrational, whose expression the speaker unconsciously tries to pre­
vent, emerges in the structure of the second language. Its seeming sense­
lessness turns out to be absolutely meaningful at closer inspection, since it
provides insight into the latent psychological mechanism effective in the
speaker.57

Rationalizations If the interviewee is asked to justify an opinion he ex­

pressed, it is in order to ascertain the motivations behind the expressed
attitude. It is known that the justifications one receives in such cases are
not necessarily true, yet one proceeds in the analysis of the results as if the
answers of the interviewees have to be taken literally. We consider this
unacceptable. The analysis always has to keep in mind that such justifica­
tions often are rationalizations. This is particularly true when discussing
emotionally charged topics. Unearthing the motives actually underlying
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 52

manifest opinions about affectively charged topics requires more intensive

stimulus effects than can be invoked by merely asking why.
Now, the stimuli in the group discussions were not so strong that the
participants were shocked into consciousness about the true reasons for
their opinions. But the basic stimulus operated intensively enough to pro­
duce an abundance of clues for an adequate interpretation of the state­
ments. The basic stimulus itself as well as the standardized arguments and
the moderation, which permitted free association, granted the participants
a sufficiently broad range of reaction to facilitate a large number of ex­
pressions uncontrolled by self-censorship.

The Trans Subjective Factors In our discussion of the concept of public

opinion, we pointed to the fact that the sum of an individual’s subjective
contents of consciousness is not identical with what constitutes public
opinion, the objectivity transcending the individual opinion. The group
discussions provided specific preliminary insights into the objectively given,
socially preset contents of consciousness. The activity of trans subjective
factors in many expressions of opinion arises from a number of observa­
tions, which imposed themselves during the analysis of the discussion
material. Thus, throughout all the discussions there was a marked monot­
ony of statements across all important topics. The basic stimulus acted as
leverage, releasing statements without providing the individual motives.
One could, of course, object that the recurrence of a limited pool of the
same theses and formulas could be understood as the expression of accu­
rate judgments and that their intensity is the result of the reality of the
facts judged by the participants. Such a view contradicts the fact that the
statements in question here actually share the characteristic that drasti­
cally distorts reality.
Our analysis proceeds from the hypothesis that constantly recurring
views that are in no way derived from the nature of the reality are the result
of the effectiveness of trans subjective factors. We tried to discern two layers
in the contributions to the discussion—a preset objective one and a specifi­
cally individual one that describes the reaction to those trans subjective ele­
ments, the relation between the subject’s view and those elements. We have
not yet found a satisfactory solution for these methodological difficulties.
Intensively comparing analyses of statements about the same object, where
despite the statements’ differences one and the same argument is intended,
promises a better understanding of these contexts.
A further indication of trans subjective factors is the surprising agree­
ment of many views among the most heterogeneous strata of our partici­
pants, especially in judgments that do not do justice to the issue. Although
 The Group Discussion Method ~ 53

discussions differ significantly in expression and psychological manner,

there are strong similarities in the core structure, so we must assume an
overarching role of trans subjective elements.
Finally, the analysis demonstrates the presence of numerous, reified, ste­
reotypical ideas and formulations whose very form implies that they do
not reflect speakers’ opinions but, instead, are spoken without conscious
intent. Insofar as these elements can be reconciled with a theoretically
sound relation to the content yielded when the material is analyzed from
a different perspective, they count as further evidence for the influence of
objectively fixed factors.

Phenomena o f Group Dynamics We have already mentioned the role of

the groups as a whole as a factor in the opinion formation of their mem­
bers. The transcriptions as well as the electronic recordings offered exten­
sive material for studying group dynamics. An analysis of phenomena of
integration, especially those processes of emerging uniform group reac­
tions, is particularly pressing. We therefore begin by studying the interrela­
tions between the group members.
We assemble a model of the process of group integration from several
different discussions. The stages of steadily increasing conformity are for­
eignness, orientation, adaption, familiarity, and conformity. The hypothe­
ses gained about psychic and social causes and conditions of individual
phenomena in the process of integration are the mechanisms of contagion,
identification, and norm formation.
Comparative analyses of individual concrete sessions show that groups
whose members constitute a social unit at the outset tend to agree not only in
their attitudes but also in their formal behavioral patterns. But randomly
composed groups can constitute themselves relatively quickly as collectivities
and develop a considerable degree of integration insofar as they are made up
of homogeneous elements.
 P art T w o

TH E Q U A N TITATIVE ANALYSIS
OF T H E D ISC U SSIO N S
 C H A P T E R T W O

The Organization of the

Discussion Materials

I. The Task and Working Hypotheses

The group sessions were transcribed, alongside the observations of investi­

gators and assistants, in 121 transcripts totaling 6,392 typewritten pages.
These transcripts are just as multivalent and, therefore, confusing as were
the discussions themselves. In order to address the study’s question we
need an overview of the topics discussed, the opinions expressed, and the
situations in which certain topics occur. In short, we have to get a grip on
the discussions’ content, which is scattered over thousands of pages. Be­
yond that, the quantitative analysis has to use cross-tabulation to uncover
structural relations between different opinions and to identify the factors
on which certain opinions depend.
Counting similar phenomena (a precondition for quantitative analysis)
poses special problems here because of the nature of statements made during
discussions. Our material contains very diverse statements. Two complica­
tions arose from the latitude our design granted to participants.
First, participants can be distracted from the planned topics. Their
statements go beyond the scope of the planned discussion. Second, it is
easier for a participant to avoid responding in a discussion than in an inter­
view, because we had to refrain from directing the discussions so as not to
jeopardize the informal atmosphere.
This means that the data lack a tight topical structure and complete in­
dividual information. It is therefore impossible to organize the entire
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 58

“sample” according to specific characteristics. When using a questionnaire

one can easily cover the various dimensions of the issue with specific ques­
tions.1 In discussions, on the other hand, the material on any individual as­
pect of a topic remains incomplete unless one elects to moderate systemati­
cally. In that case, the discussion is stripped of all spontaneity and becomes
a group survey interview.
The extent and richness of the entire material and the considerable dif­
ferences in quality and quantity of individual statements complicate the
formation of statistical groups. The search for suitable and countable cat­
egories was initially based on the material’s topical structure, evoked by
the basic stimulus and the stimulus arguments of the investigator. The or­
ganizational scheme required for classification was meant to represent the
reality of the material and was therefore modeled according to categories
that were suggested by the material. In the course of processing the mate­
rial, it became clear that the basic stimulus and the stimulus arguments set
the discussions in a general direction but did not determine their course in
detail.
Table 2.1 illuminates this fact. It juxtaposes the topics raised by the basic
stimulus and the stimulus arguments with the topics that came up in the
course of the discussion.
This table only includes topics addressed in the statistical analysis. Be­
yond these topics, though, an abundance of statements in the material
surround the actual topic of discussion.
Even the topical differences between the basic stimulus and the discus­
sion material already show that we were right to develop the statistical
classification scheme from the material itself after the fact.
Based on the 20 items on the first list of topics in the material, the state­
ments were initially simply organized and examined for further similarities.
We expected to arrive at a tally by using categories including more of the
concrete structure of the material than, for example, the categories used in
content analysis can connote.
Two claims underlay this process:
FIRST: Form and content of statements reoccur with a frequency
sufficient for statistical processing.
SECOND: Even statements differing in form and content might have
the same meaning, which can be identified through interpretation.
These two ideas directed the work on a scheme for ordering statements
in the discussion. On the one hand, this scheme describes the statements
by categories tailored neatly to the material; on the other hand, it captures
the meaning of different contributions to the discussion.
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 The Organization o f the Discussion Materials ~~ 61

This task is performed by two different kinds of categories. They can be

described as descriptive and interpretative.
Descriptive categories reduce statements to their shared natures by ab­
stracting away from accidental differences. Interpretive categories make the
discussion material accessible to quantitative processing by the circuitous
route of counting the results of interpretation. Among the interpretive cat­
egories, we further distinguish between two methods: gradation, which
arranges the attitudes on a three-level scale according to their approving or
disapproving character, and evaluation, which relates a speaker’s state­
ments to the dominant Western system of values.i.2
We began by collecting all statements for the listed topics. After a first
tabulation made it clear that some topics included very few contributions,
we limited the number of topics to twelve for future analysis. We com­
bined the “England” and “English occupation” topics as well as the
“France” and “French occupation” ones into one topic each and left out six
topics: the Colburn letter, DPs, denazification, Korea, role of the church,
and position of Germany. For the sake of quicker communication during
interpretation we labeled the twelve topics with the following roughly sche­
matic keywords:

1. Form of government
2. Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn)
3. War guilt
4. Joint responsibility for concentration camps and war atrocities
5. Anti-Semitism
6. U.S. occupation
7. United States of America
8. England
9. France
10. Eastern Bloc states
11. Remilitarization
12. German self-assessment

II. Descriptive Categories

i. The Process o f Category formation

At first, the formation of descriptive categories was based on the topical
structure of the material, since it provides the first common characteristic
for certain groups of statements. The topical structure of the material,
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 62

however, does not suggest that the discussions can be divided into chrono­
logical sections sticking to single topics. In the course of the discussion,
the statements’ subjects change in irregular succession. The discussion
jumps around. In some statements, different topics are frequently inter-
locked to such an extent that it became necessary to decompose individual
sentences and subsume them under different categories. An example of
this:
I.: I don’t believe that the Germans, or let’s say even the majority of the
Germans, rubbed their hands when the Americans sustained casualties (in
Korea).

This sentence includes three topical aspects:

FIRST: To start with, our participant (a woman) makes a statement about
Germans. (They don’t take pleasure in American defeat in Korea.)
SECOND: The statement refers to a passage in the Colburn letter (basic
stimulus) and questions its truth.
THIRD: The statement shows that our participant identifies with the
destiny of the Americans in Korea.
The statement was coded under three different topics: judgments about
Germans, the Colburn letter, and Korea.
When we select all the sections relating to one of the topics mentioned
above, we find that, on the one hand, the statements—which were strung
together arbitrarily—present an image of diversity but that, on the other
hand, they reveal certain similarities. Now, the task is to subsume simi­
larities under one category. Therefore, the principle should be to be as
concrete as possible, i.e., to limit abstraction as much as possible so that
the category reflects the structure of the statement itself. This task is made
easier by the fact that some statements are grouped around current ste­
reotypes. In these cases the categories can be derived closely from the
material. From time to time, statements are articulated in such a formu­
laic way that they can be used immediately, i.e., without further revision,
as a category for coding the rest of the statements. These opinions served
as tools for building the very categories in which they themselves were
classified.3
Now, stereotypes alone do not determine what is said in the discussion.
Some contributions to the discussion feature a rationality that largely
evades stereotypes. A balanced approach using real criteria is preferred to
orientation by means of stereotypes. Frequently the generalizing abstrac­
tion of stereotypes is avoided by simply reporting personal experiences. In
these cases, we had to develop categories with a broader logical scope, i.e.,
with a higher level of abstraction, in order to capture the commonality of
 The Organization o f the Discussion Materials — 63

these types of statements in a category. Categories of this kind, naturally,

have less descriptive strength due to their higher level of abstraction.
Hence, the descriptive categories developed for the individual topics
feature different levels of abstraction. These differences are not the result
of arbitrary handling of the coding, but rather of the principle of formulat­
ing the categories by following the material as closely as possible in order
to describe recurring arguments as concretely as possible.
The differences in the categories’ level of abstraction reveal the follow­
ing about the nature of the statements in each:
FIRST: concretely formulated categories reveal the presence of the stereo­
types that make the concrete formulation possible in the first place.
SECOND: By contrast, abstract categories indicate that stereotypes
were largely absent from the discussion.
To illustrate the process of developing categories, we present an example
for the topic “Federal Republic of Germany.” We print only five examples
from a very large set of similar statements:
Z.: When looking at the poor children . . . the anemic children, it’s terrible.
And then they spend incredible amounts for the sake of appearances, and
we have to pay taxes all the time . . .
£.: I think the federal government should not make the unnecessary
expenditures it makes. I think the people see what’s going on .. . When
one sees what Adenauer spends, what a gaudy set up he is building for
himself, a man more than 70 years old, he should consider dying instead.
Instead of thousands of marks for flower donations and decorations, we
should use this money to build homes for youth.
M.: They also show off too much in Bonn, no? Yes, of course, they also
should save a bit more, then there would be a bit more left for the people.
There is no need for what one reads in the newspapers, Persian carpets
and club chairs and red uniforms and all this stuff, they do it just like the
Nazis did, no?
P.: There is always talk of burden sharing, that the refugees should get their
share. If they finally cut the salaries of the gentlemen in office and took
the burden sharing from there, I think that would leave us with an
entirely decent deficit.

The common core of these statements is the supposedly unnecessary

expenditure in Bonn paid for with public funds. The reproachful state­
ments recur uniformly in a whole series of remarks in different guises. The
category that captures this similarity is formulated as “reproach for wast­
ing public funds in Bonn.”
The differences among the remarks do not obscure the uniformity de­
scribed by the category. Almost all the statements arise from the experience
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 64

of economic misery. In our examples, there is talk of “poor children,” of

lacking “residential homes for youth,” of “burden sharing,” and of the
people for whom a “bit more” should be left. The expenditures in Bonn are
viewed in contrast to the background of economic misery, which plainly
arouses dissatisfaction.
The indignation over expenditures in Bonn in the face of “anemic chil­
dren” is rendered intelligible by the implication that the funds spent “un­
necessarily” in Bonn could help to remedy the misery. This is explicit in
some statements, e.g., “we should use this money to build residential
homes (dorms) for youth,” “they also should save . . . more, then there will
be a bit more left for the people.” Regardless of economic processes and
proportions, a connection between the expenditures of the federal govern­
ment and the economic misery of the people is presumed. The mode of
declaration substitutes for evidence.
Judging from our quotations, the origin of this stereotype is in transfer­
ring individual experiences to social processes. Misery in a particular
household can be avoided by avoiding unnecessary expenses and saving.
What holds true on a small scale should also apply on a large scale. Thus,
one says that “they” should save so that “there will be a bit more left for
the people.”
The way the expenditures’ extent is illustrated is characteristic of the
structure of the stereotype in our case. Even though it is devoid of evidence,
the imagination clings to the obvious, such as “flower decorations.” A
combination of the evidence presented shows that the main things that are
cited are those one has to forgo because of a low income, like Persian car­
pets, club chairs, and, finally, the thing which enables one to purchase “all
this stuff,” the high salaries. Apparently, what is concrete and real in these
stereotypes is the economic situation on which the argument is based.
These observations are distorted by the fact that the understanding of eco­
nomic processes is drawn from the pool of individual experience. The sense
that one has to use different means to judge such processes is illuminated
by the word “deficit.” The speaker tries to master the difficulty with a
chunk from the language of budgets or foreign trade balance. Its faulty ap­
plication, however, merely underlines the complete helplessness in the face
of economic processes.
Yet this changes nothing about the subjective feeling of certainty demon­
strated by the stereotype. “Incredible sums” are spent in Bonn. The statement
attains the power of a conclusion at the end of a detailed investigation. At the
same time, the existence of “anemic children” puts forward a better purpose
for the funds spent unnecessarily in Bonn. “What conditions are these?”
“I don’t know whether one can agree with that!” The indignation felt by
 The Organization o f the Discussion Materials — - 6j

speakers who adopted the stereotype as their own gives way to open aggres­
sion in some passages: “he (Adenauer) should consider dying instead!”
It becomes clear here how the stereotype that “public funds are wasted
in Bonn” can influence attitudes toward the Bonn government. In inter­
preting the origin of this stereotype, though, it is important to add that its
usage is relatively independent of social status. The pretension of wasting
public funds has always been used as a standard phrase in the demagogical
polemic against democratic forms of government. The agitation with this
stereotype is not only directed toward poor audiences. It accepts any rea­
son for its adoption—from the resentments of those paying high taxes to
jealousy toward the social position of “the gentlemen in office.” This indif­
ference toward diverse motives suggests that the effectiveness of such a
stereotype is no longer particularly tied to the reality from which it arose:
in this case economic misery. Instead, it appears to have originated in the
disposition to oppose democratic government. Factually, the stereotype is
wrong. Moreover, it is freed from its tethers to these facts. In turn, it con­
nects to an authoritarian personality structure, which a large number of
our participants use to argue against the democratic form of government.
They use the stereotypes like stones to cast at others.

2. The Coding Scheme

Similarly, all further statements about the “Federal Republic of Germany”
are reduced to categories, provided that they are sufficiently similar. The
interpretation following the example above is meant to remind the reader
of the underlying potential in the statements when reading the rest of the
categories.
Since the statements contain widely varying shades of favorable and un­
favorable judgments about the Bonn democracy, we consider them in a
rough scalelike arrangement, ranging from one extreme to the other. The
categories are roughly arranged into the grades of this scale: approval,
qualified approval, and disapproval. The coding scheme shown in Table 2.2
emerges from this.

3. Summary *
The categories of the descriptive coding scheme, which was developed
with the help of two examples, reduced the material to a manageable

We have removed three intervening sections from the original here.—Eds.

 7α* o70 cno

Criticism of the electoral system

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Categories for coding statements about the Federal Republic of Germany

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Sch.: Well, how can one vote at all, if one doesn’t know the person? Why can’t we have

Quotation
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government from all the oversight.
especially his present life, his past life?
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our governm ent should listen a bit more to the people and to the opposition, namely
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 The Organization o f the Discussion Materials — - 69

series of statement types. These provide reasonably concrete information

about what certain groups of interviewees predominantly say about the
topics mentioned in the basic stimulus under the conditions of our experi­
ment. In forming the descriptive categories, the actual wording of the
statements was either reduced to: (1) the core ideological claims recurring
in variations, (2) a common topic, or (3) the mere connection of the state­
ments with one of the twelve named topics (miscellaneous arguments).
The descriptive coding is oriented solely by the content of the state­
ments. These are classified as what they seem to be when in isolation. The
coding, hence, remains purely descriptive. It enables us to take stock of the
statements that recurred in the discussion. Categories for descriptive cod­
ing emerge from the material itself by processes of abstraction. The repre­
sentation of the material, preferably by concrete categories, allows an
overview of common arguments.
The statistical presentation is best done as rankings, differences among
which can be observed across different sociological groupings. Using de­
scriptive categories, the discussion material cannot be analyzed beyond
listing the most current statements and determining favored sources for
argumentation. In the first place, this is because statements coded in isola­
tion, based on their face value, cannot yield reliable insight into the atti­
tudes of the participants. One cannot even confidently infer attitudes from
the sum of the categories used in coding a contribution to the discussion,
since coding individual arguments dissolves the context of argumentation.
One has to abstract from qualitatively significant nuances of the statement.
Substantively important singular or rare passages fall under the collective
category “miscellaneous.”
Furthermore, the statistical characteristics of a descriptive coding
scheme complicate quantitative processing. Namely, the variation in the
code “statement about topic X” is so large that the small numbers of each
value render the feasibility of a statistical analysis questionable.
The phenomenon of opinions expressed in the group cannot be under­
stood with topical categories alone. Coding opinions according to their
face value is in no way sufficient for a quantitative analysis. One has to
find criteria allowing for reducing statements from mere façade to their
ideological or psychological significance.
A classification scheme including those aspects of statements from which
one had to abstract in the descriptive consideration has to rely on an inter­
pretation of the contributions to the discussions. This kind of coding con­
sists of judgments about the material. These judgments constitute a system
of categories, all based on a common principle of interpretation; comprise
all possible statements in accordance with the principle of interpretation;
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ' 70

and are mutually exclusive like the elements of a logical contradiction. An

interpretive coding scheme has three advantages compared with descrip­
tive sets of categories:
FIRSTLY: the characteristic (attitudes toward topic X) cannot be
combined,
SECONDLY: variations in the characteristics can be minimized,
THIRDLY: the contributions to the discussions are classified according
to significant aspects.
Classification according to qualitative characteristics, however, can be
done only if the material is rich enough that an interpretation anticipated
by the categories is possible with confidence in each individual case.

III. Interpretive Coding

The quantitative coding of the discussion material on the basis of interpre­

tation had two goals: the attitudes toward different topics expressed dur­
ing the discussion and certain psychological mechanisms.4

i. The Concept o f Attitude

Even though it is generally true that one can infer attitudes from behavior
and expressions of opinion, what is said by the participants in the situation
of a discussion does not suffice for a secure diagnosis of their attitudes. One
cannot conclude from a singular observation of reactions in a certain situa­
tion whether the displayed reactions are solely the expression of attitudes
toward the topics discussed, or whether they are also caused by intervening
factors, like protest against caustic formulations in the basic stimulus or the
readiness to submit oneself to the control of a group, to adapt to a majority,
or to argue against the opinion of whichever majority.
The extent to which a general, relatively stable orientation5 to the topics
of the investigation is present in the discussion can be specified only if the
observation is extended beyond the scope of the discussion session in such
a way that the behavior in the discussion can be compared with that in
other situations.
Thus, identifying attitudes and specifying them quantitatively on the ba­
sis of contributions to the discussion can be done only with considerable
caution. What is available are, in the first place, the reactions of the partici­
pants during the discussion. Yet in the statistical analysis of reactions to­
ward the individual topics, structures of behavior emerge permitting the
 The Organization o f the Discussion Materials — 71

conclusion that a certain percentage of the participants argued in accor­

dance with their attitude toward certain topics in the discussion.
The fact that reactions toward different subjects are systematically con­
nected indicates that some of the discussants’ reactions are caused by or­
ganizing principles. The presence of such factors, such as the principle of
humanity, is the characteristic feature of attitudes and bearings.6 Thus,
what was initially classified as behavior during the discussion should be, in
part, a matter of genuine attitudes and bearings. For that reason, we re­
ferred to the collected reactions of a participant toward any topic as atti­
tude. However, one has to bear these qualifications in mind.
 C H A P T E R THREE

Quantitative Analyses

I. Preliminary Results*

In this section we attempt to formulate a survey of the results of the quan­

titative analysis, but we must emphasize as strongly as possible that the
following details cannot be understood literally, but are subject to several
important reservations. Among these are above all the limitation on the
validity of all numbers to the statistical groups they relate to, the problem
of the significance of the differences in the percentages, the influence of the
degree of participation in the discussions on the generalizability of the
statements to all the groups and beyond, and other factors. All this makes
it advisable to regard the results as quite preliminary. They may need to be
corrected, potentially drastically, later on.1
Furthermore, remember our criteria for grading attitudes. The criteria
rank positive attitudes toward the Soviet-Russian world as negative, and
critical judgments about Germans as free of ethnocentrism and, hence, as
positive attitudes.
As much as it was tempting to trace the sometimes striking accumula­
tions of a certain attitude or the large deviations of individual groups from
the average opinion back to their causes, we generally did not try to reveal
causal relationships that did not arise from our material itself.

* We removed seven intervening sections from the original here.—Eds.

 Quantitative Analyses — 73

Our quantitative findings can be grouped into four areas. To begin with,
the preparation of a coding manual created a catalog of nonsingular opin­
ions and reactions and, thus, offered a first insight into the emotions and
beliefs that make up the object of our study. We already mentioned that,
after using half of our transcripts to formulate the categories necessary for
coding the material, the other sixty transcripts showed no accumulations
of opinions and reactions that could not be classified easily with the avail­
able categories. This fact argues in favor of the completeness of these catego­
ries, at least in relation to our circle of participants. A comparison between
the quotations reproduced in this chapter as illustration for the different
categories and the complete transcripts shows that even attitudes with low
frequency are represented in our catalog of categories.
The numerical data gained so far can be summarized in two different
ways. Not only can we analyze the reactions of the statistical groups based
on demographic factors, for each topic individually—as we have in our
account up to this point—but we can also compare the distribution of re­
actions within each statistical group with that of all the speakers in our
circle of participants. The conformities or deviations might tell us some­
thing new about the dominant ideology and the role of subjective factors.
We can also trace the counts of graded codes as well as those about the
participation in the discussion of each statistical group across all topics and
see whether relevant group characteristics emerge. In this way we can more
clearly reveal the characteristics of the groups in relation to their attitudes to­
ward democratic values as well as their interest in individual political topics.

i. The Speakers* Attitudes in Each Demographic

Group Compared with All Speakers* Average Attitude
The following seven graphs show the level for each topic for each statistical
group (men, women, etc.) alongside the average level for all speakers on
each respective topic. In addition, the number of speakers is marked in per­
centages of the group size for each topic. Hence, one can easily read from
each graph to what extent the attitudes of the speakers in each statistical
group conform to or deviate from the average attitude of our participants.
Each graph also presents a concrete picture of the proportions in which the
three (or four) types of reactions are distributed across the different statisti­
cal groups and, likewise, across all speakers. The graphs also present a pic­
ture of the extent of speakers’ tendency to talk about each topic. We provide
seven additional graphs in the appendix* in order to illustrate further the

These additional graphs are not included in the translation.—Eds.

 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 74

differences in attitudes of each group toward each of the seven major topics
in comparison to those of each other group as well as to the average attitude
of all speakers in all groups (the general average) to each topic. These graphs
depict the percentage deviation in attitude of twenty groups from the general
average attitude on the topic. The computation was not made in percentages
but in percentages of deviation from the general average.2

Attitude toward Democracy The topic of democracy has the largest par­
ticipation in discussion of all topics (53% as compared with the average of
39% for all speakers for all seven topics). The following groups partici­
pated particularly often:
University graduates: 71%
High school graduates: 64%
War veterans: 64%
We find particularly low participation for the topic of democracy among
young people (20 years old and younger), who also stand out for the low
percentage of their speakers on other topics.
The average attitude of all participants toward democracy shows:
• approval among one-tenth.
• disapproval among approximately one-fifth.
• ambivalence among the great majority, approximately two-thirds.
At the top of advocates of a positive attitude3 toward democracy (average
10%) we find unskilled workers (20%) and participants 20 years old or
younger (15%), while university graduates (6%) and farmers (3%) show the
smallest percentage of approval. Overall, every tenth woman and every tenth
man spoke positively about democracy. Between the ages of 20 and 50 years,
our speakers become less positive with age, until the group of participants
aged 50 and older again shows a more positive than average attitude.
A negative attitude toward democracy (average 22%) is displayed partic­
ularly by farmers (39%) and soldiers with more than 6 years of service
(32%). Lower numbers of a markedly disapproving attitude toward democ­
racy are documented for:
University graduates: 15%
High school graduates: 15%
Housewives: i4 % 4
Women: 13%
The men show almost double the women’s percentage of rejection (25%).
Ambivalent attitudes toward democracy are characterized by their enor­
mous breadth and relatively high uniformity.
 Quantitative Analyses — 75

A ttitudes tow ard D e m o c ra c y

in % of people who responded in each category for this subject*

‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.1

More than two-thirds of all speakers on the topic (68%) display neither
an unreserved commitment to democracy nor a radical rejection. Groups
showing above-average ambivalence are:
University graduates: 79%
Women: 77%
Housewives: 76%
High school graduates: 75%
We questioned what this high percentage of speakers who feel neither
cold nor hot toward democracy actually means and examined it in relation
to the other statements against the background of the group atmosphere.5
Even if we hesitate to regard ambivalent reactions generally as essentially
rationalizations of underlying rejection (which they certainly are in many
cases), we have to state at least that the broad zone of ambivalence pervad­
ing all statistical groups clearly demonstrates that among two-thirds of our
“population”6 no definite attitude had emerged at the time of our research.
This would mean that the large majority was probably susceptible to posi­
tive as well as negative influences. This interpretation is complemented by
the small percentage of approving and disapproving participants (except
for the two exceptions mentioned above). It is disquieting at least that, on
average, the number of outright enemies of a democratic system is double
that of its unreserved friends.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 76

To the extent that we can discern a regularity from the relatively small
range between the percentages of the gradations, one can say the fol­
lowing: it seems as if the personal negative attitude toward democracy
decreases with increasing educational level.7 Yet the negative attitude
does not decrease in favor of a commitment to democracy but in favor of
an increase in ambivalent statements. The inverse picture appears for
the length of military service, where the rejection grows dramatically
with increasing years of service, mainly at the expense of ambivalent
attitudes.8

Attitudes toward Guilt Approximately half of the participants (48%)

spoke on this topic. The participation was above average among the fol­
lowing groups: those with the longest military service (58%); high school
graduates (57%) and university graduates (56%). Again, the topic was
discussed particularly little by adolescents of 20 years or less (29%), and
by workers (unskilled 38%, skilled 41%).
Of all 800 speakers on the topic, only an average of five in a hundred
conceded unreserved complicity (Mitschuld). Half of the speakers (51%)
denied any complicity, and almost every other (44%) showed an ambiva­
lent attitude.
If we register concession of complicity as a positive attitude within our
frame of reference, the following groups behaved a little bit more posi­
tively than the average: those 50 years of age and older (9%); those 20
years of age and younger (7%); and women (7%). A below-average posi­
tive reaction on the question of complicity is displayed first and foremost
by the farmers, among whom not a single speaker conceded the existence
of complicity, and among university graduates, who presented a very simi­
lar picture (1% of approval).
As we already learned from the average number of disapprovals (51%),
one in every two speakers rejects all responsibility for the crimes of National
Socialism. Almost unanimous in their negative attitude are the farmers
(92%),9 and the groups with the longest term of military service show about
two-thirds disapproval.
The percentage of disapproving speakers is about 40% among partici­
pants aged 20 years or less (37%), women (40%), and students (42%).
Maintaining the limitations mentioned above, we can identify some in­
teresting differences in negative attitudes. Considerably fewer women than
men categorically reject complicity (40% versus 56%). The frequency of
negative attitudes increases with age up to 50 years and then falls again.10
The frequency of negative attitudes increases with the length of military
service.11 It decreases with increasing education.12
 Quantitative Analyses — - 77

Attitudes toward Guilt

in % of people who responded in each category for this topic*
100

80

60
48%
40

20

ψ ^ ^
Yrs Military Service

I Approve ] Ambivalent Disapprove

*lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.2

Table 3.1. Groups deviating from the average by 9% or more in their

ambivalent attitude toward complicity

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

age 20 years or less 56% of speakers 2-6 years of service 36%
University graduates 54% More than 6 years 34%
of service
Students 53% Farmers 8%
Women 53%

The sphere of ambivalence is not as broad as for attitudes toward democ­

racy, but is still 44% on average. The major deviations from the average are
presented by the following table [Table 3.1].
These results clearly show that, at the time of the study, the attitude to­
ward the question of complicity was much more definite than that toward
democracy. When we consider that each speaker conceding complicity
matches ten who strictly reject it, one can hardly resist the conclusion that
the final attitude of the large majority approached a radical rejection of
complicity.

Attitudes toward Jews For comparison’s sake, we reduce the four grades
of attitudes toward Jews to three—positive, negative, and ambivalent. By
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ y8

Attitudes toward the Jews

in % of people who responded in each category for this topic*

Approve ] Ambivalent
•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.3

positive we mean a wow-anti-Semitic attitude, by negative the opposite, and

“ambivalent” comprises—under the reservatio mentalis stated above—
qualified anti-Semitic and pro-Jewish statements.
Fewer participants spoke on the topic of Jews than on any other topic.
The average participation was only about half that of all topics taken to­
gether (22% versus 39%) and about one-third of the highest participation
for an individual topic. Notably above-average activity on the discussion
of the topic of the Jews (3i%-32%) can be found among the groups of
white-collar workers (Angestellte), students, high school graduates,
women, and mittleren Reife.* The following groups score five percentage
points (20%) and more below the average: 20 years old or less, 19%; uni­
versity graduates, 19%; skilled workers, 17%; unskilled workers, 13%.13
A comparison between Figures 3.2 and 3.3, which present the some­
what related attitudes toward complicity and Jews, highlights that the av­
erage number of positive statements for the question of Jews is much
higher than that for the problem of complicity. The percentage of speakers
who make decidedly non-anti-Semitic statements is almost six times that
of those conceding complicity (28% versus 5%). Correspondingly, the
frequency of radically negative (i.e., anti-Semitic) speakers is considerably

A secondary-school certificate indicating readiness for vocational training.—Eds.

 Quantitative Analyses — 79

lower than that of speakers with a negative attitude on the question of

complicity (37% versus 51%).
In the category of positive attitudes, i.e., the speakers who are definitely
not anti-Semitic, we find the following significant deviations from the av­
erage [Table 3.2].
While the frequency of our participants’ anti-Semitic attitudes is not much
higher in total than their positive reactions, there are, nonetheless, large de­
viations from the total average among specific statistical groups. Particularly
remarkable in this respect are the farmers (53%) and the university graduates
(52%), the 20-35-year-olds (44%) and those 20 years old or younger (43%).
Above-average reticence in anti-Semitic remarks can be found among
housewives (24%). A similarly large differentiation among the groups be­
comes apparent with ambivalent reactions, so we illustrate it in table form
(average 35%) [Table 3.3].
At first sight, the general picture conveyed by these results seems to indi­
cate a fairly even distribution of the three gradations among our “popula­
tion.” On closer inspection, however—and, it should be reemphasized, at

Table 3.2. Groups deviating from the average frequency of positive reactions
by 6% or more in their frequency of non-anti-Semitic attitudes

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

Skilled workers 40% of speakers University graduates 4%

Housewives 40% Farmers 14%
Unskilled workers 39% More than 2 years 21%
of service
Students 37% More than 6 years 21%
of service
Up to 2 years of service 35%
High school graduates 35%
Women 34%

Table 3.3. Groups deviating from the average frequency by 7% or more in their
frequency of ambivalent attitudes toward Jews

Higher Frequency of Lower Frequency of

Ambivalent Attitude Ambivalent Attitude
(average 35%) Unskilled workers 22%
White-collar workers 47% of speakers Skilled workers 23%
3 5 “ 5 °"year‘°lds 45% Students 24%
Academics 44% 25-3 5-year-olds 25%
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 80

the time of our investigation and among our participants—alongside a

third of open anti-Semites one finds another third with considerable anti-
Semitic potential.
Even if we classify all pro-Jewish speakers as positive, the anti-Semitic
potential decreases only from 35% to 25% on average for all speakers,
while the frequency of participants with a positive attitude only reaches
that of the anti-Semites. Two of the groups leading in the frequency of
anti-Semitic reactions, university graduates and farmers, also attracted our
attention because of the far-below-average frequency with which non-
anti-Semitic statements were heard among them. The very high frequency
with which the university graduates are represented among the ambivalent
speakers (44%) permits, on closer examination of the transcripts, the con­
clusion that anti-Semitic attitudes are far more prevalent among our aca­
demically educated than among all other statistical groups.14

Attitudes toward the West Participation in discussions of Western foreign

countries amounts to an average of 50%, and among most of the statisti­
cal groups it is not far from this average. It is only more than ten percent­
age points higher among high school graduates and the group with the
longest military service (63%), and it is below average by more than 10%
only among one group: young people aged 20 years less (35%).
The average attitude toward the West is predominantly negative among
our speakers (61%), only one-eleventh (9%) is favorably committed to it,
and about a third reacts ambivalently.
Among the small minority of approving participants, there are only three
groups among whom a notably above-average percentage reacts positively
toward the West. These are: housewives (20% of speakers); women as a
group (16%); high school graduates (15%); and 35-50-year-olds (12%).
Approvals considerably below the average can be found among young
people 20 years old or less, university graduates, farmers (each with 6% of
the speakers), and veterans with the longest term of service (5%). From
within the chorus of participants reacting negatively, the deviations of
more than ten percentage points can be found in Table 3.4.
Among those who cannot rule absolutely for or against the West, the
lead is taken by young people 20 years old or less (50%), students (48%),
and university graduates (40%). Ambivalence is low among farmers (17%),
unskilled workers (17%), and skilled workers (24%).
Women prove to be much more positive in their attitudes toward the
West than do men. The first three age groups show clear increases in nega­
tive attitudes (from 44% to 62%), albeit accompanied by an increase in
positive attitudes (from 6% to 12%).
 Quantitative Analyses — 8i

Attitudes toward the West

in % of people who responded in each category for this subject*
100

80

60
51%
40

20

^ Yrs Military Service

I Approve Ambivalent I Disapprove

‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.4

Table 3.4. Groups deviating from the average by 10% or more in the frequency
of negative attitudes toward the West

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

Farmers 77% of speakers Students 44%

Unskilled workers 74% Age 20 years or less 44%
Women 48%
Housewives 48%

The number of approving speakers increases with education (within the

limits of the very low average) as follows: grade school (8%), technical
school graduates (11%), and high school graduates (15%), only to drop
far below the average for university graduates: to 6%.
The relatively low average of ambivalent remarks, together with the
majority of almost two-thirds of participants disapproving, suggests that
strong trans-subjective factors took effect on our “population’s” attitude
toward the West at the time of our investigation.

Attitudes toward the East A look at Figure 3.5 seems to prove that the
overwhelming majority of our participants has a fixed attitude toward the
East. More than four-fifths of all speakers speak against the East (83%),
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — - 82

Attitudes toward the East

in % of people who responded in each category for this subject*
100
H HHh m m b m uuulö a r tn t m j i

^ Yrs Military Service

I Approve Ambivalent Disapprove

‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.5

about one out of twenty supports the ideology and policy of the Soviet-
Russian domain, and only 12% of the speakers on the topic express am­
bivalence. The frequency of ambivalent attitudes amounts to only one-
third of the average frequency of ambivalent speakers for all seven major
topics (37%). No other topic has such a low level of ambivalence.
Doubts on the explanatory power of this picture arise, however, when
we look at the degree of participation in the discussion. At 31% it is sig­
nificantly below the average (39%), and we again have to ask ourselves
what the silence of more than two-thirds of our participants means. Did
they not speak because they agreed with the disapproving remarks of the
speakers, or did they not want to oppose the dominant opinion of their
group? Or were they afraid of reprisals which could arise for them in case
of a Russian invasion due to their rejection of the East?15 Reports from
our moderators permit the conclusion that—at least in some cases—the
silence meant agreement with the disapproving remarks. We cannot yet
say to what extent this interpretation is valid or how much other motives
might have affected the silent participants. Even more than for all of the
other topics, the results of the quantitative analysis apply only to the speak­
ers themselves.
Thus, even though we cannot say anything certain about the actual atti­
tude of our “population” toward the East, the same reaction of almost ev­
ery statistical group presents an impressive example of what one says and
what one is expected to say.
 Quantitative Analyses ~ 83

Very few groups deviate from the average frequency of rejection by even
around eight percentage points.16 These groups are high school graduates
and white-collar workers. Their speakers’ antagonism against the East is
expressed at a frequency of around 90%. The other extreme—if we can
talk at all about extremes in the face of such small percentage differences—
features students, with only 73% disapproval, young people of 20 years of
age or less (75%), and, strangely enough, farmers (74%).
The frequency of approval of the East varies between zero and 17%.
Deviations of 1% or more from the average in favor of the East emerge
among farmers, with the shocking frequency figure of 18%,* war partici­
pants with less than 2 years of service (11%), 20-35-year-olds, participants
age 50 and older, and those with a grade school education (7% each).
On the other hand, there are no uncritical remarks on the East among
participants 20 years of age and less and among high school graduates;
among university graduates, white-collar workers, and the 3 5-50-year-olds
the frequency of approval of the East amounts to 2% to 3%.
Larger deviations from the average ambivalent attitude can be found
only among participants 20 years of age and less and among students
(25% and 24% higher frequency) on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, among the oldest age group, high school graduates, and farmers
(7-8% lower frequency).
The difference in frequency among the age groups and the other statisti­
cal groups is either too small or too inconsistent to infer regularities from
it. The attitude of the male and female speakers toward the East is virtu­
ally identical (as is their participation in the discussion). In contrast to
their attitudes toward other topics, the positive attitude (i.e., the rejection
of the East) increases among the speakers with longer terms of service.17

Attitude toward Remilitarization We already know that the topic of re­

militarization was not included in the basic stimulus, but that it came up
anyway in many discussions. This was an expression of the agitation
about the sudden change in Allied policy toward German rearmament
that affected large parts of the German population in the winter of
I 95 ° " 5 1· Although an average of only one-third of the participants
(36%) got a chance to speak on remilitarization, some statistical groups
showed much higher participation: almost one in two university gradu­
ates and war participants with 6 or more years of service contributed to

* It is unclear how farmers could agree 18% of the time when the top degree of agreement
was reported as 17% in the same paragraph.—Eds.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 84

Attitudes toward Remilitarization

in % of people who responded in each category for this topic*
100-1—

80- —

60- —

40- — — 36%
20- — A
■ i i ■ r r n ■ n ■ · ι ι·ι~η i ■
■1

0-

<r & * v?
Yrs Military Service

I Approve Ambivalent I Disapprove

‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.6

the discussion. Most silent were women and young people 20 years of age
or less; only about every fourth participant from these two groups spoke
on the topic.
Approximately two-thirds of the speakers (59%) rejected rearmament,
a little bit fewer than one-third approved of it with reservations (29%),
and only every eighth speaker (12%) was an unqualified spokesman for
armament [Tables 3.5 and 3.6].
These average numbers, however, offer too crude a picture. The differ­
ences between the attitudes of many groups are particularly interesting.
While the average rate of approval of rearmament shows a frequency of
only 12%, there are groups with a frequency between 18% and 24% and
others among whom it sinks as low as 4%.
In contrast, the frequency of negative attitudes increases to 83% (un­
skilled workers),18 while the lowest percentage of speakers who are hostile
toward rearmament amounts to 38% (20 years of age or less).19
Remarkably, the frequency of disapproval among unskilled workers is
double that among students and participants aged 20 years or less.
Also, those who approve conditionally of remilitarization are distrib­
uted very unevenly among the statistical groups.
The tabulation of the numbers shows that the first impression of an
overwhelming, unconditional rejection of remilitarization has to be cor­
rected. Among strata that are particularly important for the formation
of public opinion and also among a large part of those who would have
 Quantitative Analyses 8y

Table 3.5. Groups deviating from the average by 3% or more in the frequency
of approving attitudes toward remilitarization

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

Age 20 years or less 24% of speakers Farmers 4%

High school graduates 19% University graduates 7%
Junior high graduates 18% 3 5-50-year-°lds 8%
White-collar workers 15% Grade school graduates 9%
Housewives 9%
Unskilled workers 9%

Table 3.6. Groups deviating from the average by 5% or more in the frequency
of ambivalence toward remilitarization

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

Students and 47% of speakers Unskilled workers 9%

university graduates
Up to 2 years of 40% Age groups 30-35 17%
service and 40-45 years
Age 20 years or less 38% Junior high graduates 22%

to supply officers and enlisted men of the new army, unconditional and
conditional approval were more frequent and disapproval rarer than on
average.
The frequency of approving remarks increases with higher education
from 9% (grade school) to 19% (high school) to drop back among the
university graduates to 7% due to other overcompensating influences.
This hypothetical influence of the degree of education on the frequency of
positive reactions toward the topic is displayed impressively in Table 3.7.20
The higher the level of education, the more positive the attitude (mea­
sured by the sum of approvals and conditional disapprovals) and the smaller
the unconditional rejection.
As to age groups, the approval sinks from 24% frequency among the
youngest to 8% among the 35-50-year-olds, while the frequency of dis­
approvals almost doubles between the young people 20 years old or less
and the 35-50-year-olds—from 38% to 65%, only to turn again to a posi­
tive direction among the participants over 50 years of age.
Women, men, and all war participants of 2 years or more of service
display approximately the same average frequency among the three
categories.21
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 86

Table 3.7. Degree of education and attitude toward remilitarization

(in % of frequency)

I π- II
I II Positive plus III
Groups Positive Ambivalent Ambivalent*1 Negative

Grade school 9 25 34 66
Junior high 18 22 40 60
High school 19 33 52 48
University 7 47 54 46
Average of all 12 29 41 59
speakers
aAdding rows I and II is methodologically justified since an examination of the tran­
scripts as well as the reports of the assistants in the sessions showed that the majority of
ambivalent reactions evinced approval “at a price.”

German Self-Assessment The lower participation for the topic of German

self-assessment (average of 30%) might be balanced to a certain extent by
the definitiveness of the statements. Only every fifth judgment (20%) is
neither exclusively critical nor similarly explicitly ethnocentric. The low av­
erage for statements on the topic is further balanced by the fact that partici­
pants with higher education, that is, the strata who are most important for
opinion formation, address the topic with a frequency far above average.22
On average, every other judgment on Germans (49%) is articulated ex­
clusively critically, about every third is ethnocentric by distinguishing the
Germans at the expense of all other people, and, as already mentioned, only
one-fifth displays an ambivalent attitude.
Regarding the individual groups, we find that the educated not only talk
most frequently, but also are most frequently critical about the Germans
[Table 3.8]. The lead in the frequency of criticism falls to the group of
25“ 3°-year-°lds, who overlap to some extent with the students, high-school
graduates, and university graduates.
The conjecture of a linear relationship between the degree of education
and critical judgments is supported by the above-average frequency of eth­
nocentric remarks among some groups with little education and vice versa
[Tables 3.9 and 3.10].23
The numbers in the right column of Table 3.10 suggest greater cosmopoli­
tanism with increasing education, since the high school graduates place first
with a frequency of ethnocentric judgments of only 13%. After attitudes
toward the East, the assessment of Germans is the topic with the most de­
finitive statements and with the number of ambivalent participants (20%)
far below the average frequency for ambivalence (37%). The frequency of
 Quantitative Analyses ~ 8y

German Self-Assessment
in % of people who responded in each category for this subject*

30%

<f * * ?
Yrs Military Service

I Approve Ambivalent Disapprove

•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.7

Table 3.8. Groups deviating from the average by 9% or more in the frequency
of critical remarks about the Germans

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

University graduates 66% of speakers Farmers 30%

Students 65% 6 years of service 33%
or more
High school graduates 61% 3 5-5°-year-olds 40%
25-30-year-olds 60%

Table 3.9. Speakers of the smallest professional groups according to critical and
ethnocentric judgments
(in %, based on the number of speakers)

Critical Ethnocentric Number of

Group Remarks Remarks Speakers

Higher officials 54% 23% 13

Independent professionals 48% 24% 25
Lower officials 40% 25% 20
Self-employed n% 67% 18
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — - 8 8

Table 3.10. Groups deviating from the average by 6% or more in the frequency
of ethnocentric remarks

Higher Frequency Lower Frequency

Farmers 50% of speakers High school graduates 13%

Six years of service 44% Students 20%
and more
Unskilled workers 43% 2° ” 3 5 "year“°lds 22%
Junior high 38%
>»O University graduates 22%
vP
<O
3 5 “ 5 °"year"°lds ox Age 20 years or less 25%
50 years and older 38%

ambivalent judgments is noticeably small among university graduates and

skilled workers (12% each) and among unskilled workers and students (14%
and 15%).
Compared with men, women display a slightly lower frequency of criti­
cal statements and a significantly lower frequency of ethnocentric judg­
ments; however, their participation in the discussion is substantially higher
than that of men.24
Examining Figure 3.7, two general impressions are particularly dominant.
Of the twenty statistical groups, one quarter deviate more than 10% from the
average frequency of ambivalence. This is to say, the range of the frequency of
ambivalence shows approximately the same breadth for three quarters of all
cases, and, hence, the lines of criticisms and ethnocentric judgments move al­
most in parallel. The higher the frequency of critical judgments within a
group, the lower the frequency of ethnocentric judgments and vice versa. This
parallel movement is particularly clear among long-serving soldiers. A sec­
ond, much more significant finding is the strong preponderance of critical
judgments over each of the other two categories. In contrast to the wide­
spread opinion that Germans are especially ethnocentric, the attitude of our
“population” turns out to be predominantly critical about their own people.

2. “Profiles” o f Individual Statistical Groups,

Constructed on the Basis o f the Frequency
o f Their Attitudes
As a second method of summarizing our quantitative results, we compile the
gradations of attitudes toward each of the seven topics for each statistical
subgroup and compare them to the average reactions of all participants.
Thus, we obtain for each group a kind of “profile,” which, so to speak,
draws their character sketch in relation to each topic, and which provides a
general impression of their more or less positive attitude toward democratic
 Quantitative Analyses — ’ #9

ideas. This profile can be compared with an ideal democratic orientation

and contrasted with the positive and negative variations from our partici­
pants’ (already rather far from the ideal) average attitude.25
Figures 3.9 to 3.18 illustrate the frequency of attitudes in percentages
of the speakers on the seven major topics for a selection of ten out of the
twenty statistical groups. Furthermore, they show all groups’ participation
in the discussion as well as the extent of their deviation from the average
participation. The topics are arranged according to the frequency of posi­
tive attitudes among all speakers of all statistical groups. The average at­
titude of all speakers toward each topic as well as the respective group’s
average frequency of the different attitudes based on all topics (except the
topic of the East) are charted for comparison.
Each profile gains its significance only in comparison with the average of
all profiles26 as well as with those of individual distinctive statistical groups.
As rough as the construction method used here may be,27 characteristic re­
sults still emerge from the tables. Due to their consistency these results
cannot be regarded as purely accidental. In particular, we surmise that the
characteristics of the extreme groups—just as those of the average of all
twenty groups—point to facts that hold beyond the “population” of our
experiment.
The twenty profiles can be divided into three major groups, each of which
shows clearly distinctive features in respect to the other two. As everywhere
in this study, the typology is guided by group members’ attitude toward the
traditionally democratic frame of reference.
Based on that we distinguish among participants:
I. with a more positive attitude
II. with an average attitude, and28
III. with a more negative attitude.
It goes without saying that this classification is a matter of more or less,
not a matter of exclusively positive, average, or negative attitudes. Moreover,
one has to consider in applying these “types” that we are dealing with a sche­
matic ordering of statistical groups whose individual members frequently
appear in several of these groups.29
The classification of the twenty statistical groups into the three types is
based on the interpretation of each individual profile and complemented
by a simple mechanical device—for each group, we computed an index
indicating the degree to which the group’s attitude deviates positively or
negatively from the average attitude of all twenty groups toward six major
topics.30 With the aid of this index, one can easily compile a scale ranging
from +292 (high school graduates) to -658 (farmers).
Table 3.11 summarizes the result of classifying all twenty groups.31
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 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 92

Attitude Types
in order of their values

I of all topics (except the East) I I of 4 test topics

Figure 3.8

Figure 3.8 illustrates the order of the twenty statistical groups, ranked
according to the indices computed from the attitudes toward the major
topics.
The table of the types of attitudes seems to contradict all of our previous
experience with the attitude of our participants. Just three out of twenty
groups have to be classified as negative. When referring to the predominantly
negative attitude of our participants, we proceeded from average values of
attitude toward all or individual topics for all or individual groups. No mat­
ter how one calculates the average, it is always apparent that the average
frequency of the negative attitude is considerably higher than that of the
positive attitude. The computation of the indices, however, was based on the
percentage deviation from the overall average of all groups for each topic.
This is to say that the [three] groups with negative attitude types are more
negative on average than the already largely negative average and vice versa.
With all due reservations arising from the data as well as from the
method applied, we can make the following assertions about the individ­
ual statistical groups of our participants:
i . Women are more likely to display a positive attitude toward demo­
cratic values than men. They rank among the top of all positive
speakers.
 Quantitative Analyses — - 93

2. The youngest and the oldest age groups express themselves posi­
tively concerning the problems of our major topics considerably
more often than the two age groups between 20 and 50 years; the
frequency of negative statements increases from the first to the third
age group and decreases subsequently.
3. Among our participants, education relates to attitude in a curious
way. Participants with a high school diploma but without a univer­
sity education are ranked in the top of the positive part of our order,
while speakers with a university education belong to the opposite
extreme. The speakers with only grade school or junior high educa­
tion show an average type of attitude.32 On the other hand, ambiva­
lence increases with educational level.
4. Since only six occupations were represented strongly enough to
justify a separate quantitative analysis, we can make statements only
about these few professions. Housewives and students make up the
positive extreme; farmers the negative counterpart. In the category
of average attitudes, white-collar, skilled, and unskilled workers
follow housewives and students after a considerable gap.
5. Furthermore, there seems to be a clear correlation between length of
military service (which for our older participants coincides with the
time between their entry into war and their captivity) and attitude
toward the major topics: the four groups for length of service can be
easily arranged on a scale from a more positive attitude among the
speakers without military service through the clearly more negative
attitude of the two groups of 0-2 years and 2 to 6 years of service
to the extremely negatively minded group of war participants with
6 years of service or more. Parallel to this curve runs the increasing
participation in the discussion with increasing term of service. This
increase in negative attitude with increasing military service is
understandably also seen among those age groups whose male
participants were largely also doing a longer term of service.

Due to space restrictions, we reproduce here only the extremes from the
first four major statistical groups as well as the skilled and unskilled workers’
groups, which are classified as averages, from among the twenty profiles. We
also discuss the profile compiled from the statements of all speakers related
to all seven major topics for the average attitude of the entire circle of
participants.

Women Of all statistical groups, women (including the housewives sub­

group) present by far the most positive picture.33
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 94

Women’s Attitudes (n = 563)

in % of women who responded in each category for this topic*

H H I Positive 1 I Ambivalent Negative

•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.9

Table 3.12. Topics for which the frequency of attitudes of female speakers
deviates by 11% or more from the average distribution of attitudes

(in % of deviation)

Topic Positive Ambivalent Negative

The West +78 +20 -21

Jews +21 -6 -I I
Democracy 0 -41
Guilt +20 -22
Germans +6 +10 -i 6
Remilitarization +8 -1 7 +7

For five out of the seven major topics, female speakers’ opinions are
more positive than the general average, and, likewise, their negative state­
ments are less frequent for five topics. For five topics, ambivalent state­
ments are more frequent in this group than among the average and less
frequent for two (Jews and remilitarization). The high percentage of am­
bivalent statements for the topic of democracy (more than three quarters
of speakers compared with about two-thirds for the general average) is
striking.
Women participated a roughly average amount in the discussion, but not
evenly: for the first four topics the participation in the discussion is 2%-22%
 Quantitative Analyses — 95

lower, for the remaining three it is 3% - i 8% higher. For the following top­
ics, female speakers display considerable deviations from the average dis­
tribution of attitude [Table 3.12].
The indices of the test topics confirm the general view: for the topics of
complicity and Jews as well as for the topics of the West and democracy,
women present the highest positive number (+94 and +140). This does not
come only from the above-average frequency of speakers’ positive opin­
ions toward those topics, but also from the considerably below-average
frequency of negative speakers for five of the topics.
In contrast, the attitude toward remilitarization is more negative than
average, a behavior much more pronounced among housewives (n = 237;
positive -25% , ambivalent -14% , negative +12%). In contrast to the
alarming general average of our participants for the attitude toward demo­
cratic values, women as a group stand out as by far one of the most posi­
tive. However, the high percentage of ambivalent statements, particularly
for topics like democracy and complicity, urges caution in evaluating the
results.

Men The profile contrasts in virtually every respect with that of women.
Figure 3.10 shows that the frequency of positive statements is predomi­
nantly below average, while the frequency of negative attitudes is above
average for six of seven topics. However, these deviations from the average
exceed the 15% limit only for two topics.34

Men’s Attitudes
in % of men who responded in each category for this topic*

Democracy

Germany

Guilt

Jews

Remilitarization

The East

The West

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive I I Ambivalent Negative
‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.10
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 96

Table 3.13.
The West and
Guilt and Jews Democracy

Men -4 6 "3 4
Women +25 +40
Men more negative in attitude 71 74
than women, in points

The frequency of ambivalent attitudes is not insignificantly below the

average, an indication that opinions among men are considerably more
fixed than among women.
We already demonstrated above that men as a statistical group are not
extremely negative, but can still be counted among the middle group. How­
ever, they rank only as number 14 in the scale organized according to the
index.35
For the test questions, the difference in attitude of the two sexes be­
comes particularly apparent. The indices are in Table 3.13.
The average participation in the discussion is close to the average for
men and is considerably higher than that of women for the first four
topics, particularly for remilitarization.
The fact that the statistical group of men comprises two-thirds of our
participants has to influence the numbers for the attitude of the sum of all
groups decisively.
This makes the deviations in the following profiles of the remaining eight
subgroups, which, likewise, are predominantly composed of men, all the
more remarkable.

Participants up to 20 Years Old This group comprises young people

who were 14 years old at the end of the war and experienced the school
of the Hitler Youth and the triumphant demonstrations of the first years
of war, but also the defeat and the years of starvation at the beginning of
the postwar period.36 Their attitudes are particularly interesting as a cue
for the spiritual (Geistesverfassung) and mental (Gemütsverfassung) state
of the youngest group of German youth, who were exposed to Nazi edu­
cation during only a limited period of their childhood. Yet again, one has
to advise greatest caution in generalizing from this group, here especially
due to the low total number of only 150 participants.
The first impression of the profile at hand is extremely positive. With
two and one exceptions, respectively,37 the frequency of positive attitudes
 Quantitative Analyses — 97

Attitudes of Respondents Under Age 20 (n = 150)

in % of people in the group who responded in each category for this topic*

1 1____ 1 1 1 1 1 ~'f 1 I ------

Guilt
Ί 1 1----------1----------Γ“® —1--------ί1-™ ™ η --------
------- 1______
The West
1 1 1 1 " r" \ r _ _ χ _ _
Democracy
___ 1
______ 1______ 1 1 I 11
Remilitarization
II 1 1nuiiutem im p 1
1 1 1 —-------------------------------
Jews
^ ---------- 1
--------1....... ...I 1 —1----------1---------- 1
----------
Germany
1—1-------- 1-------- 1--------
1
The East

-1— 1— i— 1— L T T 1— 1—
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive I I Ambivalent Negative
’ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.11

is above the average, and that of negative attitudes below it, and some of
the differences are quite sizable. For the topics of complicity, the West, re­
militarization, and the East, the frequency of negative statements is the
lowest of all statistical groups.
Yet this positive impression is disturbed by a series of factors. In addition
to the small total number of groups, it is important to note the above-
average frequency of ambivalent attitudes, with the exceptions of the topics
of democracy38 and Jews, and the above average frequency of ambivalent
attitudes as well as the abnormally low participation in the discussion.
These young people rank at the top of all groups with respect to the average
frequency of ambivalent attitudes and at the bottom with respect to partici­
pation in the discussion.
All these data lead to the conclusions that our young people have a ten­
dency to respond positively to democratic values in general, but that their
attitudes are still rather undecided and, hence, probably also very suscep­
tible to influence.

Participants Aged 20 to 35 Years One cannot draw conclusions about the

development of the young people from the considerably less positive char­
acter of the next age group, since the 20-3 5-year-olds were subjected,
largely defenselessly, to the National Socialistic education and propaganda
apparatus for 12 years.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings

Frequency of Attitudes of Participants Aged 3 5 -5 0 (n = 529)

in % of people in the group who spoke in each main category for this topic*

Guilt

The West

Democracy

Remilitarization

Jews

Germany

The East

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive I I Ambivalent Negative
•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.12

Participants Aged 35 to 50 Years The influence of these Goebbels-style

methods of education is reinforced in the case of the 35-50-year-old age
group by the fact that a large number of its participants experienced infla­
tion and unemployment as well as the later despair of the Weimar Republic
in the 1920s and were hardened through long military service.39 This group,
too, does not exhibit predominantly negative types of attitudes, yet it ranks
at the bottom of the average type.
The frequency of positive attitudes is predominantly below average,
that of negative attitudes above average, and that of ambivalent attitudes
about average with one noticeable exception.40
The greater deviations from the average are summarized in Table 3.14.
Perhaps the relatively high numbers of participants prepared to come to
an understanding with the West in relation to rejecting remilitarization re­
flect war-weariness rather than a truly democratic attitude. This supposition
is suggested by the far-above-average frequency of ethnocentric statements,
the radical rejection of complicity, and the high frequency of ambivalent re­
marks on the topic of Jews, probably indicating a disposition toward a
hostile attitude. Despite the relatively high frequency of positive speakers for
the test topic of the West and the lower frequency of anti-Semitic remarks,
the combined index for all four test topics puts the 35-50-year-olds in fif­
teenth position, i.e., in the bottom quarter ordered according to this crite­
rion. This shows that, due to its attitude toward democratic values, this age
 Quantitative Analyses — 99

Table 3 . 1 4 . Topics for which the distribution of attitudes of 3 5 - 5 0 -year-olds

deviates by 15% or more from the frequency of the general attitude
(in % of deviation)
Topic Positive Ambivalent Negative
The West +33
Guilt -40
Remilitarization "33
Democracy -20
Germans -18 +23
Jews +29 -19

Attitudes of High School Graduates (n = 159)

in % of people who responded in each category for this subject*

Guilt
r — 1— 1--------- 1--------- 1--------- Γ ΠΖ
— ---------
--------- 1T
----------
-------- 1T---------T
1---------r
_ L
The West
--------- 1--------- r~---- - ■ri “ "“ i1*-- ,, jl·,. -T . .
______ 1______ 1______ 1______ L_
Democracy
--------- 1--------- 1--------- 11--------- 1—------ 1--------- 1--------- 1---------
Remilitarization
--------- 1--------- 1--------- 1 ------ 1 ,1 J______
Jews i ^ H 1 1
Germany

The East

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive I I Ambivalent Negative
*lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.13

group seems to belong in the neighborhood of groups with extremely nega­

tive attitudes.

High School Graduates The quantitative as well as the qualitative analysis

of our discussions do not leave any doubt that an important correlation ex­
ists between the degree of education and the attitude toward our topics.
However, this correlation is partly hidden by the effects of the other vari­
ables. It has to be left to future research to try to isolate the effects of indi­
vidual factors.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 100

In the following, we arrive at diametrically opposed pictures when com­

paring the profile of participants with only high school diplomas to that of
university graduates: the high school graduates and university graduates
are on opposite poles of the scale ranging from extremely positive to ex­
tremely negative attitudes. To begin with, let us examine the profile of high
school graduates.41
Here we find a picture already familiar from the groups of women and up-
to-20-year-olds: a predominantly above-average frequency of positive and a
below-average frequency of negative statements. Classified according to
their indices for attitudes toward the six major topics, we find high school
graduates in the first position, for the four test topics in fourth position:
hence at the positive end of our scale. This group ranks third in the order of
participation in the discussion; in relation to its total number, the group has
significantly more speakers for each topic than all participants on average.
Intense investigation is required in order to find out why high school
graduates, i.e., those who did not attend university despite qualifying for
entrance, show a much more positive attitude than university graduates.
Greatest caution is also advised in generalizing these preliminary findings
for high school graduates due to the relatively small number of participants
(n=i59> and the above-average frequency of ambivalent attitudes.

University Graduates In the case of university graduates, we are dealing for

the first time with a group whose attitude gives a predominantly negative
impression. Here, far-above-average participation in the discussion comes
together with a frequency of positive attitudes that falls substantially below
the average, remarkable reservations as regards critical comments for all
six major topics, and an above-average (for five topics extremely above-
average) frequency of ambivalent attitudes, again with one exception.42
No matter which benchmark we use to measure the position of speakers
with university education among the twenty groups, we always have to in­
clude them in the predominantly negative attitude type. Particularly striking
are the characteristics for attitudes toward Jews.
The frequency of positive attitudes is 86% below the average. The fre­
quency of negative attitudes is 40% above the average. The frequency of
ambivalence is 26% above the average. The participation in the discussion
is 14% below the already low average.
A higher-than-average ambivalent attitude together with lower-than-
average participation in the discussion is, in this case (as generally), inter­
preted as accentuation of the negative attitude.43
We have to leave it to future investigations to make claims as to whether
a broader representation of university graduates would lead to a picture
 Quantitative Analyses — ιο ί

Attitudes of University Graduates (n = 135)

in % of people in the group who responded in each category for this topic*

Positive I I Ambivalent Negative

‘ lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3 . 1 4

Attitudes of Participants with Vocational Training (n = 200)

in % of people in the group who responded in each category for this topic*

Positive 1 I Ambivalent Negative

'lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.15

similarly negative to the profile constructed from the behavior of only 135
participants.

Students The group of participants who are still in professional training

deserves special attention, since it includes members of the first two age
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~~ 102

Table 3.15. Topics for which the distribution of students’ attitudes deviates by
15% or more from the frequency of the general attitude

(in % of deviation)

Topic Positive Ambivalent Negative

Democracy +40 ~ z 3
Germans +33 -* 5 -3 6
Jews +31 -31 +5
Remilitarization +17 +62 “ 34
The West +60 -28
Guilt +21 -18

groups, both men and women, and different degrees of education. When
comparing this group to other profiles it is immediately clear that we are
dealing with one of our positive groups. The students take the lead in the
frequency of positive speakers and in the low frequency of negative state­
ments. Yet the spectrum of ambivalence is broad in their case, too; they rank
third place there, after the university graduates and the 20-year-olds. Their
participation in the discussion is above average.
The profile presents striking deviations from the average (Table 3.15).
Their relatively high positive and relatively low negative frequencies for
the four test topics are remarkable.44 Furthermore, their very frequent am­
bivalence toward the topics of the West and remilitarization together with
a relatively low frequency of negative statements toward these two topics
is also interesting.
One can probably infer from the profile above that students at the time
of our survey show a strong disposition toward accepting democratic val­
ues, but that a broad area remains for influencing their final decisions.

Farmers The exact opposite can be said about the speakers who were
farmers, who present in all respects the extreme of negative attitudes among
our participants. The frequency of all positive statements is far below
average, that of negative statements far above average, and the ambiva­
lent spectrum is significantly smaller than for the average of all groups.
The farmers participate in the discussion about as frequently as the
average.
Table 3.16 shows that the farmers also outstrip all other groups in
regard to negative (and low positive) attitudes on individual topics. They
attain by far the highest negative number for the indices for the four test
topics.45 The far-below-average spectrum of ambivalence indicates that we
 Quantitative Analyses — -103

Attitudes of Farmers (n = 140)

in % of farmers who responded in each category for this topic*

. 1 'π 1 1 1 — 1— 1—
Guilt
_J_______1_______1____ I 1 1 Γ Γ, "ηΡ'ώΡ jîffiMCi
The West ■1
_J_______1 1 Γ^*Τ Ί ^
Democracy t
_J_______1 1 J 1 1 T .ggMMfljMBiL
Remilitarization ■
___1_ _ _ _ 1___ “Τ ~ ' t “ Ί i J" ΐ
Jews IITP — 11_ _ _ _ _ 1,___ _ _____ ______ ______ _____
□ ____ —
Germany a i_ _ _ _ Γ Ί i 1 ^... Τ '
The East
L -l - 4— i i I 1 1 1
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive Ambivalent Negative
•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.16

Table 3.16. Topics for which the distribution of farmers’ attitudes deviates by
14% or more from the frequency of the general attitude

(in % of deviation)

Topic Positive Ambivalent Negative

Guilt -io o (!) -82 +80

Democracy -7 0 -15 +77
Remilitarization -6 7 +14
Jews -5 0 +41
Germans "39 +61
The West -3 3 "43 +26

might be dealing with higher-than-average fixed attitudes for three of the

topics.
Not a single farmer speaks positively about the question of complicity,
and eleven times as many speakers are hostile to democracy than speak
positively about it; for the attitude toward the West, the ratio is even more
unfavorable with 1:12.5. By the same token, the frequency of anti-Semitic
farmers who spoke is only four times as high as of non-anti-Semitic speak­
ers. If the profile of farmer speakers derived from our group of 140 farmers
were only approximately representative for the agricultural population of
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 104

the Federal Republic, it would be an exceedingly difficult task to win this

group for democracy.46 Yet we have reason to assume that the progressive
strata of the farming population are far too little represented in our circle
of participants. Future investigations have to attach special importance to
providing democratically minded farmers with the opportunity to articu­
late their opinion.

Skilled Workers The following two profiles of skilled and unskilled workers
present a middle position among our twenty statistical groups. Ordered by
the index for the attitude toward six topics (without the East), the skilled
and unskilled workers are in the average attitude type. Ranked by the index
for their attitude toward the test topics, however, both groups prove to be
rather positively minded, and they receive the seventh and eighth positions in
that scale.
Despite much similarity, the two groups show differences that may be
important for their evaluation.
For some topics, the frequency of positive statements is significantly above
average (Jews +43%, democracy and complicity both +20%, Germans
+ 14%) and of negative statements below average (complicity -8% , de­
mocracy -18%).
On the other hand, the attitude toward the West and toward remili­
tarization is not insignificantly more negative than the average. The higher-
than-average frequency of criticism against remilitarization probably re­
flects the brusquely dismissive attitude of the Social Democratic Party.
It is part of the tradition of this group that they attain the highest num­
ber of all statistical groups in the frequency of positive statements on the
topic of Jews. The frequency of ambivalent speakers is much lower among
the skilled workers than the average—on the scale arranged according to
the frequency of ambivalent attitudes, this group is in the third to last po­
sition. In its decidedness to speak in favor or against a topic, it ranks be­
hind only unskilled workers and farmers. The participation in the discussion
among skilled workers is also far below average: they rank at the fourth to
last position.
It does not quite fit the common image of the skilled German worker
with his traditional union and political schooling that his profile shows a
frequency of 70% ambivalent speakers for the topic of democracy. This
surprising finding is emphasized by the ratio of positive to negative atti­
tudes for the topics of complicity (1:8) and the West (1:8.5), both of which
deviate considerably from the ideal of a democratic attitude. Insofar as
representative significance can be attached to our group of skilled workers,
political education still has major work to do.
 Quantitative Analyses ~ 105

Attitudes of Skilled Workers (n = 308)

in % of skilled workers who responded in each category for this topic*

Guilt

The West

Democracy

Remilitarization

Jews

Germany

The East

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive 1 I Ambivalent Negative
•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.17

Attitudes of Unskilled W orkers (n = 104)

in % of unskilled workers who responded in each category for this topic*

Guilt

The West

Democracy

Remilitarization

Jews

Germany

The East

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
■ ■ 1 Positive I 1Ambivalent Negative
•lines denote mean percentages of approve, ambivalent, and disapprove with respect to all data

Figure 3.18

Unskilled W orkers A similar story may hold to an increasing degree for

unskilled workers. Their profile is characterized primarily by an above-
average frequency o f negative attitudes for the six major topics.
However, this group proves to be remarkably positive for the topic of
democracy: it has the highest frequency of positive and the lowest frequency
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 106

Table 3.17. Indices (sum of the percentage deviation from the average) of the
frequency of ambivalent attitudes among four degrees of education

Degree of Education Index

Grade school (n = 981 ) -5 4

Junior high (n = 213) -1-2
High school (n = 159) -♦-48
University education (n = 135) + 120

of ambivalent speakers for the topic, and the ratio of positive to negative
statements is about 1:1.
The frequency of critical statements toward remilitarization is above
80%, a number that only occurs elsewhere among the negative attitudes
toward the East. While the unskilled workers rank third to last in the par­
ticipation in the discussion, they uphold, as was already mentioned, the
first position in their definitiveness for or against a topic. There is proba­
bly a close correlation between the frequency of ambivalent statements
and the degree of education; the latter seems to increase with the former
[Table 3.17].
Since the majority of unskilled workers possesses only a grade school edu­
cation, this would at least partially explain their definitiveness. We probably
have to trace it back less to political maturity than to the overpowering
force of the dominant ideology.

3. General Average o f the Frequency o f Attitudes

Above, we had the chance to indicate that the profile of our entire popula­
tion offers little cause for confidence for supporters of a democratic world
order. Certainly, the attitude toward the East shows a radical rejection of
the Russian program—one approving speaker is matched by more than
sixteen disapproving speakers and only a bit more than two whose state­
ments are ambivalent.
Yet examining the average frequency of the attitudes toward the six
other topics, we find that only about one-sixth of the speakers have a posi­
tive attitude (16%), but that almost three times as many have a negative
one (44%) and more than twice as many an ambivalent one (Figure 3.19).
For five of the six major topics (leaving out the attitude toward the East)
the frequency of positive statements is but a fraction (and usually a very
small one) of negative ones. The details can be inferred from the overview
in Table 3.18.
 Quantitative Analyses — 107

G eneral Average of all Participants’ Attitudes

in % of people who responded in each category for this subject

Negative
Figure 3.19

G eneral Average of the Frequency of Attitudes (n = 1635)

in % of speakers who responded in each category for this topic

Guilt

The West

Democracy

Remilitarization

Jews

Germany

The East

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Positive 1 I Ambivalent Negative

Average of all to p ic s ------- ...except the East -------

Figure 3 . 2 0

Apart from the topic of the East, the frequency of positive attitudes pre­
dominates only for the topic of German self-assessment, namely in rela­
tion to the negative speakers as well as to the ambivalent ones.
Significantly more speakers participated in the discussion of the first
three topics than of the other four. The lowest average participation in the
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 108

Table 3.18. Ratio of positive to negative statements for six major topics
among all participants

Approximate Ratio of Positive

Frequency to the Frequency of

Topic Negative Attitudes Ambivalence

Complicity 1:10 1:9

The West 1:7 i :3
Democracy 1:3 1:7
Remilitarization 1:5 1:2.4
Jews 4 :5 4 :5
Germans 5 :3 2.5:1
All six topics 1 -3 1:2.5

discussion is found for the topic of Jews (=22%), the highest for the topic
of democracy (=53%).

4. On the Interpretation o f the Profiles

In this section, we presented and commented on some of the profiles gained
from the quantitative analysis. We tried to point to the differences between
the individual groups. Now, when asking whether these differences touch on
the basic structure of the frequency of attitudes, we have a simple instrument
to establish clarity. The profile of the general average of all groups is plotted
in each of the ten group profiles. By examining the deviation of frequency of
each individual group from the group average, we discover that the confor­
mity of the basic structures carries significantly more weight than the individ­
ual deviation from the general average. We are probably entitled to deduce the
“public opinion” pertaining to our circle of participants from that.
In the preponderance of negative and ambivalent attitudes toward the
four test topics as well as in the sharply profiled distribution of attitudes for
the three other topics, we may detect the influence of trans-subjective fac­
tors, i.e., the political ideology effective during the time our pilot study was
conducted.
 C H A P T E R F O U R

Integration Phenomena in
Group Discussions

i. General Information

Preliminary Notes As a special field, the qualitative analysis* lent itself to

an investigation of the dynamics of opinion formation in the group ses­
sions. It was of prime importance for our research to gain a better under­
standing of the processes at play in the group discussions. This is because
our experiment is based on the assumption that opinions on political ideol­
ogy usually crystallize only during engagement with the stimuli and with
other people. This process is reciprocal: while group opinion is reflected in
individual opinions, individual opinions contribute to group opinion. The
group opinion becomes a psychological force. Once it is formed, individ­
ual group members no longer feel isolated. They feel emotionally con­
nected to each other from then on. This is what we understand as the “in­
tegration” of a group. In the process, factors are at play such as the specific
atmosphere that dominates a certain discussion, the crystallization of
group opinion, and the effectiveness of “social control” exercised by the
group.f

* The qualitative analysis is presented in full in the companion volume. Guilt and Defense.
—Eds.
* The text refers to sozialen Kontrolle and to “social control” (English in the original).
—Eds.
 Group Experiment and Other 'Writings ~ no

The experience of the moderators and their assistants as well as a first

review of the discussion transcripts shows that valuable material was at
hand for the study of such problems of group dynamics, especially for ten­
dencies of integration and disintegration.
The issue in this chapter was, in each case, the entire group. We consider
the opinion formation of individuals within the group only in this context.
Specifically, we use the empirical material itself to develop a theory of which
forces provide the group with a more solid structure. We seek to explicate
elements of integration and disintegration: an essential prerequisite for
reliable insight into the position of the individual vis-à-vis the group.
Since we are not concerned here with an experiment during which dif­
ferent variables relevant to integration were manipulated, attempting to
proceed from establishing elementary phenomena and factors for integra­
tion to investigating constant interdependencies would miss the point. Such
an attempt would necessarily demand quantification. Here we carried out
a purely qualitative analysis. Thus, we are not concerned with countable
concepts or measurable units.1 This does not preclude the hypotheses of
this work from proving useful for quantitative experiments on integration
as well. The categories constructed here might provide models for variables
to be used in such experiments.
Since our study was not focused on the investigation of phenomena of
integration, our material for the analysis of important individual problems
of the process of integration is not equally fruitful throughout. Some issues,
first and foremost the role of the “opinion-leader” [English] and the role of
the group as representatives of the dominant opinion, should be given par­
ticular attention in future investigations.

2. On Terminology
A short discussion of the two basic concepts of group and integration is
appropriate for terminological reasons. Both have been used in sociology
with widely varying meanings, so we have to outline what these terms mean
in this study.

The Concept o f Group There are three characteristic types of group con­
cepts in traditional sociological literature. Some authors (e.g., Oppenheimer;
Geiger; Bogardus)2 define the concept of group in such a way that it be­
comes a collective name for most social structures. Others (particularly
Sombart, Vierkandt, L. v. WieseŸ use the term group for a specific category
of social structures. And sometimes the concept of group is hypostatized. It
is understood as an entity that preexists its members. Thus, for Vierkandt,4
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~~ h i

for example, a group is a structure that has a life of its own, is an entity
for itself, and has its own conditions, characteristics, and patterns of
behavior.
Comparing the actuality of our discussion groups with these concepts of
group, the first of these formal concepts seems to be most applicable to
our group discussions. We will provide closer—and if necessary changing—
specifications of our groups in the course of this investigation. A first fea­
ture which all of our groups have in common can already be indicated
here: the groups are small in the sense that they have few members, and,
hence, there are immediate personal contacts among all members.
The word group is an example of “occasional expressions” in logic.*
This means that, by nature, group is an open concept defying any univer­
sal definition. It can be compared to the X in algebra, which can be in­
serted into completely different formulas and the specific value of which
results from the respective formula. By analogy, the concept of group gains
meaning only when the structure identified by it is understood concretely
through the social situation and constellation. If the nature of the group is
to be specified, one has to proceed from this insight, not from a formal
definition.

The Concept o f Integration Most sociologists consider integration a pro­

cess that takes place in the entire society or at least in major parts of it
(Spencer; Geiger; L. v. Wiese).5 In this sense, integration is one pole of the
integration-differentiation tension, on which opinions diverge. For Spencer
and Geiger; the processes are complementary, i.e., they identify simultaneous
occurrences, while for v. Wiese only integration (binding) or differentiation
(dissolution) can exist at any moment. These extensive concepts of integra­
tion, however, need not be considered here, since we are dealing with the
integration of small groups in a specific situation—the discussion.
It is precisely this situation to which more recent American literature
applies the term “group integration” [English], though here it means only
the development of an undivided group opinion. The researchers have in
mind discussion groups that have to come to decisions, and this was not the
case for the groups in this study. In the case of small group discussions seek­
ing to arrive at a conclusion, Maclver and Page6 distinguish four types of
unification: (a) through authority, (b) through compromise, (c) through vot­
ing, and (d) through integration. Integration means an actual dissolution

* The term is from Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, (New York: Humanities
Press, 1970), vol. 1, Section 26. “Occasional expressions” are expressions whose meaning
depends on the particular context of their use.—Eds
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 112

of differences in contrast to, for example, a majority vote. This dissolution

can only be effected by a completely unanimous group opinion.
For our usage of the word integration, we selected from the definitions
of various authors those characteristics of the process that fit the group
phenomena of our study. Since this study is concerned with processes in
small groups, one must not think of a growth or fusion of several complete
groups, as Spencer does. Processes of integration rather take place within
the group (Geiger).7 Integration consists of psychic interrelations between
individuals and may result in stronger identification of the group members
with one another: an emotional consensus (Giddings)8 or group opinion
(Maclver).9 No individual is isolated in a strongly integrated group.10
In summary, in these pages we use integration to refer to the development
of relations between group members constituting a unity that only persists
for the duration of the group session. In this process the relations, not the
group members, are actually the integrating factors.11

3. Two Major Types o f Discussion Groups

Arranged Groups Approximately one-tenth of the discussion groups con­

sisted of people who did not know each other before the discussion or knew
each other only casually. We call such a circle of people who were not con­
stituted as a group until the day of the discussion (and did not outlast the
hours of the discussion as a group) an “arranged group” in order to mark
their difference from the discussion groups whose participants belonged to
an already existing social group.
These arranged groups are of particular interest for us because they
were not subject to any processes of integration prior to the discussion. In
these cases, integration can be studied ab ovo, so to say. It will be shown
that, even after only a short time, an astonishingly high degree of integra­
tion could be observed in some of them. These could be called “psycho­
logical groups.” 12 They are defined neither by living near one another, nor
by profession, nor by any common interest or attitude as the social groups
are (which, of course, are psychological groups as well).
Examples of arranged groups are: a number of men and women who
were invited on the basis of their addresses in the address book; patients on
different wards in the same hospital; and men who registered on a certain
day to spend the night in a large urban public shelter (Großstadtbunker).

Preexisting Groups The difference between arranged and preexisting

groups can be simplified to this: the members of arranged groups did not
know each other prior to the discussion and did not perceive the other
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 11 3

discussion participants as fellow members of their community of fate or

interest. The members of the preexisting groups did know each other or at
least had some feeling of connectedness (e.g., as refugees).
It is irrelevant to our analysis whether the members of preexisting groups
had daily contact with one another (e.g., joint residences in barracks, bun­
kers, etc.), whether their group was defined by a common profession (ship­
yard workers), by the same attitude (young socialists), or by common interest
(participants of a course of higher education). Rather, it is crucial that the
groups were either already integrated or at least in a way were disposed to­
ward integration. The style of moderation was the same for arranged and
preexisting groups.
The difference between “homogeneous” and “not homogeneous” groups
is on a different logical level. By “homogeneous” groups we understand
those groups among which sex, age, education, religion, political attitude,
and other common interests create a feeling of connectedness, through
which the members, even if they did not know each other beforehand, feel
at home relatively quickly. In contrast to this, nonhomogeneous groups are
those whose members feel isolated due to the differences in the variables
mentioned above and are, thus, impaired in their ability to connect.

I. M odel of the Course of a Discussion

(Continuum of Integration)

In order to arrive at a coherent picture of the processes that combine over

the course of the discussion to produce integration, we will use a model. We
will select different phenomena found in numerous discussions and arrange
them as if they were phases of a single, exemplary discussion, in which in­
tegration starts from zero and increases gradually until it reaches its peak.
This construct uses only empirical material from the discussions for a
montage. We selected the phenomena from several sessions that seem to be
particularly striking expressions of progressive integration. A large num­
ber of less relevant phenomena for our current interest are not considered,
even though they might appear frequently in the actual discussions. Fur­
thermore, the model does not comply with reality’s chronological order of
categories. Its order is rather assigned systematically; at base is the as­
sumption that the phenomena can be arranged on a scale as indicators of
different degrees of integration. Thus, the processes scattered throughout
the entire research material recur here as categories of a continuum. This
selection and abstract ordering of phenomena is meant to facilitate the
overview of the actual co-occurrence, order, and mixture of phenomena.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 114

In the discussion of the model, the individual evidence in the transcripts

is interpreted realistically. The interpretation is not modified in view of the
model, but relies on the events in the respective original sessions. Passages
are selected to allow meaningful integration into the model. The individual
phases—or categories—are indicated by subheadings.

i. Strangerhood
All arranged groups shared the phase of strangerhood at the beginning of
the session, although this varied in nature. We will begin the presentation
of our model and analysis with this phase.
The investigator opens the session with a brief explanation about the pur­
pose of the discussion, and the assistant plays the base stimulus on a tape
recorder.
The phase of strangerhood at the beginning of the discussion is marked
by cautious phrases and prophylactic clichés. Numerous such words and
phrases such as ‘T think,” “a little,” “sure enough,” “perhaps,” and similar
can be found at the beginning. The implicit question of what others might
say is always dominant. The participants are, moreover, uncertain as to the
attitude of the moderator.
In our discussion, Mrs. P. is the first one to try to learn something about
the moderator’s attitude. The moderator repeats a passage from the base
stimulus:
In.: Well, Mr. Colburn says that there is a risk that they (the Germans) will
follow Stalin or Hitler because they long for a strong man.

After brief hesitation, Mrs. P. says:

P.: Surely, this is not the case . . . No, we are wiser now, don’t you think?

She addresses her question to the moderator in order to discern his atti­
tude. He enjoys a certain authority, formally supported by the design of the
experiment. In the arranged groups in particular, the participants focus on
the moderator at the beginning of the session. He is expected to lead the
discussion firmly. The moderator does not answer the question, but passes it
on to the group:
In.: You think that we have become wiser through experience? Ladies and
Gentlemen, what do you think about it?
M.: That one has learned something from it, from the past. It’s probably not
so simple.

This remark, too, evades an actual response; it hedges a personal statement.

 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions —* 1 1 5

The reaction of the other cannot yet be predicted, and, thus, the partici­
pants formulate their statements as tentatively as possible. Accordingly,
Mr. M. says:
M.: Of course, an accused person will always deny his guilt. This is a
completely natural phenomenon. At least, he will find grounds for
his justification. In my view, this is an obvious thing, if a German is
judging from his German perspective. We have to be clear about the
fact that an Englishman also judges only from his perspective. But what
appears to be red from the English perspective can appear to be blue
from the German perspective. The question of which of these two
representatives of those perspectives is right would have to be decided
by a third person.

The relativization of perspectives relieves people of the obligation to take

a position. In this way one becomes unassailable because one can avoid
every bind.

2. Orientation
In the next phase of discussion, people try to gain certainty about the at­
titudes of the other participants.
A common way to evoke group reactions so one can adjust one’s habit
to them is by referring to supposedly popular opinions. Such contribu­
tions often start with the words “people say.” By distancing oneself in such
a way from the opinion and passing it off as somebody else’s, a speaker
can adhere to it in case of agreement from the group, while possible objec­
tions can be neutralized by retreating from the referenced opinion without
consequences.
The following example is typical for referring to an opinion to elicit the
group’s attitude toward it. The [female] participant A. continues the dis­
cussion in our model session:
A.: One often hears older and younger people say: No, it won’t work like
this. Here in Germany there has to be some man at the top, someone has
to dictate. Otherwise, it won’t work with the Germans. This opinion is
actually quite common . . .

Then she dares to advance a bit:

A .:. . . Actually it is unfortunate that it is common, because this does not
advance democracy . . .

The group does not approve of the referenced opinion. Yet, after a few
minutes, Mrs. A. ventures a second time in a similar direction, i.e., she again
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ' 116

reproduces a supposedly popular opinion that is not advantageous to

democracy:
A.: Perhaps it is unfortunately the way people say: If what we have today is
or is supposed to be democracy, if this is democracy, the way things are
going in the country, then democracy is no good.

The other participants disagree with her excitedly, several at the same
time. Mrs. A. is lectured that one must not expect the group to tolerate
such a view. She reacts immediately and hurries to add:
A.: That’s exactly the bad thing about it, that it is repeated and that one
does not get to the bottom of things and that one does not actually make
an effort to take up democracy, intellectually.

Other participants act similarly to Mrs. A., advancing views for which
agreement is unlikely as those of other people or groups.
If participants want to learn about the group’s attitude on delicate sub­
jects, they like to start with harmless remarks, in order to touch the hot
potato only bit by bit. They, so to say, increase the dose of caution in the
statements. That this procedure is intended to provoke the group’s reac­
tion, which is necessary for their own orientation, is demonstrated by the
words of the participant E.:
£.: In order to arouse disagreement, I want to express myself in an exagger­
ated way. Since 1945, as they have tried to force the concept of “democ­
racy” on us in Germany, this feels to me like remedial help for children
who have been held back . . .

His preface shields him in any case. If disagreement emerges, he can re­
treat and say that he was trying to provoke; if no disagreement emerges—
and this is the case in our discussion—he can further develop his idea and
reveal that what he called an exaggerated expression is, as will be shown,
just a moderate part of his true view. He goes on to speak of National So­
cialism as an “experiment,” which “unfortunately” failed, because it was
impossible to keep the leadership under control. After that he marks his true
view as follows:
£.: I believe every place will get to this point in the not too distant future,
that is, an authoritarian form of government, in which democracy still
functions insofar as it occurs as background organization without
impeding decisions as such.—An American told me recently that the
United States is governed by a democracy that is really corrupt, although
he had drunk a lot of whiskey,.

It is easy to construe the affinity between the sentences cited first and
last. E. wants to say that there is no reason for a German to learn to strive
for a certain form of government if its downfall elsewhere is already
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~~ u y

evident. Hereby, the “exaggerated” assertion of “remedial help” is still the

mildest passage of his remarks. Much more radical is his final claim that
democracy is ruined everywhere. But even here he shields himself through
the disclaimer, which sounds almost like a concession to the idea of de­
mocracy, that democracy might still have a background function. Further­
more, he seeks to prevent a shock effect by giving the little anecdote of the
drunken American and, thus, addressing consent in matters that are all too
human. With the help of these little tricks, E. can venture to raise his state­
ments after his preliminary, cautious remarks stirred no objection, and in
doing so he can find out what the group will put up with.
The orientation phase, of feeling one’s way, which springs from the desire
for certainty and for discovering and finding commonalities between oneself
and others, is now over according to our model. Now, speaking figuratively,
the participants define rough contours for the field of free movement of
opinions, the range of the acceptable, the scope of tolerated views. The par­
ticipants begin to adapt their behavior accordingly. This takes place in the
adaptation phase.

3. Adaptation
The adaptation phase clarifies which people within the group adopt which
behavioral patterns. It is comparable to a crystallization process, the result
of which leads to a determinable structure of the group opinion.
The same form of appearance of adaptation can have different causes.
Two of the most important should be mentioned: (1) the adapting partici­
pant is labile or unstructured and actually adapts to another participant’s
view, sometimes without consciously accounting for it; (2) the adapting
participant adopts another’s attitude only outwardly, in order to conform,
while in reality he thinks completely differently and disguises his true opin­
ion in the face of others.
There are two other behavioral patterns that, from a psychological point
of view, have to be separated from both of those above. Yet they often be­
come manifest in a similar way: (3) a participant can actually be persuaded
by the arguments of another; (4) a participant thinks that an earlier speaker
took the words out of his mouth, i.e., both share specific, closely related
dispositions for opinions; thus, the later speaker would have expressed the
same thing as the earlier one in any case. These two processes cannot, of
course, be called adaptation. In an actual discussion these types of adapta­
tion overlap one another. For our example discussion, we only make use of
the first three types.
Reflecting earlier remarks is a clear sign of adaptation and sometimes
becomes manifest midsentence. Our participant T. tries to make up for a
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 118

lapse, so as not to offend several other participants. The following words

come during his longer explanations:
T.: . . . This is an artificial thing, all the unemployed. Many of those who
have been stuck here . . . or much more not stuck here, but who had to
take refuge here, this provides the best cannon fodder for them.

The words “or much more” (vielmehr) start the adaptation, because T. is
mildly alarmed to remember from earlier remarks that two group members
identified themselves as having been expelled. Of course, they would have
to feel offended if someone discussed their fate in such unfavorable terms.
T. cannot change the content of what has already been said; he tries by
way of form to make up for it by stopping his idea and talking about some­
thing else in order to wash away the bad impression. He seamlessly con­
nects to the sentence concerning cannon fodder:
T. : This is exactly how it’s going to be, when a troop is deployed, that the
Germans are located where things are worst, because not enough people
died in the bombings . . .

This is a very fine-tuned taking into consideration of what had been said
earlier, which now has its effect only formally. Most often, however, adap­
tation proceeds more primitively, in that a participant directly adapts to
another’s attitude.
Sometimes it seems as if the later speaker maintains the idea that he ar­
rived at his view without being influenced, while in principle he simply re­
formulates the idea expressed earlier by another participant. The following
example is a case in point. Referring to the change in America’s political re­
lations to Soviet Russia in the years after 1945, the participant T. says about
the American statesmen and their knowledge of Russia:
T : . . . in the end people suppose that a politician has a long view . . . The
entire (Bolshevistic) system actually has already existed for 20 years, and
there are enough emigrants who fled from Russia, who found a new home
in America . . .

The participant U. reproduces exactly the same content, simply in other

words:
U. : .. . and not a single American politician or senior official can make me
believe that he did not see the Soviet danger back then the same as today.
This is impossible!

Either he thinks that his stated opinion is entirely his own or he wants
to evoke this impression, because he does not refer to T.’s contribution.
This is a case of unconscious adaptation.
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 119

The few following words of the group member T. shed light on the social-
psychological element effective during adaptation. By all means, adapta­
tion is not always performed for the sake of others whom people wish to
please or whom people do not wish to have as enemies. Adaptation can well
be an indication of something lying deeper: the idea that the group is an
objective authority capable of deciding on correctness and incorrectness, on
truth or falsity. This is a symptom of clinging to authority. This also comes
through in T.’s words:

T: I have discussed this with several others and it is also my own

opinion . . .

The several others cited by T. are not participants in the discussion, yet
it stands to reason that he will say later: I participated in a discussion in
which people were of the same opinion. It is comforting to find opinions
to which one is predisposed in a group or to have them confirmed by it,
i.e., to experience the kind of collective reinforcement that American soci­
ology calls “social support” [English].13
Sociologists and psychologists have repeatedly stated that group mem­
bers are inclined to regard their group as an objective authority. In the end,
trust in the working of democratic institutions is based on the assumption
that the mistakes and eccentric opinions of individuals are cancelled out in
a sufficiently large collectivity. It is believed that, using Simmel's phrasing,
“collective opinion approaches objective truth.”14 If the individual observes
other people sharing his experiences and opinions, the content of these ex­
periences and opinions is “transplanted” from a sphere of pure subjectivity
into objectivity, as Vierkandt says. This is, he assumes, due to the fact that
the group is the natural source of objectivity.15 As Durkheim highlights, the
sanctioning of the group as objective authority causes adaptations, often in
the form of mere imitation. Imitation within a discussion simply means
repetition, as in the following passage:

D.: Let’s take an example from recent history for illustration. The German
people are absolutely against a war. Yet, we find the press full of topics
like military buildup and remilitarization, even though we have a
democratic government. Where, now, is the voice of the people?

Shortly after this, a second speaker puts the same idea in very similar
words:

M .:. . . even though we have a democracy, even though the German people
want peace, we find in the press the echo of war and war cries, the
tendency to make a possible war palatable to the people .. .
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 120

Merely repeating or expanding a contribution with the same content

happens quite frequently in the discussion. We find this particularly for
views that garner general consent, as would be the case in our model dur­
ing the familiarity phase.

4. Familiarity
All the phases described so far could have appeared in any discussion, even
one that does not develop toward firm group integration. The decision as
to whether the group finally integrates or splits is made only in the famil­
iarity phase. (Of course, whether its members act in parallel with one an­
other in an atomistic and unrelated way is decided earlier.) For our model
we leave aside the possibility of splitting.
Only familiarity allows for a general group consensus, as it is now con­
stituted in our example discussion. Meanwhile an atmosphere was created
in which the participants agree in principle and where a weak difference in
opinion shows itself at most in insignificant details, such as whether chari­
table gifts or “frontline soldier”-packages were sent to the German soldiers
in Russia during the Second World War. Yet on the questions they deem es­
sential, group members tend toward consensus in this phase. Thus, Mrs. M.
and Mrs. A. confirm their agreement:
M.: May I quickly say on that: a people will come together if it hasn’t been
filled with hatred, right.
A.: That’s it: A people comes together!
In.: That’s a very important thought.
M.: Yes, a people always finds itself.
A.: And also politics is just hatred in my eyes, where politics is done, it’s just
agitation against one country or another.

Large parts of the discussion consist of such passages, which are accom­
panied by approving murmurs and affirming nods from the listeners. One
contribution fits the next so well that sometimes one can succumb to the
illusion that only one person is speaking. Often, one participant even inter­
rupts another in order to complement, substantiate, or strengthen his state­
ment. Women in particular easily reach this level of mutual consent. In this
state of the group it happens now and then that a participant, completely
used to agreeing, inadvertently endorses contradicting views, without his or
the group’s realizing it.16 If a participant contradicts himself, if a later state­
ment is not in tune with an earlier one, this usually remains unnoticed by the
group. It has, so to say, a short memory. It is crucial that a second statement
contradicting the first is not contrary to the momentary group consensus.
Otherwise, it would be suspect and would certainly not evade attention.
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 121

If a participant is actually caught contradicting himself, he feels embar­

rassed. In the course of most of the discussions it became apparent that the
speakers were always anxious to maintain at least a formal consistency in
their statements or at least to reestablish the appearance of consistency for
the group, for example by pointing out that they were misunderstood.
In adapting to a newly formed group opinion some speakers also like
to appeal to a misunderstanding if suddenly changing sides to the group
opinion would set them into too strong of a contrast with their own ear­
lier statement. The following example illustrates this. The participant
T. claims unmistakably that the allies of the Second World War were of
the opinion that:
T.:. . . we (Germans) did not suffer enough on the front. They have to be
gotten rid of, because things are still proceeding according to the Morgen-
thau plan,* and they can write whatever they like in the newspapers. I
always believed: The Russians and the Americans fully agree in this point.
It is a matter of exterminating the German people .. .

The moderator expresses reservations as to the objective truth of this claim

and asks:
In.: Do you also believe that the Americans and the Russians agreed in the
case of Korea that there are too many Koreans in the world? .. .

Another speaker replies that he believes American politicians during the

war had a different attitude toward Germany than at present: now Amer­
ica feels threatened by Russia and wants to include Germany on the front
line against Russia. The world was simply divided into two large camps,
the Communists on one and the democratic governments on the other side.
Yet T. wants to prove that America and Russia can nonetheless agree, as
he says:
T: I’m of the opinion that there is not a large difference. In America, capital
reigns, in Russia, the dictatorship reigns. In the end, it is the same.

Yet when the investigator poses the specific question to the entire group
of whether they agree with T’s opinion—Russia and America agree on the

* Henry Morgenthau Jr., U.S. Treasury Secretary during the war, had proposed a plan for
de-industrializing Germany after the war so as to prevent Germany from being able to remili­
tarize. The plan was never formally implemented, though it served as a symbol for the belief
that America wanted to destroy Germany through a harsh, vengeful peace. It is not incidental
that Morgenthau was the highest-ranking Jew in American government. See Jeffrey K. Olick,
In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949. Chicago: Univer­
sity of Chicago Press, 2005.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — - 122

destruction of Germany—or of the other speaker’s opinion—America

wants to consolidate its position against hostile Russia with the help of
Germany—T. revises his initial thesis by taking refuge behind a supposed
misunderstanding:

T.: I was mistaken in this point, because I don’t want to say now that they
just want to destroy the Germans. They just use the Germans; the
ideologies of those two are opposed to each other, and the Germans are
the best instrument against this.

In principle, T. has surrendered completely; his self-esteem, however, does

not permit him to concede.
In the familiarity phase within our continuum of integration, critical con­
sciousness seems to recede to some degree. The group members, who no
longer regard each other as strangers and are less reserved than at the begin­
ning of the session, are more inclined to be impressed by the others’ state­
ments, to forget their own previously expressed attitude, and to let their new
attitude be prescribed by the group atmosphere. Those who want to influ­
ence the group are not excluded from this behavior. If this state has been
reached, the individual feels safe and secure within the collective. Then an
outright sense of togetherness is developed within the group. The idea of
not being accepted by the group or of being excluded from it as an indi­
vidual causes discomfort. The more closely bonded the group feels, the
higher, on the one hand, the incentive for the individual to dare to come out
with more extreme statements as well as, on the other hand, the risk of psy­
chic isolation if the group disavows an individual’s attitude. Groups with a
strong sense of togetherness often refuse outsiders in a particularly stringent
manner.17
The kind of isolation at issue here has been called “psycho-social isola­
tion” or “moral aloneness” by some authors.18 This means that the lack of
esteem from the group causes discomfort in the isolated individual. Soli­
tary confinement has been regarded as the worst punishment; yet physical
isolation—these authors argue—becomes unbearable for the person con­
cerned only when it includes “moral aloneness.” William Trotter's theory of
instinct interprets the fear of solitude as a feature of instinctive human herd
behavior, thus not subject to further analysis.19 Sigmund Freud, however,
derived the “herd instinct” as a reaction formation from primordial envy. Ac­
cording to him, not even group spirit or the “esprit de corps” disavows this
origin: “No one wants to stand out, every one must be the same and have
the same.”20 These are probably the unconscious motives in our group, too.
Social sense, the formation of norms, and control are mutually depen­
dent and develop at the same time, apparently in society as well as in our
group.21 We will observe these processes in the conformity phase.
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — * 123

5. Conformity
In our model session, we call conformity the phase during which there is no
deviation of individuals within the group from the general tendency of opin­
ion expressed. A consensus has been reached allowing no space for remnants
of deviation, let alone for antagonism. The members identify with one an­
other. They feel united. We can see this clearly in their behavior; they speak
more and more frequently of themselves as “we.” The individual seems to be
only a spokesman, even a function of the group. To a larger and larger de­
gree, his contributions conform to the group opinion. They are, in a way,
molded by it. Any individuality is more and more renounced. Quite fre­
quently, the group opinion in this phase expresses the dominant opinion.22
A major motive of conformity in our model group is collective defense
against reproach. It takes the form of reckoning: American acts of war are
used to compensate for the extent of German guilt. The following passage
documents this attitude and, at the same time, illustrates how a speaker
starting with light aggression can escalate to outright hostility if he is sup­
ported by the group.
At first, when the bombing of city X by the American Air Force comes
up, the participant J. argues, as outlined elsewhere,23 that the destruction
of X was “unfair,” since, in contrast to other cities, no war matériel was
produced there. The next speaker agrees with him and explains that “they”
consciously wanted to commit a crime.
Thereupon J., supported in his views, strikes out with full aggression:
It’s obvious: this was dirty business by the Americans. I have to say here:
The end justifies the means. The Americans didn’t attack many large
heavy industry enterprises (IG-Konzerne). Why? Because the major
capitalists’ dough was in there (approving laughter). Absolutely, it’s still
standing there, the heavy industry tower, it’s still standing upright,
straight as an arrow. Even more, the Volkswagen factory! Not a single
bomb in the Volkswagen factory! Certainly, they did not let it stand to
make us happy that we can build Volkswagens afterward. Again the
capitalists have wound up with significant sums.
It is interesting that J. introduces a completely new aspect to his own
argument and only remains constant in the tendency to attack “the” Ameri­
can as the enemy, a tendency for which he can count on the group’s ap­
proval. He has judged the group opinion accurately, as the reactions show.
The next speaker starts:
U .:. . . this was a completely clear consideration, since they not only left the
heavy industry factories in one piece, but they also left all the barracks in
one piece .. .
and other speakers deal with the topic similarly.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ' 124

The claim that it seems as if conformity and delivering monologues belong

together will not sound completely paradoxical after we have hinted at the
fact that a person might agree to two opposing arguments in quick succes­
sion, in order to conform in any moment and under any circumstances, and
after we have shown that a participant’s transition to a new idea does not
necessarily arise from logical continuity but from the group atmosphere. In
contrast to dramaturgical usage, we will call “monologues” those statements
showing not a logical but at most an associative link to the content of what
has been said before. A participant delivers a monologue when he does not
respond to the argumentation of the others, when he says something that just
crosses his mind and to which the discussion can contribute nothing but the
keyword. Monologues appear where no dialectical argument takes place;
the adaptation to the group atmosphere is indeed blind. One could assume
that monologues would have to retard or disturb the progress of the discus­
sion; instead, they can be found, as has just been said, namely in the confor­
mity phase, when the discussion seems to proceed completely regularly.
The explanation is easy. People in the group listen to each other only
superficially because they have the vague sense that they agree with the
others, that a given speaker will in the end argue in the sense of the group
(they, themselves, would do the same), and that the unanimity will not be
disturbed easily. Thus, nobody works to ensure that the object of discus­
sion stays the same, let alone that the thoughts stay within the bounds of
logic. Conformity is largely an emotional harmony. It allows for the kind
of reckless prattle that finds its typical expression in monologues.
What, then, underlies conformity from a psychological point of view?
Our hypothesis is: the identification of the group members with one an­
other. This requires a brief explanation. Identification means that an emo­
tional bond is formed between two or more persons. Freud explains the
nature of this bond in his theory of libido.24 Identification is an early form
of emotional bond in the life of a human being. (Roughly speaking: the boy,
for example, identifies with his father; he wants to be like him.) An emo­
tional bond at a later stage of development is the choice of an object (Ob­
jektwahl) (roughly: someone wants to possess a loved person). Identifica­
tion, however, can reappear regressively later on, as it becomes a substitute
for a libidinous object-bond; yet it can also—and this is important for our
analysis—“arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with
some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct.”25 In such
cases, Freud talks of a partial identification. Freud explains the emergence
of such identification with the idea that several persons have substituted
their ego ideal with one and the same object and that, thus, everyone iden­
tifies his own ego with the ego of the other.
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — 125

Freud studied identification for masses, in particular for those who have
a leader.26 At first, a leader seemed to him indispensable for the formation
of masses, i.e., for the emergence of emotional bonds constituting identifi­
cation. The individuals identify with one another by mutually accepting
the leader as ideal. Furthermore, the illusion exists that the leader loves all
of them with equal love. Freud himself, however, encouraged an investiga­
tion of whether the leader as an object of libidinal aspiration is nonetheless
substitutable for the nature of the group. We will come back to that ques­
tion in the next section.
Identification in our group is established such that one person perceives
commonalities with another, i.e., it is a “partial” one according to Freud.
The commonalities exist in that the people agree in either the attitude
or the intensity of the affective charge concerning a certain topic. In part,
we explained the orientation phase as a result of the search for such com­
monalities.
In the conformity phase—which we regard as the highest degree of
integration—identification of almost all of the conversation partners with
one another has been accomplished. We also recognize this in the paradoxi­
cal appearance that the group members are no longer listening properly to
one another. This demonstrates the primacy of the libidinal factor over ratio­
nality. The only ones who listen closely are individuals who want to object,
thus those who have not identified with the others. However, the other par­
ticipants, we should perhaps say more precisely, listen with half an ear,
secure in the knowledge of their agreement. They take in what is said enough
so that they can notice glaring deviations from conformity and that they can
register striking words—keywords, as it were—which, beyond the general
tendency of the utterance, are suited to arouse the latent joy of acclaim and
approval. Sometimes, the discussion gets hung up on a striking formulation
like the slogan below: “Think less politically—more economically!”
(Acclamation: Party discipline does not exist!)
K.: Everyone can do what he likes. He just has to pay more attention to the
economic situation.
A .:. . . We are too mired in the parties. We should have a voice from an
economic viewpoint instead.
(Acclamation: More economy and less politics!)
A.: Moreover, I believe that we should not vote based on party membership,
but economically. The party is no longer so interested in the masses. We
saw it before the war, where did that lead with 28 parties, and now it has
come that far again. They are just interest groups in my view. We should
think economically. Because with this party business we’ll go to the dogs,
just like before the war.
(Acclamation: Indeed! Then dictatorship will arise again!)
 Group Experiment and Other Writings —’ iz6

K.: I’m of the view, as Mr. A. says, away from the party system, I completely
agree, and setting up economic groups . . .
Z.: In any case, this would be much better, we would again work econom­
ically instead of politically. This would be much more reasonable. We
can’t get ahead at all with all these party politics.

The relapse to certain, not necessarily interesting, topics in which there

was unanimity even before conformity was achieved is a further indication
that conformity has developed. In our model group, this occurred for the
topic of youth. Dealing with this topic led to a not entirely concealed eu­
logy for National Socialism. What follows are six contributions of differ­
ent male and female speakers uttered at uneven intervals, sometimes after
dealing with other topics:
D.: I was 16 years old. We finished school in 1934, we were young then, we
were enthusiastic, one really wasn’t worried about anything. I took part in
many camping trips, and it was always nice. I have to say that in each
camp life was wonderful. We weren’t forced to do anything. We played,
we cooked, we learned, we learned to tinker, we learned sewing. It was
nice, really. Until 1938 . 1 didn’t go anymore after that. Until ’38, after­
ward, during the war, I was at home.
H.: I’d really like to come back to talking about youth again, youth during
the prewar period and now after the war . . . While I was in the Hitler
Youth, I have to say that it was very pleasant and very nice. And in
today’s youth? Take a poll about how many boys and girls are in organi­
zations today, it is certainly a minority of them . . . And the largest part,
they don’t get to see anything other than work, the café, smoking
cigarettes, standing on street corners and chatting up girls.
] .: . . . and then (1945) the Americans would have to have been smart
enough to organize these adolescents again right away, so that they would
get on the right track.
E: . . . well, back then we weren’t allowed to go to dancing lessons under 18.
Today the kids are 14 years old, they haven’t finished school, but insist on
going to dancing lessons . . .
A.: At any rate, I can only say that every human being who was in that
organization (the Hitler Youth) is—mind you in the peace time—a
completely different human being from today. Look at today’s youth at
the same age as back then and consider the difference . . .
/.: On the question of youth: Due to the huge differences between prewar
youth and today’s youth movements—we have to consider the following
cause: before the war, our youth had a goal and an ideal in front of it, and
in everybody they saw ideals posed before them, people who tried to
reach the ideal . . . the demand on the youth: to be hard as steel, tough as
leather, and quick as greyhounds. And we tried to strive for that. It was a
worthwhile idea, to be there for the people, and it was worthwhile to
make sacrifices for it. The war is over, today . . . who gives the youth an
idea, an ideology worth supporting?
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 117

Often the topics that the group returns to repeatedly are the sensitive
spots of the respective social group, its specific existential or prestige con­
cerns. For example, a sensitive spot for young men who find themselves
confronted with the possibility of being drafted is remilitarization. Or the
question of economic competition from foreign countries for a group of
exporters; or the measures of the Soviet government in a discussion group
made up of inhabitants of the border zone area.
For the observer of group behavior, conformity has a passive appearance.
In this phase the group members let things happen to them; they subordi­
nate themselves to the group, to its atmosphere and its vaguely sensed, un­
written codex (assimilating to the thinking ratified by the group, the mode
of argumentation etc.). This subordination happens voluntarily in the sense
that there is no apparent individual will to unify the group. The compulsion
for integration is an unconscious phenomenon, not the result of an indi­
vidual’s act of will. It can be regarded as proven that the consensus of even
just a majority within the group can have a suggestive effect. We touched
on that when we discussed the group as objective authority. Yet it would
have been premature to assume a suggestive effect already in the famil­
iarity phase within the discussion group. As Vierkandt says, the larger
the degree of “communal proximity” (in our terminology: the degree of
integration), the bigger impression the fact of agreement makes upon the
individual.27
Conformity is not only present in passive phenomena, it can become
manifest actively too. This is the case when the unity of the group is exposed
to attacks of any kind. Attempts to question, violate, or disrupt the confor­
mity of the group can emanate from individual participants, including the
moderator. If the group is tightly integrated, it answers these attempts by
excluding the attacker at once, by labeling him as enemy, by attacking him
on the group’s behalf. Often the moment of exclusion is audible: the group
laughs at the person concerned.
In our model session it is Ms. S. who is unwilling to approve of or even
put up with each unreasonable argument. She feels compelled to intervene
when the main speaker tries to rationalize his anti-American polemic:

M .:. . . Indeed, we want to become democrats—but not American demo­

crats. This is impossible, because we have never had what is essential
about America, the racketeering. Apparently we’ve now adopted that as
well. I remember very well that in 1935, 1936, 1937/38 I could leave a
bicycle standing next to a house for eight days, without locking it. And is
this possible today? Just leave something valuable around, it will be
stolen, as a principle anything will be stolen if it’s not screwed down or if
it’s not as heavy as rocks.
S.: That isn’t the Americans’ fault!
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 128

M.: It’s being brought in in a way, since where does all this stuff come from?
It’s just being imported from America.

Ms. S., however, does not cease in her effort to convince different speak­
ers that some of their statements are untenable. She fails with this inten­
tion, is unable to teach the group; instead, the aggression against her argu­
ments spreads to others, and the entire group fights against Ms. S., until, in
the end, she says:
S.: Yes, my standing is very difficult here. There was Mr. M. . . . yes, every­
body really is arguing against me!

On the other hand, an individual can enjoy the protection of the collec­
tive, to the extent that it is sufficiently integrated. The group members also
feel this, and some almost solicit the group’s protection. Mrs. H. tries to do
so with the following remark:
H. : . . . the Marshall plan does not erase the mistake they (the Americans)
made years ago. Roosevelt was about to . . . already the big evildoer, that
they . . . for God’s sake, b u t. . .

The “for God’s sake” is, as becomes clear from listening to the recording,
just performed shock; basically it is nothing but begging for collective cover.
It is also received with complete understanding by the group laughing ap­
provingly. The speaker feels secure in her daring, because she can count on
the group to provide cover. Thus, she mocks her own daring. The expecta­
tion of being protected by the group contributes considerably to reducing
psychic blockages which earlier prevented latent attitudes from individuals’
deeper layers from being verbalized.28
The more passively a group member has behaved toward the group’s
stream of opinion, the more his activity, and that of his colleagues in the
group, is aroused when an individual aspires to leadership. Group members
are ready to subordinate themselves to the group as a whole; they withhold
allegiance to an individual who seeks to “lead.” The group is very subtly
sensitive toward such intentions, and reacts with clear rejection of the in­
dividual who strives for leadership. This does not preclude one or another
from temporarily winning much acclaim or the group from regarding his
opinion as binding for the group or asking for his comment. But he is not
allowed to exert pressure, to show a desire to dominate.

6. Fading o f the Discussion

The essential manifestations of the phase of strongest integration have thus
been described, and it would seem that the model discussion can be con-
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~ 129

eluded here. Yet, this would mean that a remarkable phenomenon, which, as
the analysis shows, belongs logically to the process of integration, would
remain disregarded: the fading of the tension, the fading of the intensity of
the discussion.
As if the group has reached a goal with conformity preserved against vari­
ous obstacles and has accomplished an achievement after which no further
effort is necessary, the group’s activity decreases in some respects. From the
outside this state is characterized by less value being placed on incisive for­
mulations. The contributions become shorter, and fewer interruptions take
place. The content of most statements repeats things that were said earlier or
at least adds to topics already treated. One could exaggerate and say that the
situation appears as if the conversational partners have (almost) nothing left
to say to one another. The following evidence supports this interpretation:
G.: Mr. N., I don’t know if I understood you correctly. I want to make sure.
Do you believe in the possibility of an accord between East and West?
N.: No.
G.: No? Then I don’t have anything to say. But then I also absolutely don’t
know why they want to try to negotiate with them. Or did I misunder­
stand you? I want to make sure.
N.: No, in the sense of negotiating with the Soviets now?
(Shout: Yes, yes.)
N.: You can’t negotiate with gangsters!
G.: Then I don’t have anything to say, right?!

Thus, the group in no way falls apart with a decrease in tension. Pre­
cisely the consensus, the conformity, ensures that no more tense moments
arise in the group. The moderator often feels compelled to conclude the
session in the face of this development.
The fact that energy wanes after the group has become tightly inte­
grated can be explained in part as symptoms of fatigue. In addition, how­
ever, another factor might be at play. It seems as if the participants do not
seek to overcome their fatigue because integration itself matters more to
them than does the factual content of the discussion. As important as the
topics might be to some, the individuals should be primarily concerned
with adopting a certain position within or toward the collective and, thus,
creating and stabilizing the structure of the collectivity (to which they be­
long, or which they may want to impress). To a large extent, the facts only
provide a vehicle for the discussant to achieve collective identification. For
them, the latter is the internal purpose of the gathering; when it is achieved,
the energy, too, is exhausted, and the discussion wanes.
In other words, it seems as if the function of the discussion for our par­
ticipants is more to effect a certain sociopsychological situation and
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 130

constellation than to address an objective question. If this is true, it implies

a warning to be cautious about statements of public opinion. It would be
wrong to interpret them according to their content as the conviction of
the speaker, since they are first and foremost formed by the person’s attach­
ment to a social situation, by the pursuit of belonging to a collectivity or
by bestowing a certain form on it. These motives are more important than
rationality, which is often used only in the service of such aspirations. Here
we have one of those mechanisms before us through which social tenden­
cies prevail even against rational interests of the individuals. The identifi­
cation with what people perceive as preset, as objective feeling, matters
more than the expression of private beliefs, and this relativizes the notion
of opinion.
After the description and explanation of the model session, it seems use­
ful to present a scheme to illustrate the individual phases of integration,

Table 4.1. Scheme of our model of integration

Phase of Discussion Manifestation Hypothesis on Causes

Foreignness Timid phrases; tentativeness;

“looking over a shoulder”
Orientation Cautiousness, stimulating and Desire for certainty; search for
provocative statements commonalities
Adaptation Consideration of preceding Need for consent; satisfaction
statements; repetition with the validation of one’s
disposition or opinion; group
as “objective authority”
Familiarity Reactions toward other group Familiarity with attitudes of the
members; statements of group members; feeling
common sentiment; comfortable in the collective;
complementary acclamations: fear of isolation
consensus
Conformity Uniform group opinion; no Infection; “group suggestion”;
deviation of individuals; identification; care for the
“monologues”; retreat to cohesion of the group
certain topics; ganging up on
outsiders; defense against
aspirations for leadership;
covering up of faux pas
Fading of the Fading of tension; decrease of Satisfaction with the achieved
discussion intensity of the discussion, conformity; fatigue
inattentiveness; repetition
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — 131

their manifestations, and some hypotheses on the causes of the phenomena.

In regarding the scheme, we remind the reader (as always) that the connec­
tions were established theoretically. It could well be possible (and probably
is the case in reality) that factors that are listed as decisive for a certain
phase of discussion play, in some cases, the crucial role in a different phase.
We are not trying to depict the full variety of interdependencies.

II. Tendencies of Integration and Disintegration

We now turn to what the actual conditions for the realization or nonreali­
zation of integration look like in the group discussions. With this, we be­
gin correcting our model based on reality. The next task, already begun, is
contrasting the proceedings of the discussion in characteristic groups with
the model constructed here.

i. Factors Facilitating Integration

Hardship Community The social-political situation of the months in the

winter of 1950-51, during which the group discussions took place, greatly
facilitated integration of the ad hoc arranged groups because at that time in
Germany strangers came into contact with one another much more com­
monly than in so-called normal times, which provide less opportunity for
contact. The common habits of the time of hardship, which all had to suf­
fer under the circumstances, persisted; people had long formed the habit of
exchanging thoughts with strangers, sharing woes, or griping in public
shelters and in lines in front of grocery stores or the housing office.
Even though consciousness of social stratification had increased by the
time of the study, people were still strongly influenced by the collapse of
1945. The normalization of the governmental, economic, professional, and
private conditions was still in the early stages. Remnants of the feeling that
Germans constituted a large community of hardship were still alive.
In such an atmosphere, many people showed a marked disposition to
speak. People did not mind talking to strangers if they could hope for sym­
pathy for their own situation. As far as possible, our discussion groups were
arranged so that there were no overly great social differences between the
members of the same group session.
Of course, the discussants did not say that they felt able to talk freely
due to the fact that as Germans they all shared the same fate. Yet our con­
clusion is probably justified because there was frequent talk of exactly this
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 132

common situation, from which solidarity among all Germans would have
to result; it was just not directly explicitly related to the disposition to give
one’s opinion.
The bonding feature of this common hardship is also emphasized by the
speakers of a group of unemployed cited below:

Z.: But the letter writer doesn’t say why we can’t commit ourselves to
democracy overnight: there are 7 million refugees from the East, 1Vz
million unemployed and millions of welfare pensioners who have an
income significantly below the subsistence minimum. These social
problems haven’t existed in any democracy yet . . . We’ll arrive at a
democracy, sooner or later .. .
H.: I still want to say the following: We mustn’t forget that we lost the war
and that the powers opposed to our people brought about an even more
difficult predicament than before. I actually want to use the expression
that Germany is over-burdened (überhitzt), i.e., it’s a real trick to feed 50
or 59 million or even much more from this little piece of soil we live on*

In all these statements the word “we” stands for “we Germans.”29

Influence o f the Discussion Topics As we saw in the quantitative analy­

sis,30 the basic stimulus touched on some topics that were particularly
emotionally charged for a lot of participants at the time. The participants
were so captivated by them that they fell back on just these topics continu­
ally, without adhering to the thematic continuity of the group discussion.
The questions of guilt and defense, occupation authority, and democracy
were in a sense like catalysts suited to effect integration. Only topics that
involved worries, hardships, and interests close to the social group were
up to the task of catalyzing integration.
The integrating effect of the topics touching on immediate interests of
the groups appeared most clearly among the groups of farmers and in
some groups of refugees. Evidently the discussion had the function of an
emotional release valve; the speakers wanted to relieve themselves of their
burden, they were perhaps even thankful for the opportunity to let their
hardships be heard by “higher ups,” the “Gentlemen in Bonn.” The mod­
erator reports on the behavior of a group of Bavarian farmers:

Moreover, it became apparent that some participants had something on their

mind that they wanted to get off their chests on this occasion . . . The older
ones spoke with emotional turmoil.

* In “Guilt and Defense” Adorno quotes this same passage but uses only the 50 million
figure (Adorno 2010, 91).—Eds.
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~~ 133

And among a group of farmers from the Main area, the following remark
was dropped:

A.: That entirely depends on what comes of this discussion, whether it

matters, whether the office to which this is sent, whether they really take
the thing seriously . . . and the conditions will be changed; if not, you can
throw this machine (indicating the tape recorder) into the river, because
none of it will matter . . .

The participants in this and many other discussions were happy that
their words could have an effect beyond the circle they were otherwise ac­
customed to. The recording guaranteed that they were not just speaking
for the moment.

Feeling o f One's Own Importance After the group discussions, most of the
participants said they did not regret the time spent in the discussion. The
majority even expressed spontaneously and very pointedly a desire to
be able to participate in such a group session again. We have reason to as­
sume that we have before us the effect called “group cohesiveness” [En­
glish] in American “Group Dynamics Research.”31 This effect of cohesion
itself results from the possibility of satisfying psychic needs and wishes
which group membership seems to provide. By counting and measuring,
American experiments have supported the hypothesis that the more group
membership is a means for satisfying needs, the more desirable it is for
the individual.32
In the case of our discussions, the satisfaction of demands can be seen in
the discussant’s feeling of being taken seriously for the duration of the dis­
cussion, of being an accountable, acting subject. The sense of authority to
speak as a group member authorized, as it were, on behalf of the many who
were in the same position (“I suggest we ask the people, i.e., us here”) is
crucial. It functioned as an integrating factor. People who are weighed down
by the feeling of their own insignificance and powerlessness were particu­
larly grateful that for once their words would be heard. At the conclusion of
a session with peasants they said:

Acclamation: This should be done more often, so that the little people also
get a chance to speak!

Unemployed or poor participants, who were forced to live under the most
meager conditions, showed a particular tendency to play real parliament in
the sessions. In one of these groups, genuine speeches to the people were de­
livered. We found a strong affinity for the cliché “Mr. previous speaker” in
groups with low-ranked social status. This holds for groups who placed high
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 134

value on their views being made widely accessible. Participants concurred

with “previous speaker” in groups in which participants addressed each
other with the informal “du.” The words “previous speaker” and “concur”
were correlated in a stereotypical way throughout the discussions.
The dream of achieving something through ones words can be inferred
from the following contribution from a refugee:

X.: . . . And that’s the idea, and over and over I’m glad that we’re speaking
so clearly in discussions, because, on the basis of our experience in life as
little people, we can finally tell these big statesmen what they did
badly . . .

Apparently, it is not just the simple drive for expression finding its satis­
faction in the group session, but, beyond that, the wish to achieve something
with words.

Delegate Role Our participants felt important as spokesmen for many

others. They were particularly encouraged by the introductory speech of the
moderator. He had emphasized that all are speaking on behalf of those who
agree with them. The basic stimulus only spoke of “the” Germans, “the”
German women, of the conditions in America in their entirety, so that no
one had to feel addressed as an individual. The discussion was limited to
so-called political questions; the experience and welfare of the individual,
as much as it might be influenced by the political situation right down to
the last detail, was not actually at issue.
Certainly, the organizer’s agenda-setting would not alone have moved all
participants to abstain from discussing their private problems if a social-
psychological mechanism had not exerted its influence: making private
emotions taboo. If individuals violated this norm, the group’s shying away
from intimacy became all the more apparent. In a few cases, the most pri­
vate things were articulated—thus, a woman describes her sterilization by
the “health authorities” of the Third Reich in detail with all physical
symptoms—and such contributions always seemed like foreign intrusions
within in the overall context; they remained unrelated to what happened
otherwise in the group discussion. When private emotions came up, an at­
mosphere of embarrassment was regularly created; emotions were only
accepted if they could legitimate themselves as those of a collective.
Even if the participants gave an account of their experiences or described
their own situation, they did so as representatives of a group, not as human
beings with individual fates. What they had suffered, what they demanded,
they experienced or they desired not as Mr. or Mrs. X., but as “Sudeten Ger­
man refugee,” as member of the “peasantry,” as “young socialist,” as “re-
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — 135

turnee.” They acted as representatives of a collective from which they drew

their power.
It has already been said that members of established groups could count
on everyone’s agreement if they acted as the speaker of the social group to
which all assembled people belonged. By the same token, some individuals
felt empowered to oppose the discussion group on the basis of their con­
sciousness of membership in a different group, for example, a political party,
whose official views they espoused in a group that was contrarily disposed.
This was the case for two communist women in a prevailingly democratic-
minded group of women. The participants played a role in the discussion,
and the integration of a discussion group depended largely on whether the
roles of the individual speakers were complementary.
While insecurity about the speakers’ own roles and those of the other
participants frequently prevailed in the arranged groups, the roles were
fixed from the outset in some established groups. The individual roles were
defined by the situation, or, more specifically, by each individual’s idea of
what the others expected from him or her.33 Sometimes the group articu­
lated what it expected from an individual: a rural group literally asked the
mayor of their village to play the role of the mayor in the discussion. It was
a forgone conclusion that he would have to start the discussion, as per con­
vention, and he met these expectations.
Thanks to the precise information from the moderator about how a
group of former general staff officers behaved immediately before and
after the discussion, we can see clearly how the participants in this group
reassumed particular roles they had had to give up since the end of the
war.34 They used the discussion as an opportunity revert to their old status,
at least based on their behavior, and to act as if they had influence over deci­
sions of their superior, as they had in the past. Participant M. in particular
completely changed his behavior based on whether he was speaking in the
session or privately. In the discussion he put himself in the role of the chief
of general staff of an army corps reporting to the General in charge, where
the greatest sobriety, clarity, and weighing up the pros and cons was de­
manded. He asked,

M.: . . . that we say what we think entirely openly . . .

and advocated a “completely dispassionate view.” He stuck with these rules

as long as he stayed in his role. Yet as soon as he had cast it off, a com­
pletely different behavior appeared. The investigator reports:

In the case of M. it struck me that, after the recording, he said, so to speak,

what he had avoided saying earlier. He had saved up his entire arrogance for
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ■ 136

the private talk. The imprecise and unimaginative character of his private
statements also caught the attention of the moderator.

Systematic observation in future group experiments will also be able to

provide further material for the phenomenon of role-playing.

Social Control All of what has been dealt with so far in terms of collective
psychic processes within the group can be traced back to the effectiveness
of “social control” [English] in the broadest sense. The social control mech­
anism can be seen in that the individual consciously or unconsciously an­
ticipates others’ reactions when in their presence and adapts his or her be­
havior accordingly.35 The role of social control is of special importance for
our study goals insofar as we can identify in our discussion groups a social
agent that effectively makes the prevailing ideology in society the “domi­
nant” one. General standards (e.g., “We Germans . ..”) and group standards
(e.g.,“We Catholics . ..”) are imposed upon the individual by “functionaries
of the dominant ideology.” Their function is to exert pressure. If a function­
ary of society is an individual, we are dealing with a person of authority, an
“opinion leader” [English]. He can, as we will see in the following examples,
come into conflict with another agent of social control [English]. In our ex­
ample, it is the group itself that is able to impose a certain ideology via the
person of authority. It is important here to note the connection between
social control and the individual’s anonymity within the discussion group.
The more confident the individual participant is in his anonymity, the less
he is subject to social control and vice versa. This hypothesis, however, has
to be qualified because of the other factors alongside individual identifiabil-
ity and the expectation of reward and punishment influencing the individ­
ual within the group, e.g., the desire to be seen, even by people one does not
know personally, as a decent human being, a good patriot, a loyal comrade,
or not to be regarded as an outsider.
In general, however, social control will be most effective if the individual
knows and respects its functionaries.
Of course, this is especially so where certain concise norms of behavior
have formed for the relationship between the individuals and specific others
(e.g., superior—subordinate). We found this in a group of nurses with their
head nurse, among a youth organization and its regional leader, as well as
among a group of resettled Germans who already met for discussion out­
side the study, and in which the main speakers of the regular meetings also
dominated in this, i.e., functioned as opinion leaders [English]. Control can
also be located on a nonpersonal level. For example, within a student group,
observers could detect a kind of intellectual control, i.e., the participants
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~ 137

considered the knowledge value of what was said and were sensitive when
the intellectual standard sank.
A well-integrated group can, however, revolt against the pressure exer­
cised by a superior if the superior’s claim for authority conflicts with the
group’s advocated ideology. In a group of urban police officers, the social
control exercised by an individual because of his rank changed into the col­
lective group’s control, to which the individual who had lost his authority
willingly submitted later on. The process is described below: the highest
ranking officer of the mentioned police group acted with a notable claim to
prominence from the beginning of the discussion, after he felt that a certain
amount of esteem was paid to him. It was left to Mr. Unger* to open the
discussion, and it was soon apparent that the participants were also obe­
dient to his views. U. spoke the most of all participants. He reinforced his
words by banging on the table. The other group members hardly dared
to take a stand on a new topic before U. had spoken. At first, they cau­
tiously stated the bare facts, without taking a stand. They spoke more freely
only after U. had stated his attitude toward the respective topic. However,
they did not take the risk of an overt protest, but sowed the seeds for an
opposing position by suggesting that the problem could be considered from
different points of view (for example, an economic instead of a political
one).
The situation came to a crisis when the group had to realize that, unlike
the majority of police officers, U. did not base his arguments on the political
theses of Social Democracy, but held a contrary view. The fact that he did
not accept the demand for new elections for the Bundestag—which the SPD
[Social Democratic Party] had put forward back then—was already taken
badly. His position began to teeter without his being conscious of it at first.
With complete confidence in his dominant position, he made the mistake
of letting himself get carried away, remarking that the “capitalist” had
nothing to gain from a war, a view that was ideologically diametrically op­
posed to the group. He tried to make his voice heard against the building
objections with the words “Gentlemen,gentlemen!”, which aroused laugh­
ter from the group. His reaction
U.: You can laugh or not, I don’t care!

proved that he felt his reputation fading.

Once the opposing group appeared on the scene, the rebellion against U.
could no longer be stopped. Direct and carefully formulated objections

Here the text gives the full surname (Unger) instead of the customary first initial.—Eds.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~~ 138

against U.’s opinion appeared now. Everyone thinking of him as “leader,”

including U. himself, sensed the loss of his prestige, and U. tried to rescue
himself from psychological isolation at a certain point by participating in
the debate again after a period of silence, when his opinion could be in­
serted without breaking with the newly-existent group opinion.
This example illustrates two of our hypotheses. (1) Highly integrated
groups seem to accept only the group itself, in its entirety, as the controlling
authority and resist individuals’ dominance. (2) An individual excluded from
the group is generally unable to bear the tension of “psychological isola­
tion”36 and, thus, seeks reconnection with the group through conformism.

Aggression Against Out-Groups Our observation is that integration be­

gins before the group is united; we are inclined to classify similarity of reac­
tions as a symptom of integration. Yet in the passages of the discussion with
advanced integration, when consensus within the group is already present,
we find that the participants mostly united around a negative attitude,
opposing a person, a view, an institution. This fact was described (but not
explained) for masses by Georg Simmel in an excursus on the negativity of
collective patterns of behavior:

Negation is simply what is easiest, and, thus, large masses, whose elements
cannot agree on a positive goal, unite around it. The negative character of the
bond uniting the large group becomes evident particularly through its norms.
This is already indicated by the phenomenon that binding arrangements of
any kind have to be the easier and less extensive, the larger the scope of ap­
plication is supposed to be, all else being equal.37

Freud assigned negative patterns of collective behavior a different priority

and explained their integrating effect. According to his theory, in some cases
they make possible the emotional bonds by which a mass becomes a psy­
chological mass—becomes integrated, as we would say. He means those
cases where neither a common leader nor a guiding idea prompts the indi­
viduals to identify with one another. Then—according to Freud—“the
hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the
same unifying way, and might call up the same kind of emotional ties as
positive attachment.”38 With this sentence Freud indicates that a leader
is not required for a mass to be constituted.
Now, our groups are leaderless, yet they are not psychological masses. In
the groups, emotions are low intensity, and we will have to substitute the
word aggression for hatred in the Freudian sentence. Aggression toward
the outside integrates our groups internally. The discussion groups become
aware of their own unity by feeling that they are in opposition to an out-
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — 139

group39 or to an actual or fictitious common enemy. For the effect of in­

creasing integration through common aggression, it does not make any dif­
ference who the enemy is. (Studies on persons inclined to have prejudices
have shown that the out-group or the enemy is interchangeable, without
the structure of the prejudice being altered.40)
In our sessions, the basic stimulus addressed all of our group members
as members of the large group of Germans, and supposedly in the voice of
someone who does not belong to this group himself. As has been highlighted
several times, Colburn's remarks had to provoke many to resist; thus the
division between the in-group and the enemy was predetermined by the
stimulus. By presenting an outsider, Sergeant Colburn, in the central func­
tion of setting the provocative terms of the discussion, the experimental
design at the same time offered a target for latent aggression.41
The fact that the aggression shifted in very many cases toward the entire
out-group, of which Colburn was considered a representative, toward the
Allies or the occupying force, does not change anything about this constella­
tion. The integrating effect, for the sake of which the aggression of the group
toward the outside is mentioned here, persisted nonetheless; the group be­
came integrated through the common emotional charge in the hostile state­
ments against the one enemy.
If Colburn's criticism of “the” Germans was to be defended, the partici­
pants sometimes narrowed their own group from the entire people to the
smaller one of the social stratum with whose members they were sitting
around a table, and finally to the group of the other participants with
whom they identified. This took the form of exempting themselves from
Colburn's charges as “shipyard worker,” as speaking for “the [social] cir­
cles around me,” or as “garden plot holder.” The participants met such re­
marks with approval; the one who made the remark was authorized as
speaker of the group by acclamation. This is thinkable only in tightly inte­
grated groups.
The aggression mentioned—as a rule disclosed cautiously and increased
only when the participants realized that they were tolerated by the mod­
erator and the group—was in no way directed at Colburn exclusively. Its
object could just as well have been an outsider of the group, a subgroup,
“the” Jews, “the” refugees, “the” capitalists, or the government in Bonn,
without impairing the integrating effect of affective expression.

2. Factors Facilitating Disintegration

These pages have not made a secret of the fact that they could not convey
a complete picture of the dynamic of the discussion. This is due to the
 Group Experiment and Other Writings ~ 140

restriction of the report to those phenomena associated with integration,

that only the one aspect is addressed—integration. Hence, the analysis risks
suggesting one-sided ideas to its reader. This section is meant to guard
against this risk.
In each discussion group there is a latent tendency for disintegration. In
many groups it becomes manifest. Psychological experiments have re­
vealed that a number of persons in almost any small group are inclined not
to be influenced by the judgments of the majority.42 In the same way, no­
where near all of our participants in every discussion group merged into
an undifferentiated unity. There were indeed a number of sessions in which
there was antagonism, there were variations in the strength of integration
over the course of the discussion, and finally there were participants who
did not participate in the discussion at all—the silent participants. As
concerns the motivations for their reservation we depend on speculation.
Since some of them, as other investigations seem to show, deviate from
the group opinion,43 hypotheses on the factors causing or influencing si­
lence are interesting for us. It is plausible that these factors are at the same
time those of disintegration. We imagine that the following factors facilitate
disintegration as well as influence silence to an unknown extent: lack of
interest, diverging interests, social distance, contact problems, psychologi­
cal antagonism, and factual disagreement. Each of these is subject to brief
reflection.

Lack o f Interest We highlighted above the emotionally charged topics and

the close interests of the group as discussion contents that function most
strongly as catalysts for integration. They have in common that they con­
cern the individual in his emotional realm, that he is affected by them. The
individual’s ability to belong to the group would therefore have to decrease
to the degree to which he is not touched by the central topics. This hypothe­
sis is supported by the material. The patients of a recovery home for mothers,
for example, hardly knew how to deal with the basic stimulus. The indi­
vidual stimuli of the letter remained without impression or even echo. In
this group, the lack of comprehension toward the discussion topics ex­
erted an almost atomizing influence. It can be assumed that among these
very poor women the immediate hardships of each individual were so over­
whelming that no psychic energy was left for even the most minimal dis­
tance. The session was ended early because it was unproductive. Only four
of eleven women had spoken and these only after the moderator had asked
them for their experiences during the flight from Eastern Germany; the
others could not be moved to speak despite being directly addressed. The
women said after the discussion that they had never bothered about such
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions 141

things and did not have anything to say on the topics. The same was expe­
rienced with women in a housing camp. In these sessions the interrelations
common in the other groups were missing. We can connect this with the
hypothesis that an individual uninterested in the topics within an inter­
ested group is not integrated into the group. Now, since the interest of the
individual can change from topic to topic, it can be assumed that a change
in topic can also involve variation in the attachment of the individual to
the group.

Diverging Interests A bridge from the type of group where integration

does not take place due to a lack of interest to one whose members remain
unconnected as a result of diverging interests can be found in an arranged
group of overnight guests in a public shelter in a large city. This discussion
group comprised eighteen men between 25 and 70 years of age from all
areas of the Federal Republic, mostly with general and middle school edu­
cations. Several refugees and people who had been expelled from the Soviet
zone were among them. Some had recently accepted a job in the respective
city; most of them were unemployed and were searching for jobs. At most
two of them worked in the same occupation.
Despite its being lively, the discussion was almost completely incoher­
ent, unconnected, monadic. While those who had begun to create a se­
cure occupational existence again were most likely to be appreciative
and interested in the topics of the basic stimulus, those who were still
roaming the streets, who were (as the moderator put it) “in an extreme
borderline situation,” were not receptive to the discussion topics. Each
described his own hardships and distresses without eliciting understand­
ing or sympathy. Each was too concerned with himself. The impression
of embarrassment (mentioned above) arising in the group after revealing
private emotions did not fail to appear here as well. The interests di­
verged to such an extent that the group did not even become weakly in­
tegrated. Rather there were indications that the group was splitting into
two parties, one with limited interest in the topics of the investigation and
one without any.
Kurt Lewin's observation that a group can endure as unity only if
its elements do not exceed a certain degree of difference seems to per­
tain to this group. The boundary between bearable difference and that
disrupting the group is, according to Lewin, relatively low in Ger­
many.44 With the exception of the group just described, however, there
is none that was so heterogeneous, even among our arranged groups. As
it seems according to Lewin's theory and to the case described, integra­
tion can hardly be expected in very heterogeneous groups. According to
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 142

our findings, social distance and differences in education within the

group inhibit integration most strongly. Through them, a part of the
group can become timid enough that it does not connect. The absence of
such control was felt in a group of women, who explained to the mod­
erator after the discussion that they would not have spoken so freely in
the presence of their husbands.

Contact Problems If individual participants are unable to establish a

connection to the group, numerous reasons, summarized here as contact
problems, are possible: extreme narcissism with starkly autistic patterns of
behavior on the one hand, self-consciousness and various feelings of insuf­
ficiency on the other. While persons whose behavior is determined by the
latter mostly do not talk, narcissism permits completely different patterns of
behavior: silence, trumpeting one’s importance, trying to dominate, oppos­
ing, having the last word, etc. Frequently such participants are not fully
integrated into the group if it has attained a certain degree of unity. In an
arranged group of female and male patients in a hospital, for example, the
participant M. contributed considerably to the group’s integration around
a common positive attitude toward nationalistic ideas. And yet he was not
accepted as leader, probably because of his authoritarian manner. He men­
tioned, when the congruence of his views and the general opinion of the
group had emerged and he felt certain about his influence, that he was a
Hitler Youth leader at first and an active soldier later on. Thus, he himself
indicated the points from which the most effective opposition against him
could proceed. C.,* one of the youngest participants, who was not quite in
agreement with M. already beforehand, tried to attack M. as a former Hitler
Youth leader:
O.: Yes, I want to come back to Mr. M again, . . . it might be quite nice that
the youth back then were raised exactly like today, this might be, but
when I was in the Hitler Youth, we had to enter, when we were 10 years
old, we were required to go there. If we didn’t appear for our service on
Tuesday or Saturday, there was a punishment, a disciplinary punishment
right away. That is pure force!

M., conscious of being unable to object to such widely known facts,

simply evaded by saying:
M.: Unfortunately, I’m not aware of that, because I entered the work
command in 1936.

The speaker is referred to as C. in the text but O. in the quotation.—Eds.

 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — 143

The participant U., who up to that point had shared the views of M. and,
like him, acted as a kind of spokesman, saw that the time had come to sup­
plant his rival. In clear opposition to M.’s glorification of soldiers’ work, he
commented ironically:

U.: And the army life, it was nice!

M. replied:

M.: Wait a minute. I spoke to a very old communist who absolutely despises
war to the last. And I told him: Listen, dear grandpa, soon you’ll be 80
years old and your great-grandchildren will play on your knees, and you
won’t know what to do, then you fetch the picture box and at the very
bottom, under the newsprint, a yellowed picture comes up, you’ll take it
in your hand and say: Gosh, here I am as a soldier, those were good times!
Guaranteed, everybody says that!

M. had to use the trick of citing his own view as that of the supposed
addressee (whose answer he did not mention at all), but this still did not
gain attention. U., however, was not impressed by this statement; he con­
tinued the attack against M.’s opinion in a very drastic manner of speaking.
In order to take the aces from M.’s hand, he said:

U.: . . . I carry with me my discharge letter from the army, it is not like
th at. . .

However, what he learned “among the Prussians” was “not so very de­
cent.” With very vivid words he critiques “the” Germans’ fearful respect
for authority:

U.: This is what the German suffers from: Fear of the one who is called
doctor or whatever, what have you, or director or whatever, his knees
shake . . .

Yet U.’s usurping behavior was also rejected by the group, and he was
told:
T.: . .. just start with yourself, when you’re in your job . . .

From this point onward, M., like U., no longer had a major influence
on the group and participated noticeably less in the discussion than
beforehand.
Only in rare cases do speakers who are overtly seeking a leading posi­
tion manage to win over a subgroup within the discussion forum. When
subgroups are formed, these become integrated more in a narrower
sense, yet also do not allow an individual to become too strong; over the
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — - 144

long term, they, too, accept only the supremacy of the collective, not of
an individual.

Antagonism In case of antagonism within the entire group, the fronts can
very well shift, and the composition of individual subgroups can change.
Yet, as a matter of fact, constant parties evolved in the majority of really
antagonistic groups. The opposing subgroups then feuded throughout the
entire discussion, completely independent of the topic and, thus, of factual
concerns. Evidently personal, not content-related, factors influenced the
stated opinions. The antagonism was therefore predetermined, inherent
in the persons. In very many cases we succeeded in tracing the differences
responsible for the antagonism. Mostly these were ideological oppositions,
which were activated by the basic stimulus. Thus, an arranged group with
long-established residents and refugees was dominated by an antagonism
between the two parties, one of which argued for a militant nationalism
while the other advanced pacifistic ideas. In a group of women, two com­
munists formed one side, women from the bourgeois class the other. We
mentioned above that a group that remained completely atomistic (made
up of overnight guests in a public shelter) began to be grouped into em­
ployed and unemployed. Also, preexisting religious tensions could lead
to antagonism during the discussion. Hostilities caused by living closely
together in emergency shelters were not suspended during the discussion.
Often two generations confronted one another in a hostile way, and among
women an animosity between unmarried and married women seems to
have existed at times.
Of course, there were enough cases of opposition based on factually and
not personally motivated differences in opinion, even if they were rarer than
the discussed personal antagonisms. Factually justified objections often met
a willingness to respond to the arguments of the opponent. In contrast to
personally motivated antagonism, they did not, as a general rule, lead to
personal groupings, which themselves could have tended toward integra­
tion or disintegration.
From all this it follows that we may not draw the conclusion from the
present study on discussion groups that every group must invariably
become a firm unity, in which the individual is collectivized and shaped
by force.45 Even if adaptation to the group situation is almost never
absent, few groups attain the highest degree of integration, and only a
fraction of these keep it for the entire discussion. Moreover, there can
be no talk of the individual inevitably submitting to the group. In most
groups there are individuals who more or less stave off the pressure
from the group. Apart from that, there are forces in both directions
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions ~~ 145

effective in every group—toward integration as well as toward disinte­

gration. The contradictory elements are understood in their proper
weights when they are considered against the background of the dynam­
ics of integration.

III. Some N otes on Experiences with the Course of

the Discussion in Individual Discussion Groups

The investigation permitted insights into the concrete, observable indi­

vidual processes of the society-forming progress of integration. The anal­
ysis of the course of the discussion among our groups has shown that
strong immanent forces bear on the participants even within arranged
groups to move in a series of repeatedly observable steps from the initial
phase of strangerhood to conformity, i.e., to the formation of a unitary
group opinion. We have also seen that, besides the factors facilitating in­
tegration, there are forces that do not allow for integration and may even
dissolve the already advanced process of integration (factors facilitating
disintegration).
We were in the position to trace the dynamics of arranged groups, i.e.,
of collectives comprising individuals who met for the first time. We could,
furthermore, compare the behavior of these newly formed groups with
those of previously established groups during the discussion. This demon­
strated that after a certain period of time many arranged groups displayed
the same phenomena as the established ones, and that the process of inte­
gration passes through at least the first few phases depicted in the model.
To the extent that the arranged groups were homogeneous, they did not
only prove to be unitary in themselves but also became similar to the es­
tablished groups. If an unbiased observer were to join group sessions that
had already lasted a while, he would have hardly been able to determine
whether he was observing an arranged homogeneous group or an estab­
lished group.
This seems to strengthen our thesis that the individuals were primarily
concerned with the satisfaction of psychological needs during the discus­
sions. We concluded this, as should be recalled, mainly from the fact that the
intensity of the discussion decreased after integration was achieved, as if
the unification of the group had been the goal the participants were aiming
for in their discussion. Now, we wish to generalize this conclusion insofar
as individuals collected in a new group mold the group according to their
needs. The most urgent need seems to be in line with fleeing from painful
solitude and being admitted into a kind of community, even if only for a few
 Group Experiment and Other Writings 146

hours. Yet one of the constituting elements of the feeling of community is

the dominant ideology. During the discussion it becomes evident what opin­
ions and reactions the individual has to show in order to be accepted by
the group. Satisfying this demand is easier for the individual participant the
stronger his conscious or unconscious wish for belonging.
All observers of our discussions were impressed most strongly by the
emotional involvement, joy, and sometimes even enthusiasm with which
the participants talked in most groups. The need for expression was very
high, and the speakers were visibly happy to be in a situation in which they
could satisfy it. There is no other explanation for the repeatedly articulated
and spontaneous wish to hold further discussions; that is to say: to repro­
duce the situation in which the participants felt comfortable. The fact that
the content of what was said is secondary to libidinal psychological motives
has already been discussed in the description of the model.
Remarkably, not only the active participants—the speakers—agreed
to the proposal to have another discussion, but the inactive—the silent
participants—did too. (Often the “Yes” to this proposal was their only con­
tribution to the discussion.) We can conclude from this that the group ses­
sions satisfied not only the drive for expression, the wish to have an audi­
ence, but also the desire to be part of an audience. Sometimes these two
aspirations might have been present simultaneously in an individual. Both
can probably be related to the basic need to belong to a social structure
that is stronger than the individual and in which the individual participates
in its power. It is the desire for security inside a collective that, in turn, makes
possible the exertion of the will for expression in the first place. The objec­
tion to usurpers on the part of the already stabilized group supports this
hypothesis.
When we say the individuals shaped the group according to their needs,
this must not be understood as the desire to reverse the theorem of collec­
tive determination of the individual into its opposite and assume a determi­
nant shaping of the group by the individual. In reality the process is much
more complicated; interrelation occurs. At first, liberation of the individual
takes place in the formation of a group insofar as fears are alleviated and
controls (taboos of strangerhood) are removed. While the individuals in
this phase seem to try to shape the group according to their will and their
aims, regression soon sets in. The individuals then submit to new controls
(group norms); they delegate their own will to a certain degree again to the
group, and the group for its part gains power over its elements.
The first results of an analysis of the process of integration presented here
offer important information for a refinement of the technique of the method
of group discussions. In future group sessions the observing assistant will,
 Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions — ' 147

for example, try to ascertain in each case whether and when the individual
phases of integration occur and which topics facilitate and inhibit integra­
tion, and it will be possible to deepen the understanding of the process of
integration for small groups by using the conceptual and theoretical tools
developed here.
 Afterword

UR group e x p e r im e n t set itself th e ta sk o f d e v e lo p in g a m e th o d

of spontaneous but still meaningfully comparable group discussions.
We hoped that it could, on the one hand, be used to research the otherwise
only barely tangible sector of social consciousness that Franz Böhm called
“non-public” opinion. Even though the intention was primarily focused
on the method, our interest was also directed at the content chosen for
refining it. In neither case can can we claim that we arrived at definitive
solutions. The frequently emphasized difficulties with the empirical method
obviously have consequences for content. We do not know to what ex­
tent the extremely rich and qualitatively exquisitely fruitful material al­
lows for generalizations. There is, as of now, no interpretive technique
that could do justice both to such richness and to the standards of em­
pirical research. Likewise, it cannot yet be determined whether such a
technique can be developed solely through improvements of this method
or whether one will have to combine the group discussions with more
orthodox survey methods. In later projects, the Institute also worked on
this combination: for example, in a study on students’ attitudes toward
problems of marriage and the form of marriage and in a multilayered
industrial sociological project on work climate. The analysis is not yet
concluded.
Still, the current state of affairs allows us to specify the still-unresolved
questions of technique and point to possible answers. Although plenty of
 Afterword — 149

individual insights about elements of non-public opinion, their bearers, and

the dynamics of opinion formation have been discovered, these are not
enough to tackle the bottom line: a model of “non-public opinion.”
The uniformity of motives, which became manifest in the participants’
statements, is nevertheless astonishing. It can hardly be traced back to
the assumption that the starkness of the issues compelled stark reactions,
because reality itself is in many ways blatantly distorted in the partici­
pants’ statements. Relatively small differences appeared between the at­
titudes of groups that were sociologically widely divergent. The mode of
speaking also tended toward a “uniform language,” in which differences
in education became less important; according to one of the mono­
graphs, a universal language of semi-education took hold. The attitudes of
the participants toward the study’s major topics reveal a diffuse, logically
confused in many ways, but relatively fixed structural whole, a medium
through which reality is perceived and to which it is distilled. The core of
this structure could be called collective narcissism—exaggerated identifi­
cation with the collective to which one belongs, the nation in particular.
This disposition dominates the majority of the speakers and might be one
of the essential conditions for the often disconcerting lack of desire for
agreement.
At this point, we simply raise some problems that should be taken up by
future investigations, some of which have even already been started.

I. M ethodological Problems

Of special importance are the selection effects that manifested themselves in

the selection of the group of participants, in the composition of individual
groups, in which of those who had agreed to attend showed up and who did
not, and in the frequency and scale of the individuals’ participation in the
discussions. Even if one disregards the latter—a factor residing in the na­
ture of free discussion yet interfering considerably with the quantification—
the “mortality” [English], the attrition of participants, definitely remains
much more of an issue here than for questionnaire or interview research.
Such sources of error can, naturally, influence the result of the research
significantly.
It is possible that social groups or types of individuals who are of consid­
erable importance for opinion formation were not represented sufficiently
in our groups. An unquestionable source of error can be found in the differ­
ences of willingness to participate in the discussion groups. These differences
are related to the social composition of the groups.
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 150

Given the circumstances at the time, we had to keep the instructions for
the groups’ composition fairly elastic to be able to bring together 120-130
groups at all. This evokes the danger that sectors of the population that were
relatively easy to attract were favored. Another selection effect was intro­
duced whenever we approached organizations seeking participants—the
leaders of the contacted organizations might have selected those members
whom they expected to be willing, and they might have nominated those
whom they credited with a certain degree of intelligence and verbal skills.
Yet our contact persons emphasized time and again that we were not at all
interested in “elites.” Naturally, not all of the persons invited to participate
accepted the invitation, and even among those who did, a certain fraction
nevertheless failed to show up: based on our observations these were espe­
cially those who consented only reluctantly or after coaxing. However,
we developed techniques in the course of the study which, if refined in the
future, will control these sources of error.
Silent participants presented a problem for adequate interpretation of the
discussions, as became clear at the beginning. “Silent participants” are those
who did not speak at all or who spoke on only a few topics. This problem
is analogous to the problem of “no answer” or “no opinion” in survey re­
search. Later interviews with “silent participants” revealed a wide variety of
reasons for their silence. Some are too shy or appeal to lack of experience
speaking in public. Despite the intervention of the moderator, reserved par­
ticipants are not always able to get a word in edgewise in the face of more
impulsive or reckless ones. Others considered their ideas superfluous, be­
cause other group members had already expressed what they wanted to say.
Others did not have an opinion and—in contrast to the interview method—
did not feel compelled to express themselves. Still others are too tired or too
indifferent; some, finally, deem themselves to have such an extremist attitude
that they prefer not to proclaim their views.
The nature and the weight of these motivations varies considerably;
generalizations about the silent participants cannot yet be made. However,
the more their number can be reduced, the more reliable the findings will
be. We are working on developing methods to accomplish this.
One possibility for improving the experimental design would be to
use two sharply contrasting basic stimuli in comparable pairs of groups.
One could also consider designing experiments in such a way that the
groups can be understood as statistical units from the beginning. Fur­
thermore, one could evaluate factors like the influence of the moderator,
the seating arrangement, the time of discussion, etc., through systematic
observation and, if need be, take them into account in the interpretation
of the data.
 Afterword 151

II. Tasks as Regards Content

The most disconcerting result of the study was the low frequency of positive
statements about democracy and what that implies. The almost unanimous
rejection of the East, which was registered as indication of a democratic at­
titude, is by no means to be taken as evidence of such an attitude without
further examination—our study does not allow differentiating between lib­
erally minded participants and narrow-minded nationalist ones. In any case,
it is important to consider whether our participants are indeed so “ negati v-
istic,” whether their general outlook is as narrow as the transcripts suggest.
In particular, it is possible that the negativity of the statements is an effect
of the discussion situation and could in reality be different. The following
considerations relate to the possibility of such factors.
To start with, many participants probably perceived the basic stimulus—
despite its moderate language—as a reproach, which demands a defense.
The defensive stance causes more drastic claims than would be made other­
wise.1 But that begs the question: Why was the letter interpreted in this
way, even altered in the minds of many participants, and why did they be­
lieve that a defense was required? Part of the answer is surely that the basic
stimulus evoked the circumstances of the collapse and thus opened old
wounds. This caused comparatively strong reactions.2 In order to approach
this complex, a controlled experiment3 would be required, one confronting
sociologically comparable groups of participants with stimuli containing dif­
ferent nuances.
Furthermore, one has to account for a possibility, which, of course, ap­
plies to empirical research in general, far beyond the scale of our study.
Empirical sociology is concerned with observable, isolatable facts and not
with social totality, which as such cannot be adequately “observed.” There­
fore, the empirical social researcher is tempted to attribute phenomena to
the particular situation or subject area with which he is concerned at a
particular time, even though these phenomena may not come from these
but from social interrelations well beyond his reach. Hence, it is conceiv­
able that the tendency to say no is not so much explained by the rejection
of something concrete—like democracy or foreign countries—but that it
is a symptom of a general “malaise” about the entire social condition.
This “malaise” is merely channeled by the concrete rejection, without ac­
tually being directed at it. Saying no without consequences, without com­
mitting oneself to actual resistance and oppositional action, is an outlet
for onerous dissatisfaction. Since our group discussions resemble a casual
conversation, the prevalence of grumbling and spouting off will not come
as a surprise. The pleasure of “being someone” by acting hostile toward
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — ’ 152

something which is presumably accepted becomes greater as one discov­

ers that this pseudononconformism is backed up by a small majority.
Among our participants, this was the case insofar as they repeated what
they believed to be in the air. Similarly, the above-mentioned theories of
Simmel and Freud give priority to negative behavior in contexts of mass
psychology.4
Some of the possible motives for negativity reside closer to the surface—
for example, the desire to make a commitment. To affirm a certain thing
implies a higher degree of commitment than does vague criticism, which
does not have to offer definite goals. When the research was conducted five
years ago, the anxiety that people could be prosecuted for their opinions
was still in effect in Germany. People might have thought it to be most ad­
vantageous not to argue for anything at all. Finally, people may emphasize
less what they agree on, which for them is given and self-evident, than nega­
tive judgments, deviation, and difference—an observation with psycho­
logical grounding that, of course, describes the problem rather than solving
it. Yet, none of these considerations is conclusive. Even if one assigns huge
importance to conformism, as seems appropriate in the light of Chapter 4,
the inverse result—increasing affirmative statements accepting current
conditions—would be just as plausible. No matter what mechanisms play
a role in the relation between negative and positive attitudes, a reservoir of
negativity has to exist as a common source for all the consistently negative
statements. It is obviously necessary to examine all of these factors more
closely.

III. Information on Unpublished M onographs

It is not only the material on the seven main themes presented in the quanti­
tative section nor the profile of the most important demographic and pro­
fessional groups that await further assessment. Qualitatively as well this
volume* contains more in the way of examples of what needs to be done
rather than having worked through the entire material. Thus, there is no
description or analysis of the views that came up on economy and society.
The categories applied to only 25 discussions in Guilt and Defense5 would
have to be systematically examined for all the transcripts.
Above all, however, it is important to bear in mind that only a fraction
of the qualitative monographs are included in this volume. In the follow­
ing, we would like to address some of these monographs.

The volume referenced is the original 1955 German monograph.— Eds.

 Afterword — 153

i. Attitudes toward Democracy

The study on “Mistrust Against Democracy ” investigates this phenom­
enon by categorizing anti-democratic statements. At the top we find
disappointment—an idea, by the way, that includes the most diverse dimen­
sions. It refers foremost to the hopes nourished by the fall of the National
Socialist dictatorship; hopes probably directed less at restoration of
pre-1933 conditions than at ideas of social justice and a better life for
everybody. The thought of autonomous action, which is decisive for any
democracy, is, however, only second to these hopes. Rather than taking their
political and social destiny in their own hands, the discussants seem to be
disappointed that a new administration is not taking better care of them.
Such passivity corresponds with disillusion toward all politics. A character­
istic utterance states, “Politics—no! One foot in jail, one foot in the grave.”
This climate has, without any doubt, its compelling grounds. On the one
hand, the avoidance of politics is based on the tedium of pseudopoliticizing
in the Third Reich, where—comparable to the East—political information
and theses were incessantly beaten into peoples’ heads, and they had to
obey. It is, furthermore, based on the feeling of being a mere plaything in
modern mass society of impersonal powers alien to the subject. It is imagin­
able that the mistrust against democracy and the disappointment about all
politics is to cover up the fact that one is not trying to contribute anything
to improvement even within the narrow limits. In this sense, participants
often appeal to history and deny—in contradiction to the facts—that Ger­
many ever had a democratic tradition. The problem of democracy is shifted
from the self to “the others.” Even if they understand that democracy is a
matter of those making up the democratic state, this insight is twisted by the
speakers’ shifting their own presumed or actual inability for democratic
thinking and acting to others, namely the powers from the past, which have
supposedly simply made “us Germans” undemocratic. This is sometimes
followed by a defense of authoritarian forms of government as the ones
culturally appropriate for Germany.
Often this apolitical attitude is justified with reference to Germany’s po­
litical powerlessness, which is interpreted as the powerlessness of democ­
racy itself. When the research was conducted in 1950, many still believed
that the existence of the [German] people could not be adequately repro­
duced inside the borders of the Federal Republic. Such motivations for
anti-democratic attitudes should be less important today; we have already
pointed out that views on democracy in particular have certainly undergone
a change. Finally, negative attitudes toward democracy are often associ­
ated with an inability to imagine it concretely. It is indeed equated with
today’s parliamentary form of government, yet there is a lack of concrete
 Group Experiment and Other Writings — 154

knowledge. Ideas such as freedom of opinion, tolerance, and liberty are

mentioned, but with a skeptical tone, as mere ideologies. People’s experi­
ences in the last 20 years are that statements of all kinds, no matter how
emphatically they might be articulated, no matter how strongly underlined
their objective validity, are media for instrumental propaganda and are
modeled according to those goals. This tendency is not restricted to totali­
tarian systems of government of both varieties [Fascist and Communist. -
Eds.], but emerges throughout the “communications” of modern mass so­
ciety. It offers a way to avoid one’s own choice, the effort of comprehension,
the responsibility for oneself, and hence favors totalitarian tendencies.

2. Attitudes toward the United States

The basic stimulus included statements referring to the relationship between
Germany and foreign countries and to the population’s assessment of for­
eign countries. Of all the contributions in this subject area, the ones con­
cerned with the United States were analyzed most closely. This analysis was
headed by Kurt Wo//’/’from the department of sociology at Ohio State Uni­
versity in Columbus and made the most extensive use of the methods of
American social research/ Similar to Guilt and Defense (Adorno 2010),
thirty transcripts were selected for the richness of statements about the topic
and then examined. The statements were classified according to a range of
categories like “comparison between America and Germany,” “emphasis
on shared human traits,” “American power,” “American goals,” “American
motives,” “picture of America,” “changes within the American circum­
stances,” and others. The statements in each category were arranged on a
scale from the friendliest to the most unfriendly statements. In accordance
with the overall quantitative findings, negative reactions predominated to
the extreme. Altogether, the sample rated America worse than Germany.
According to this group, American power is used for repression rather than
for help; American policies are focused more on power than cooperation;
American help in Europe is motivated by fear rather than solidarity, and
there are more reasons to mistrust than to trust America. The “factor analy­
sis” traces these unfriendly attitudes back to three essential aspects: the
participants’ overall assessment of America; their “desire for recognition”*

* Wolff’s analysis was never published, but was produced as a mimeograph by the Depart­
ment of Sociology at the Ohio State University. See Kurt H. Wolff, “German Attempts at
Picturing Germany: Texts,” Studies in German-American Postwar Problems (SGAPP), no. 3,
(unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Ohio State Uni­
versity, Columbus, August, 1955).
 Afterword ~~ 155

(closely related to the psychological drive of collective narcissism); and their

unease about American power. The dominant psychology is characterized
as ambivalent: indecision between repressed desire for help from someone
strong and rebellion against the feeling of dependence. Through the mech­
anism of projection, this results in a vague, negative image of America.

3. Social-Philosophical Interpretations
Certainly, sociology’s contribution is not exhausted by empirical research,
and it is one of sociology’s most noble tasks to exceed the ascertained facts
by developing theoretical considerations, and to integrate them in a broader
context. This task was also fulfilled in the analysis of the group discussions.
For example, this impulse motivates the social-theoretical construction of
the complex attitude toward rearmament. This construction seeks to place
the frequently contradictory aspects of the changing views within an histori­
cal process. Above all, however, this is the place to mention the very substan­
tial language study written by two students of philosophy. It definitely takes
a philosophically critical stance, is neither “value-free” nor stringently in
tune with the established standards of empirical research, and is also outside
of the methods of academic sociolinguistics. But it still offers perspectives
that would be unavailable using common techniques based on the ideal of
scientific or philological objectivity. While the extent of the study did not
permit us to include the text in this volume, Appendix B, written by the
authors themselves, offers at least a somewhat more detailed presentation
of its essential content.
 A P P E N D I X A

Findings of a Study of the

Silent Participants

Preliminary Remarks on Terminology

We call participants who did not speak at all “the totally silent” (Totalsch­
weiger). If we include the themes discussed in the definition for participa­
tion in the group discussions, then there are participants who spoke on all
themes and participants who did not speak on all themes. We call the lat­
ter “the partly silent” (Teilschweiger).
Here we seek to identify the factors that reduce the number of totally
silent participants. Their reduction is relevant for general methodological
reasons; it is also particularly important for generalizing the results of the
group discussions to the population.

Factors o f the Experimental Design

The following factors are effective in reducing the proportion of totally
silent participants:12

1. A query strategy. When a participant remains silent about a topic, he

is addressed personally and asked to articulate his view.
2. The group size. The smaller the group, the lower the proportion of
totally silent participants. This is related to the importance of group
integration and other factors.
 Appendix A — 158

3. The duration of the discussion. This has a small effect, and only if
the discussions take about two hours or longer.
4. Theoretically available speaking tim e1 per participant. The more
time theoretically available, the smaller the quota of the totally
silent. Definitionally, there are two ways to increase theoretically
available speaking time: increasing the num erator or decreasing the
denominator. Only in the latter case was the number of the totally
silent reduced.
5. The number of topics discussed per group. Individual participants’
likelihood of taking part in the discussion increased with larger
numbers of topics discussed in a group.
6. The investigator. The investigator influences the proportion of the
totally silent to a small degree mainly through the mechanism of
affecting the length of the discussion by discontinuing the discussion
too early or because of his or her personality.
We can conclude from these results that group size is the most impor­
tant factor for reducing the proportion of the totally silent.

Factors o f Group Structure

Furthermore, we examined factors of group structure:
1. Gender. For the discussion of political topics it is advisable to have
men and women discuss separately, i.e., not to form mixed groups.
2. Age. Overly large age differences within individual groups can result
in an increase in the totally silent.
3. Schooling. There is reason to expect that the presence of more
educated participants stimulates the less-educated ones to speak, as
long as the differences in education are not drastic. When they are
drastic we would expect the opposite effect.
Hence, we can conclude that the group structure, too, can result in an
increase or decrease in the proportion of totally silent participants.

The Partly Silent

An examination of the proportion of the partly silent yields some insights
into the reasons for partial participation in the discussion.
i. Significance of the topic. The less participants have to say about a
certain topic and also the less significance this topic has for them,
the more likely they are to remain silent. Also the degree to which a
 Appendix A —- 1 5 9

topic is emotionally charged can influence participation in the

discussion.
1. Significance of group opinion. The opinion of the majority of the
group constitutes another factor. In a study using questionnaire and
discussion together it was possible to demonstrate that two-thirds of
the partly silent participants held opinions opposed to the majority
of the group.
 A P P E N D I X B

From a Monograph on
“Aspects of Language” *

Our study of language proceeded in a twofold manner:2 as an analysis of

characteristic features of the language available at the time, which as a
symptom of crisis conditions was intended to reveal something about
these conditions; and as a study of the modes of speaking, of the behavior
of people toward the language, from which we hoped to learn something
about their thinking, their relation to reality.
The following is meant to communicate at least a vague notion of our
participants’ linguistic behavior within the limits of a group-sociological
analysis through some examples; the analyses of meaning of the established
language are more or less treated as givens.

Language o f Passivity

The marked surrender to language is just another expression of the sur­

render to the reality that people in industrial mass society can no longer

* This Appendix was excerpted for the Gruppenexperiment volume from a monograph
called “Aspects of Language” by Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rainer Köhne. The mono­
graph remained unpublished but was apparently circulated informally to some extent, and
René König refers to it along with the rest of the project in a 1954 letter to Adorno (König,
Briefwechsel, Bd. i, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag 2000, pp. 454-456).
 Appendix B ~~ 162

experience themselves as subjects, only as disposable objects. Their own

destiny confronts them as an object. They are not supposed to interfere; at
most they can offer passing commentary. The ways the participants in the
discussion spoke attest forcefully to this—although it is certainly impor­
tant to bear in mind the artificial and fictitious character of the situation.
It would be difficult to find even occasional passages in the transcripts in
which there is some of the earnestness that truly wants—even if it is only a
matter of persuading others—to do something. Even the vehemence with
which participants frequently speak cannot belie this. Like the chimera of
many speeches, it is only the product of the enthrallment of the powerless
spectator: the vehemence of someone who at least wants to give a proper
piece of his mind, and who does not have to fear any consequences. Another,
nonsublimated expression of such vehemence is, for example, spectators’
howling at sports events.
People use certain phrases and figures of speech without critical reflection.
These unwittingly reveal both the truth of their condition and their blind
relation to the events themselves.

P.: . . . The other thing here is again a bad game of intrigue between the
Americans and the Russians. This doesn’t concern us Germans at all, what
they are doing. Monopolism and capitalism, they want to shove us in, us,
the other states, too, right? Because if the Russians advance to the
Atlantic—and they will not stop in Germany, they will proceed to the
Atlantic—I don’t have anything to lose, right? I could be transferred to
Siberia, I don’t care. I don’t have anything to lose, from a personal point
of view. I only have one suit and this one, otherwise I don’t have a thing.
And I won’t protect the next person. I’ve had it, right? What do I care
about a bureaucrat or a director up there? He can kick the bucket just
like me, right? That’s out of the question. I don’t care anymore. Only my
own self . . .

Consider the passage “I could be transferred to Siberia, I don’t care.”

The word “transferred” (Versetzen), which in its common meaning signifies
the not-entirely-smooth movement of public officials, is reduced to the bare
core of this meaning: move from one spot on the map to another. This sen­
tence alludes to the familiar idea of people as pawns in politics. It corre­
sponds to the image in the first sentence: the “game of intrigue” with the
actors “the American,” “the Russian,” and “Monopolism and capitalism”
appearing here like the giant figures one occasionally sees sitting atop the
globe in newspaper caricatures. The participant tries to avoid the intrigue by,
in a sense, playing dead: as he says, by not being interested in anything but
himself. Understanding the phantasmic character of this trick—turning him­
self into the passive thing he is already supposed to be—might contribute
 Appendix B — ' 163

to the desperate tone that pervades the entire statement. Consequently, the
sentence: “I could be transferred to Siberia, I don’t care” precisely excludes
the speaker’s self as a mere body, as disposable “human material.” This de­
sire for absolute passivity simultaneously echoes the defiance of the outlaw
and the excluded. Because of this defiance, the speaker does not segue from
his rejection of remilitarization to a discussion of how remilitarization could
be avoided and also does not attempt to persuade other participants.
The spectator’s attitude comes to the fore particularly when participants
express a strong wish for a change in reality. They appear like an audience
member who wants to interfere in the course of a play but remains wedged
in a seat.
One participant, for example, criticizes the state of democracy:

B.: . . . Democracy? We haven’t really even been shown what democracy is,
because that would mean self-determination . ..

The spell these people are under could hardly be more obvious than in
this remark. The comment reflects that spell; it simultaneously expresses
the conflicting conclusions that “what democracy is” “wasn’t shown to us”
and that it means “self-determination.” Linguistically, this comment re­
mains restrained by collective passivity: self-determination should be intro­
duced, but at the same time remains a matter for another subject. Auton­
omy becomes the charge that autonomy is not granted from without.
People expect effective action to change reality to come from external
sources—certainly not from themselves. These external sources may be a
government or an anonymous “someone.” This can never become an active
subject, though, since every individual in the collective resorts to counting
on that anonymous collective. The refrain “but why doesn’t anybody do
anything?” recurs countless times and in manifold variations (such as “they
should . . .”) in the discussions.
Reality confronts these people as a compact and closed scene instead of
as a network of living human relations. Individuals can therefore no longer
intervene in it with action. The following passage (already quoted above)
is typical:3

Pf.: I’m 63 years old and was able to watch two world wars. I myself never
participated. After the First World War, we recovered more in the first
three years than today after five years. At the outbreak of the Second
World War, or before the outbreak of the second war, a terror was
organized in the Nazi regime that could not be opposed by the man in the
factories, the worker. The terror was so vast that we were ordered to all
kinds of festivities and events. After the horrors of the war began and the
big air raids here on . . . came, as we could watch here from up close—so
 Appendix B 164

one can really not speak today of German guilt, because those were not,
in my opinion, strategic targets, that one in this way without further
ado . . . that one just leveled entire villages.

The dominant phrases show that the reality of the bombing war and
totalitarian terror is experienced as a multiple spectacle. The passage “was
able to watch two world wars. I myself never participated” draws a sharp
distinction between the observer and the observed, who “participated.” Later
the language describes the terror as having been “whipped up” (aufgezogen).
This expression traces back to the phrase that a rally should be “whipped
up,” a phrase common in the national-socialistic organization. Terror itself
appears as a spectacle, and the language betrays the nuance of brawling,
roaring, monotonous marching at the mass rallies, which are associated
with the following sentence: it directly links terror “to all kinds of festivities
and events,” which the people were required to attend. The arrangement
and mandate of the allegedly spontaneous national-socialistic movement
cannot be articulated more clearly than by the link between “terror” and
“whipping up.” The experience, which is congealed into a cliché, is articu­
lated in a very similar way in the next sentence with the topic of the “hor­
rors of the war,” about which it is said that they “set in” like something
exactly pre-calculated. In the process, the speaker, who links his words to­
gether as people did against all sense and yet with official sanction for thir­
teen years in Germany, makes the exact point that the air raids fit into the
Imperial Ministry for Popular Education and Propaganda’s scheme of war
propaganda just as well as the required “festivals and events.” It might, in­
deed, have been experienced as something that “set in” like the heavy brass
in an orchestra.
It is also said that one “could watch” the air raids. The term used in this
context, “air raids,” certainly does not evoke good spirit in the speaker, yet
inspires the reminiscence of similar terms from advertising for entertaining
events (“Bombenstimmung” [terrific atmosphere], “Stimmungskanone”
[great joker], for example). The physiognomy was explored by Karl Kraus in
“The Last Days of Mankind.”4 The jargon of the years of war itself, cobbled
together out of manifest and cryptic elements, releases the repressed humor
of the word rather than the nuance of dread, which refuses such a usage of
language. Finally, referring to “strategic targets” and using the standardized
phrase “leveled entire villages” in today’s language, reifies the object. It es­
tranges it from experience, making it something merely stated and therefore
indifferent.
Similar to people’s perception of what happens to them as a piece of an
exhibition, they talk about what they do collectively as a piece of this uni­
versal exhibition. They do not intend it to be as ironic as it sounds:
 Appendix B ~ i 6j

W. : . . . for example, from [19)33 onwards, we who had a democracy were

anxious to move ahead, and we also managed to present so much to the
world and to demonstrate so much ability that we suddenly had the
whole world against us . . .

Thus, the world turned suddenly against Germany because the Germans
demonstrated so much ability. Moving ahead appears as an action itself
and ability seems to exist for demonstration. This is underlined by the ex­
pression “to present,” which suggests ostentatious offering. The history of
the Hitler empire is neutralized to a stage performance, against which the
audience—the foreign countries—revolts as a collection of skills. The ac­
tual cause of the revolt (the aggression of Hitlerian ability) never comes into
question. The content of action turns into an exhibition of form divorced
from actors’ intentions:

W. : . . . In a dictatorship a man says something, gives an order and it is

executed, while we do not have this in a democracy. There are so many
parties, one wants it, the other is opposed to it, and we do not arrive at a
conclusion in the end.

The limits of the language people glean from their relation to their envi­
ronment, which is reified to mere spectacle, also comes up in the remarks
about Jews. Consider the following quotation from among many similar
ones:

U.: I think the Jewish problem as such is not about the Jewish religion or the
Jewish race. The charges pressed against Judaism today concern in the
first place Jewish emigrants from the East, who live a loose life, a cheap­
skate’s life, an indolent life, and hence considerably harm Judaism as such.

The speaker does not say that indolence, loose living, and the cheapskate’s
life, which are attributed to the Jews, do real damage—they are charged
with “demonstrating” something, which one cannot observe. This takes
place entirely in a mode of speaking which is otherwise an adequate para­
phrase for the fossilized expression “unbearable,” which rigorously cuts off
every discussion. As in reality, Jews are pilloried yet again by language: the
participant’s speech resembles the hail of the surrounding crowd. Particu­
larly in the rhythm of the last passage similar to a chorus—“demonstrate
a loose life, a cheapskate’s life, an indolent life, and hence considerably harm
Judaism as such”—the speech degenerates into an empty mass. It is not set
up to evoke understanding and an answer, but to fight. Correspondingly, the
speaker attributes a certain meaning to the term “Jewish problem” by link­
ing it to the predicate “to affect.” The result is an elimination of any reflec­
tion suggested by the initial association of “Jewish” and “problem.” This
again goes with the catchword “as such,” which occurs twice in the speech
 Appendix B — ι66

and which is linked to the terms “Jewish problem” and “Judaism.” It is

meant to signal the detachment of a speaker who works his concepts out
neatly and, therefore, situates his charge against Eastern Jews as subjective
or empirically contingent. The charge does not relate to “Judaism” or “the
Jewish problem as such,” which remains isolated like a pure idea. At the
same time, the idea’s invariance and unalterability are expressed: whatever
exists in a certain way “as such” has to be like this, and all thinking and
doing has to comply with it.
People making anti-Semitic arguments do not experience Jews as human
beings to whom one talks, but rather as objects at which one stares. That
fact becomes quite clear in the following remark of a participant from a
different discussion group:
L.: . . . first of all, he should turn into a human being, that’s my private
opinion; and when he turns into a real human being, and . . . develops
those human instincts that are at the basis of other humans, then nobody
will harm a hair on a Jew’s head . . .
L.: If I should say something about it: if the Jews had comported accord­
ingly, had conducted themselves accordingly, all this would not have
happened. Such things happened in Germany many times even before
1933, that one also carried out a persecution of Jews in the cities, a
sabotage and suchlike, because they in fact did not act as human beings,
as German people . . .

In this passage, the denial of the Jew’s humanity goes with the widespread
usage of the words “to comport” and “to conduct.” They measure behavior—
and truly not only that of Jews—according to a prescriptive ideal. This
can be traced back to the language of the barracks; in “to comport” there is
the image of the corporal evaluating an exercising recruit. The phrase that
one “carried out” orders was characteristic for the persecution of people
in the Third Reich. It is in accordance with the facts. The victim, with
whom there is no further communication, is no longer acknowledged,
was abused merely as a physical entity. The murder was commanded, with­
out relation to the victim: gassing occurred because of statements in a ques­
tionnaire.

The Language o f Role-Playing

How speakers submit to existing language becomes fully clear when the
lost subjectivity escalates into a self-satisfied gesture, when people endear
themselves to the popular jargon. One of the most obviously striking themes
in the group discussions is the participant’s need to prove something and
gain at least something of the prestige and status he lacks in reality.
 Appendix B ι6 γ

When some speakers indicate their actual misery with clichés like “im­
portant question of the day,” it almost sounds like they are romanticizing
it. An unemployed refugee speaks in such a tone about having “resorted”
(sich begeben) to the refugee camp. Two characteristic passages of his
speech should be cited:
T.:. . . If somebody wants to campaign for a political party, please do it
elsewhere. I would rather discuss important questions of the day. I’m
from the eastern zone and had to go. Subsequently I resorted to the
camp Ülzen . . .
T: . . . I personally endeavored to find work, in Essen as bricklayer
re-trainee . . .

It appears that he felt prominent within this small group by being the
kind of person one normally only reads about in the newspaper. His manner
of speaking resembles the diction of a story about celebrities: “I resorted”;
“I personally endeavored.” This indicates a function of the media that is as
important as it is fatal. It provides people with formulations they can adopt
for their own use. They are thus reconciled with the fact that they are forced
to endure passively that about which they are incessantly informed.
In a literal sense, people seem to bite off more than they can chew when
they use the pompous, superlative terms too common in today’s language.
According to Theodor Haecker as well, these terms are “Collosi of aver­
ageness, [ . . . ] which produce a colossal effect,” and the linguistic usage of
which is a “mode of mediocrity.”5This can be found in the following state­
ment concerning the term “global scale.”
R. : .. . Today’s conflict between East and West has already assumed a global
scale. We see that time and again just by considering its proportion on a
globe.

It is striking that the listing of such pompous terms often ends in an “etc”:
N .: .. . And I’m of the opinion that this development, as well as the terrible
tragedy of the last war, must be rated as the force of history, as something
supra-personal, that one . . . has to mark as historical development, which
does not happen within the purely personal sphere, but within supra-
personal powers, in nations, Weltanschauung [World views.—Eds.] etc.

The disjuncture between the actual experience and its conceptual and
linguistic mastery could hardly be clearer. The more opaque, the more
total the catastrophe that has been experienced, the more hollow are the
pompous conceptual clichés with which it is seemingly mastered, and
which are based on concepts that are in themselves correct. Instead of even
trying to explain what was deemed beyond human capacity, the speaker at
 Appendix B — ι68

once dismisses it as something “supra-personal.” The usage of “etc.” indi­

cates that parts of the internal structure of this language fit with such big
terms. They erase the person who uses them. Thus, while the speaker con­
siders himself in tune with the higher powers, like the events they denote,
the speaker is in the hands of higher powers without realizing it. Language
has to cover up the emptiness of such coinages like “supra-personal powers,”
the lack of factual persuasiveness, with a concentration of words allowing
the speaker to avoid individual reflection or to preempt objection. Appar­
ently, the speaker feels that he has to continue his list endlessly. He there­
fore replaces this impossibly endless speech by the abstract clause “etc.” The
clause implies that he could go on if he wanted to. It endows the nonexis­
tent continuation with the fascination of something one does not even
want to consider.
Similar to those vague conceptual clichés is another form of bombastic
speech. These are numbers, which turn something abstract and open into
something mysterious and monstrous.6 In the following passage one can
feel how the joy of vocalizing an enormous number makes the participant
almost forget about the object it refers to:

M.: One cannot understand that at all, that this is supposed to be democ­
racy; I cannot understand this, what democracy means since the Ameri­
cans came over and killed women and children here. Just this one thing in
X, where three times a hundred thousand were dead in one day.

The meaning is no longer felt; rather, it functions like the rhetorical de­
vice of a demagogue, who effectively supports the cliché of the defenseless
“women and children” with the phrase “three times a hundred thousand
[ . . . ] in one day.” This number appears like the record figures of an adver­
tisement turned around in the negative. Hitler blared out numbers in the
same tone of voice.
The frequent use of numbers and the insistent performance of calcula­
tion is also reminiscent of something beyond confusing oneself and others
with abstract sizes. The rationalistic opposite—trust in the reliability of
numbers—seems to play an equally important role. Using numbers provides
an air of precision and demonstrates expertise—numbers easily pass as true.
An example of the gesture of exact calculation to hide pure nonsense:

S.: . . . I know through my own experience that a product manufactured in

German workshops, be it a Leica or a wristwatch, is sold to the Ameri­
cans for 30% of its value . . . as reparations. 30% of value for reparations
and—please don’t get me wrong—the American soldier did not buy this
Leica with 30%. The American soldier doesn’t pay 30% in his PX-store,
but 100% of its value, so that the American state earns 70%. And the
American state does not sell this Leica for 100%, but surcharges 100%,
 Appendix B — 169

so that the American GI pays 170%. And these are devoured by the State.
However, I cannot prove this allegation . . .

This participant, too, uses the residue of advertising—the brand “Leica,”

which counts as the epitome of German workmanship, and the coinage
“manufactured in German workshops,” which does the same thing—in
order to wrap himself in it. By the end, the speaker himself seems to sense
that language is more an instrument of theatrical self-presentation for him
than a medium of reflection. As if driven by a guilty conscience due to the
gesture of calculation, he retreats from it.

Gesticulating and Talking Down

Speaking that fancies phrases and linguistic gestures, which it does not
communicate as in thought but presents as an imitation of the language of
the privileged, escalates in many places in our material to a rally speech or
even to a disconnected monologue. Rare are the passages in which partici­
pants reflect about what has been said and respond to the experience and
thoughts of other participants.
The dominant impression is much more that the participants seek to
maintain their viewpoint at all costs.7 They do not want to be right because
they are interested in an issue. Rather, they indifferently use any affair as
an instrument for their desire to be right. This behavior expresses the con­
tradiction that, by their need to posture, they lose the objectivity they would
need to give weight to their statements. All the more vigorous gestures have
to substitute for objectivity. Loudness and obstinacy bear witness to the
anxiety of a factual counterquestion—be it imposed by reality, asked by
other participants, or alive in the speaker. The Volksgemeinschaft * in which
the people were forced en bloc to recite opinions, convictions, and pledges
loudly that were not their own, shows its downside. Under conditions of
freedom, the truly silenced individual of the Volksgemeinschaft can only
speak in an uncommunicative monologue.
The dictator and the party spokesman are deeply entrenched in the par­
ticipant’s consciousness as speakers. Although he is now allowed to speak
freely, he seems unable to do so without those models in mind. It seems
self-evident that others have to be content with passive listening; and every
single one makes this a precondition. True dialogue, which died out in the
Volksgemeinschafty needs a long time to come back to life, and the condi­
tions of mass society are not favorable. Several approaches were attempted

* “National Community,” an attempt by the Third Reich to establish a purely German

ethnic identity free of internal conflict.—Eds.
 Appendix B ^ ij o

in our groups—more among women than men. However, these speeches

usually unconsciously took on a demagogical cast despite the good inten­
tions. According to their meaning, they did not allow for a reply. Language,
though, develops as speech and response. These are smothered by the emp­
tily resounding speech. Speech becomes nothing more than agitated gestic­
ulation with language.
Here a further aspect of speech, one which can be considered the decisive
for the “language of the Third Reich,” is indicated. Even more than “typical
Nazi-terms,” this language was dominated by a totalitarian, loud-mouthed
gesture, by a commandant ruling even language itself, which has to submit
just as people do. Under the command of the “force of words”—as the
National Socialists’ manipulation of language was once revealingly and
literally truly called—language was reduced to its official and disorganized
form, to which speaking and thinking bow down even today. According to
its own boasting vocabulary, the language of National Socialism is not such
a definite phenomenon, and the objection that people talked like that before
National Socialism is as right as it is wrong. Neither National Socialism
nor its language came into existence in one fell swoop. Most of the “Nazi-
terms” perceived as typical existed long ago, and what made them national-
socialistic terms was the fact that they were brought home and gained
primacy under National Socialism. The traces of such thinking and speak­
ing bear witness to National Socialism, even where its political power is
long broken. Precisely in people’s speech, which seeks to oppose the lan­
guage of understanding and discussion, which smugly imitates what
droned out of the loudspeakers of the rallies, a barbaric impulse is upheld
as the primitive longing that was once demonstrated by the unbounded
oppressive politics of the National Socialists: to model the world after
one’s own image. The fact that this language has meanwhile become infa­
mous only makes it the more appealing. Once one of these words (the “Füh­
rer,” “blood,” “cleansing,” etc.), which are hidden as if obscene or are whis­
pered, is spoken out loud and once the spell is broken, the great slogans and
the intoxicating phrases appear by association. They are unscrupulously
sputtered with the unmistakable nuance of lust and aggression. The name
of the “Führer,” by the way, seems to be avoided with utmost powers like a
magical taboo.
Savage statements bubble furiously to the surface, invariably stigmatizing
or elevating entire groups of people while failing to do justice to the indi­
vidual. Some typical examples:

5 .: . . . These gentlemen (the American occupying soldiers) learned for the first
time what Kultur means, and interior design ( Wohnungseinrichtung)—in
America they really don’t know this . . .
 Appendix B — ■ 171

K .:. . . And the American has shown us in how he has occupied Germany,
that he can be just as brutal and just as big a rogue and a troublemaker as
the Russians . . .
. . . And as far as I know the Negro is a bloodthirsty person and caused a
lot of devastation here . . .
M .:. . . The Frenchman is among the worst! . . . The worst is the Frenchman;
he stops everywhere—wherever he can, gets in the way of everything.
P.:. . . Well the Frenchman is the worst sadist I have ever known . . . He can
look at his own brother being put through a meat grinder, alive, and is
only interested in making sure he is not personally harmed. He is a real
coward, cares only about himself . . .
H .:. . . Where, why is the Jew persecuted, why did he get into the KZ, why
the Jew of all people? What is it about him that he—and we really want
to be clear on this—was and perhaps is hated not only in Germany, but
around the world? There must be something about him that stirs up and
goads others . . . Well, my private opinion is: it is his business sense and
extreme cleverness. Perhaps he does not even have evil intentions with
these, but he simply has them, and they somehow snub everybody else. He
has success in business. He does that with the utmost cleverness, with
terrific shrewdness, and arrives at his goal, while others who want to earn
their money honestly always go broke.
H. : . . . Well, it is actually strange . . . that the Jew has never managed to
found a real nation. He sits around in dribs and drabs in other countries
and, of course, is regarded as a parasite by these countries . . . and the Jew
is allowed to go everywhere and is allowed essentially to pick off the best
bites, and people are offended by that.
U .:. . . The German is a good technician, the Jew is a good merchant. Can
one criticize him for that? . . .
And our Adolf Hitler was quite right when he said that the German
is the best soldier in the world . . .

The slogans drilled into the people’s minds by totalitarian propaganda

return to the fore. The projective talk of the “hatred of foreign countries”;
of “the people without space”; the people of the soothing “Führer person­
ality,” addicted to the search for deliverance:

T.:. . . and now we turn to the heart of the question, on which you’ve
touched, Mrs. W.: Everyone clings to the hope that a person might arise to
bail us out, indeed bail out all of Europe and the whole world, beyond
just our people. The preconditions for this exist in Germany more than
anywhere else. If no such personage can be found now, the German
people will head toward total Bolshevism and other nations will follow
very quickly. We can see that today through election results . . . but those
who did not go to the polls, and those who did go only as a compromise
to the middle-of-the-road parties . . . These are actually people who yearn
for something to rally around which would overcome rationalism,
 Appendix B — ' 172

intellectual Bolshevism, and the local and American Bolshevism. The most
fertile soil for such a leader is in Germany itself.
B.: . . . One has to consider that the popular sense (!) ( Volksintelligie) of the
German people consists directly of the cry for the Führer.

—the magic formula of the “ Volksgemeinschaft”—

5 .: In my opinion the party system needs to be abolished, because the German
people need a Volksgemeinschaft. Because only through a Volksgemeinschaft
can the German people rise again. The party system just prevents a Volksge­
meinschaft of any kind, including the way we had it earlier. Dictatorship and
Democracy—such a thing did not come about through democracy, and
Hitler realized: no party holds the Volksgemeinschaft together.

—all of them become focal points of dogmatic monologues, for the sake of
which the participants are allegedly arguing; they become linguistic vehi­
cles for aggression against the “victors,” from whom one does not want to
accept (annehmen) anything.*
Taking this speech as the unmediated expression of the speakers them­
selves instead of recognizing it as being codetermined by National Socialist
speech ignores the common type of person who cannot respond to other
ways of thinking or other characteristics; who is “against” things from the
outset, who does not examine himself and who searches for guilt first of all
in the “stranger.” This misrecognition forgets what National Socialist lan­
guage initially released—or created—in the people, which might have been
expressed differently under a different influence. They are not yet National
Socialists just because they are impressed by these linguistic gestures. Cer­
tainly, they can get absorbed with imitation to such a degree that it becomes
difficult to distinguish. With the gesture of aggressive talking down, which
no longer concerns the issue but is meant to intimidate, one participant ac­
cuses foreign countries of unjustified dismantling:
O .:. . . Yet, one has begun to rob Germany, totally, one dragged off all
patents, which are worth millions and billions, everything was pulled
apart and dismantled and taken away—whether it was the Russian or the
Frenchman or the Englishman—everything was snapped up. Now,
Germany is nothing but an empty cloud of dust! . . .

Here speaking is just wild gesture. The immaterial patents turn into
mountains of tangible material only to visualize the criminal action of
dismantling—rendering the gesture of accusation effective in the first place.
The denunciatory synonyms do not suffice to describe their “removal.”

Annehmen—to acquire (habits) or accept (presents). Probably intended as a pun.—Eds.

 Appendix B 173

Similarly, immense numbers are plucked out of the air, which render mani­
fest the speaker’s inability to do enough to make his point. The picture of
the empty cloud of dust, which signifies the Nazi legacy of a desolate Europe
more than a Germany not-at-all-dismantled, functions in a projective man­
ner similar to passages in Hitler’s speeches where, for example, he alleges a
conspiracy of foreign countries.
By the speakers’ not letting anything affect them, not wanting to continue
talking, their claims lose their substance and content. This constitutes a pos­
sible discussion only by transcending the individual linguistic formula. The
claims regress to “claims” in the sense of brute force. Many speeches in the
group session seem to be designed in such a way—and here we believe that
they indeed reflect an element of reality—as if a thesis could come into force
by the mere bodily effort of speaking. Concise, logical conclusions from
premises are replaced with argument by attrition, which seeks to force the
listener and possible objector to capitulate to a loud and confused stream
of words. A speech which is a singular aberration in anacoluthia* and at the
same time its forcible coverup, and finally abruptly gives up the topic as
proven is presented here:
B.: I’d like to return to Mr. T’s remark that the Germans always get blamed
for the last war. The true root of the problem, as the previous speaker said,
lies in the Treaty of Versailles. If you rape a people at gunpoint, as
happened in Versailles in 1921, to deprive an overpopulated country of the
possibility of living and brutally take away everything, this people is forced
to emigrate and has no ability to spread out. By taking the colonies from
it, then giving them to people who can’t possibly govern them like today’s
Frenchmen, who have to abandon their colonial areas because they are too
spineless to hold onto them. Americans do not understand European
politics. We Germans are in an unpleasant situation, we are threatened by
the Romanians on one side and on the other side by the Slavs—cramped
with about 70 million people in a small space. This, of course, is a political
necessity from our side and cannot be maintained even today. The mistakes
of our government—these enfants terrible, as the foreigners say about our
German politicians—that’s true, though. Germans are indeed impatient.
They do not wait until affairs have fully developed, but instead act like a
bull in a china shop. But the people cannot be held responsible for this. It
is the responsibility of today’s new victors, as they call themselves—in
truth they are actually losers—the true victor will be someone else—to
provide the opportunity to spread out. Because it will have to return at
some point that even today we are overpopulated. We have 12 million

* Anacoluthia refers to a sentence that lacks grammatical structure, starting out in one
direction and abruptly taking up another.—Eds.
 Appendix B ~ 174

refugees who were forcibly expelled from the Sudetenland, from Silesia,
from Poznan, from Pomerelia, and from Austria—and who thus support
the cause of Bolshevism. The Americans allow this to pass but today we
face a fact, this is a signal, that America did not control the true political
situation of Europe—something that can be excused—in general in 1945.
And guilt—when he says, Hitler wanted or instigated the war—the true
reason for the war can be found in the Treaty of Versailles.

This hasty monologue teeters between strained argument and breathless

rests as it charges forward from aggressive cliché to cliché. It does not get
down to real themes for want of spontaneous thinking. It almost seems as if
the relation between topic and argumentation is reversed, that the style of
argument is not tailored to the topic, but the topic—the idea of a population
explosion—to the argumentative style. The topic, however, is already formed
as the object is represented in the totalitarian brain: projectively disfigured;
and the crude expression (Parole), the explosive speech are merely another
expression of that.
Evaluating statements in this language as people’s opinions or substan­
tial judgment would be questionable. It would be just as wrong as the in­
clination to enumerate the moral defects of such speech. It is only an ex­
ample of the expanding decay of thought and language.

Language and Speech

It is characteristic for the language of the group discussions that they ap­
proach a kind of linguistic uniformity that is not an intact language and
which inserts itself in front of thought like a hardy screen. Language and
thought prove not to be presented in speech. Speech and, therefore thought
itself, yield to language.
Correct speech is not only adopting a preset language, or its so-called
“mastery.” It is a kind of spontaneous receptivity, which wrests language’s
desire from language itself: the clear-thinking claim in it and at the same
time against it; the expression of the experienced and the felt, which in
the bonds of language promise liberation from itself. Once language
drops out of this mediated unity of language and thought, language and
life, and appears autonomous and set for itself, this reveals that thought
has lost its medium and itself to language—thus, language, too, has lost
its language.
Yet absolutized language is exactly the kind spoken in the discussions. It
remains alien to reflection and suppresses it or—strictly speaking—does not
allow it to develop. The group discussions make it tangible that speech can­
not assert itself against ossified language. Empowering language itself is
 Appendix B ~ 175

already dead: it remains accepted and simply repeated. Speech is the ques­
tionable expression of subjects who are subjects only nominally—the par­
roted, empty gesture of fractured subjectivity.
The omnipotence of language that is itself already destroyed, which dic­
tates the impotence of speech, is that of the objective mind: the inhumanity
of conditions have hardened into a language which determines from the
outset what and how far one is allowed to think and perceive. Already
with language, however, these conditions are accepted without criticism or
resignedly. The societal premise has been established for linguistic behav­
ior: accepting and hence futile adaptation. Once the language roaring
from newspapers, loudspeakers, and advertising ceases bringing people to
their senses, it becomes instantaneously adopted. Anyone who speaks can
hardly help reproducing what is incessantly heard and read.
Speech adheres throughout to a licensed, ossified vocabulary. It is made
up of the instances and agencies which determine and reflect reality. Admin­
istration, technology, and commerce contributed as much to this vocabulary
as the rudiments of National Socialist language as well as the vocabulary
of the military* of both wars, and the mass media which at the same time
spread it far and wide. The people remain enclosed like windowless monads
inside the language constituted by such vocabulary, papered over with
linguistic clichés and jumbled fragments of experience. Language no longer
helps people to get a picture of reality—as is revealed from language itself
taken at its word. Language commands through order, instruction, and ad­
vertising. Being rhetorical and a pool of mangled clichés, it relieves people
of reflection. Interspersed with administrative and technical categories, with
scientific terminology, it reifies life itself. Being euphemistic, filled with cyni­
cism and petrified jokes, it allows neither for concern nor for human
emotion from the outset. Being the epitome of adherence to the facts, it
dethroned what remains: the incommensurable, suffering, and hope.
People uphold the appearance of autonomy and reflection while they sur­
render to language. Imitation and repetition in particular are meant to make
something out of powerlessness—yet they reveal it all the more drastically.
The more insecure the reflection, the more demanding and bombastic the
words and sentences, the more apodictic the tone; the more conscious the
powerlessness, the stronger the drive for importance, which takes advantage
of established language. Modern speech can be characterized by the mean­
ing that the phrase “to have something to say” has assumed. At one time,

* The original refers, in quotes, to the “Barras” of both wars, soldierly slang for the
military.—Eds.
 Appendix 8 — 176

it denoted the most legitimate need for autonomous reflection— to have

something to say. The emphasis shifted from “something” to “to say,” and
today one who has something to say counts as someone who can speak sim­
ply because he is allowed to. Thus, the expert, the politician, the journalist
are imitated consciously or unconsciously. Speech is the childish inability to
speak for oneself (Unmündigkeit) that fills one’s mouth (Mund).*8 But this
runs roughshod over the established language that presents itself in our
research quite uniformly on all social levels.
Such uniform jargon only instructs people in their own heteronomy. The
action of the linguistic gesture must not belie the stigma of passivity, with
which it is afflicted. People’s further susceptibility to any kind of dema­
gogy or totalitarian agitation is preserved by their own speech.

* The German word Unmündigkeit (naïveté or childishness) is used as a pun with Mund
(mouth) here.—Eds.
 Final Version of the
Basic Stimulus (Colburn Letter)

was a s s o c ia te d w ith several offices of the occupation army in Ger­

I many from the end of the war, in which I participated as reservist,
through August 1950.
Most of my assistants were Germans, from the most diverse regions and
with the most diverse views. Beyond that, my work brought me together
with Germans of all kinds. I believe that, to the extent that one can speak
of such things, I got to know average Germans and their opinions first­
hand, and especially how ordinary people feel.
Superficial observers say and write a lot of nonsense about Germany.
Some think they are all Nazis and bear guilt collectively; others see things
as rosy because, as victors, they are in a privileged position and generalize
too quickly from their own pleasant experience. Perhaps your readers will
be interested in the opinion of a sober GI who is not vengeful, but who
also doesn’t let anyone pull the wool over his eyes.
I can say many good things about the Germans. They are hardworking
and only rarely insubordinate. They are clean and orderly, and many give the
impression of being intelligent. Of course, I do not know to what extent they
are independent or just repeat what they have heard elsewhere. I do not find
any indication of unusual crudeness and cruelty, but nor are there many indi­
cations that they have taken to heart what was done to people under Hitler.
Of course they themselves had to go through so many things—air raids in
particular—that it is difficult for them to consider other people’s suffering.
 Final Version o f the Basic Stimulus iy8

Individual Germans seem rather good-natured. Married men are kind to

their families and hope to succeed. I think the Germans, who were used to
a high standard of living, will pull themselves up again economically. Their
splendid technical talent will only really prove itself once they are able to
work without inhibition.
To me and most of my acquaintances they are generally friendly—
especially the women—naturally also because they think all of us are wealthy.
But this is not the whole story. Despite the past calamity, many think of
themselves as better and more capable than us. They do not want to hear
anything of the fact that Hitler started it.
They apparently have the feeling that the world did the greatest injustice
to them. Whenever something goes badly with us, they become indignant.
When we are in a difficult situation, as in Korea, one sometimes gets the
impression that they are secretly glad about it and do not think about the
fact that we alone protect them from the Russians. Admitting the mistakes
of one’s own country and talking openly about them appears to be a weak­
ness to them. They are still hostile toward the Jews and use the DPs [dis­
placed persons] in particular as a pretense for one-sided judgments.
Only very few openly admit that they were Nazis, and those admitting it
are often not the worst ones. Only a small minority is said to be guilty. In a
certain way this is true, but in general one finds only very few Germans who
unambiguously renounce what happened.
They act especially strange when there is talk about racial persecution in
America. As soon as they hear that a Negro was lynched in the South, they
rub their hands together [as if relishing the inconvenient parallel]. I always
explain to them that in our case it is a matter of ten or twenty cases a year,
while with them was a matter of millions. In the end, for us lynching is and
remains a crime prosecuted by the state. Their state, however, managed
lynching itself on a vastly greater scale. Certainly they were subject to terror
and could have done little more once Hitler was in control. But did they not
celebrate him time and again? I was able to convince individuals of all of
this, but this is like a drop in the bucket. The risk is that, tomorrow, they will
again follow a Hitler or Stalin, and will still believe that such a strong man
will represent their interests best.
Whoever is really interested in international understanding must pay
attention to what practical democracy actually means and must engage in
the long work required to bring it about. One cannot simply plug some­
thing else into the space left by dictatorship. Rather, one has to have just as
much understanding for others as for oneself.
Only when the Germans accept this spirit will they really be able to make
a big contribution.
 Opinion Research
and Publicness

T H E O D O R W. A D O R N O ( 1 9 6 4 )

Translated by Andrew J. Perrin and Lars Jarkko

u b lic o p i n i o n r e s e a r c h is generally pursued for practical rea­

P sons. For example, one wants to reliably predict the result of an election.
The techniques employed were originally developed for market research.
Unreflexive, practical sociology gets by with this. To be sure, limited to what
sociology has always concerned itself with, it considers it easy, superficial,
and simple. Nevertheless, an element of necessity calls for the development
of a new discipline, which would gladly encompass the whole of social sci­
entific knowledge.
The German term “opinion research” (Meinungsforschung) drops, for the
sake of brevity, a key adjective, which alone identifies its concern: research
on public opinion. That adjective refers to the idea of publicness. Looking
at the history of public opinion research determines how it came to this.
Publicness, the increasing scrutability of actions within their social sur­
roundings, reaches back immeasurably far in history. The concept of
publicness itself* was first conceived with the beginning of the bourgeois
era, sometime in the seventeenth century. Since then, the public character
(Öffentlichsein) of all possible ways of thinking, ways of conduct, and ac­
tions, has been conscious of itself as an idea and has been threatened.

* Adorno differentiates here between the practice of publicness (the increasing scrutability
of actions) and the normative concept of publicness, which he takes to be the new develop­
ment. The distinction becomes important later in the essay.—Eds.
 Opinion Research and Publicness — ' 180

Publicness is a bourgeois category, as Jürgen Habermas succinctly formu­

lated it in his groundbreaking book about its structural changes,1to which
I am very indebted. He emphasizes that John Locke, one of the first impor­
tant political philosophers of bourgeois democratic society, describes, “be­
sides the divine and the national law, the ‘law of opinion’ as a category of
the same rank” as a law through which virtue and vice, in general, are first
identified. The vagueness, however, with which, certainly in Locke, the ideas
of public and public opinion are tainted cannot be corrected through pre­
cise verbal definition. Publicness is not clearly demarcated; it is essentially
polemical: what was once not public should become so. Only in this sense
is the point to understand, as a criticism of absolute cabinet politics/ how
the inverted aristocratic orders allow—and contemporary elite theories even
celebrate—the secret.
Publicness could never, and it cannot now, be regarded as a given. It is a
product of the political conception of democracy, which assumes citizens
who are responsible and well-informed about their fundamental interests.
Publicness and democracy are thoroughly tied up in one another. Only un­
der the guarantee of democratic rights to change opinions freely can pub­
licness develop; only if the things citizens have a voice on are public, is
democracy thinkable. Publicness is, though, endangered in its actual devel­
opment by the social form of bourgeois society, through the commercial
concerns that seek their own profits from the information that represents
the people. Through this, right from the beginning, a moment of the re­
stricted, the particular, is added in practice to the theoretically universal
idea of publicness. It yields generally to the material interests of institutions
that prey on it. That clarifies the known difficulties with defining the concept
of publicness. A societal (sub)sector monopolizes the information and colors
it according to its interests. The idea of publicness yields the popular voice
to those institutions. It stems from the fact that the normal conception of
public opinion is that which is in the newspapers; that faced with all the
resistance of the so-called public opinion against this or that political or
social fact after its echo in the media becomes more valued, they therefore
want less to reflect what the public thinks than to control it. The hyposta-
sization and oppositionization of all categories in bourgeois society also
underlie public opinion and publicness. They split themselves off from the
living subjects who constitute the substance of the idea of publicness. That
distorts what civil history regarded throughout as progressive and demo-*

* Adorno refers here to the practice of governing “behind closed doors” by national and
international leadership without regard for the involvement of the public.— Eds.
 Opinion Research and Publicness ~~ 181

cratic. Publicness became whatever it wanted to be and should want to be,

the public consciousness of the masses, therefore inexact and ever less the
democratic political development of the will, itself constrained in the face
of the old circle of the so-called notable and cultivated. The people turned
into an appendage of the machinery of public opinion from its fundamen­
tally passively imagined audience, to which was conveyed the (objectively
most important, political) news, not so differently from the audience of the
theater, which demands that something be offered to it. In that way, today’s
tabloids and magazines and their gossip stories about the high, indifferent
private lives of movie-stars and potentates are the consequences of the
development of bourgeois publicness. Cushioned with private interests,
publicness has always been accompanied by self-contradictory elements of
the private. Publicness today serves those whom it does not concern at all,
and withholds from, or ideologically targets, those whom it actually does
concern. Habermas summarized this development as the disintegration of
publicness. Perhaps publicness was generally never realized in reality. At the
beginning, since publicness was unavailable, it would have had to be cre­
ated, since it prevented in the growing masses the very maturation it re­
quires. Men’s right to publicness turned into their allotted supply of pub­
licness; while they should be its subjects, they turned into its objects. Their
autonomy, which required public information as a medium, is hindered by
publicness. Those who do not allow themselves to escape from ideal eco­
nomic exactitude to basic human intelligence will not allow themselves to
express that the content that floods the organs of public opinion, exactly in
reference to the masses, could hardly cause anything other than stultifica­
tion. But publicness does not lay its degradation on men; men stay prison­
ers of appearances into which publicness’s social function can only be deni­
grated under the ruling conditions. The irreconciliation of general and private
interests also reveals itself in the opposition between the public and the pri­
vate. Institutionalized public opinion falsely negates it: the private turns into
public, the public private. The problem of publicness is not its excess, but its
scarcity; if it were fully developed, it would not be through that which gets
said, refracted by its own essentials, nor through that which is not said, so
it would arrive at its correct place.
Such problematics of public opinion identify the status of public opinion
research. On the one side is control, in view of ersatz public opinion manu­
factured through the organs of its production, with these an interest in con­
trolling if and to what extent they and the people actually choose or adopt
their broadcasters’ opinions; if the masses’ opposition and independence
move against the monopoly (Oktroi). Consolidation and rationalization
of the large economic and administrative units lie in the plan of its success,
 Opinion Research and Publicness — 182

the anticipated scientific control of the market. The growth of market re­
search corresponds to this tendency; it is applied market research, trans­
mitting those dead-end ways to communicating spiritual objects. The idea,
introduced by P. F. Lazarsfeld, of administrative social research, empirical
social research for purposes of administration, describes the reality correctly,
appropriately; incidentally, market research is only one root of opinion re­
search, the other is the social survey, whose history in Germany is also con­
nected with the name of Max Weber. The current identity of market and
opinion research in America, which are also bound together terminologi-
cally in Germany, is, throughout, in the sense of the observation of com­
mon sense, that no radical difference prevails between the preferences for
the names of a political candidate and for those of a brand name, as would
be expected according to the theoretical differentiation between the autono­
mous and mature/responsible folk and the surroundings (Umkreis) of the
servitude (Kundenschaft) to mass products. Under this aspect, opinion re­
search would not be a mere technique, but just as much an object of sociol­
ogy as a science that inquires into the objective structural laws of society.
But its meaning must not exhaust itself. It steps exactly into the space
that was formed by the transition of the idea of public opinion to those of
production and control: it could, following its potential, show how much
it manipulates the opinions of the population, to what extent actual public
opinion is a reflex of usurpation. The potential for improvement springs
from the limits of manipulation. To choose only the most drastic example,
that submits the assumption of every non-naive survey to political sociol­
ogy: the results are demonstrated only if the populations actually determine
the information on which their sensible political decisions depend from the
very beginning. Where that is not the case, opinion research, without social-
critical intentions, spontaneously turns into social criticism. It can determine
the reasons for insufficient trust in information, through analysis of infor­
mation sources and of that which they supply the population, just as of the
position of consciousness of those questioned, who are modeled for their
part again through the whole social conditions, especially such as the con­
sciousness industry, under which they live. Sensible research on public opin­
ion, as they say in America, “on the other side of the fence,” namely by the
masses themselves, is able to do that further, if the so-called organs of public
opinion really represent these, and if these opinions are spontaneous and
sensible or, alternatively, if they fall into line with mechanisms of social con­
trol. Research on public opinion could restore something of that, which the
replacement of these opinions committed by market organs, since the idea
of publicness in political life became real. To be sure, that incorporates the
demand that opinion research not hypostatize itself, that it not confuse the
 Opinion Research and Publicness — 183

data it gathers with the final immediate truth, but remain conscious of its
own state of mediation through the societal structure and through the in­
stitutions of opinion formation, which try to grab more and more power.
Opinion research can fulfill its promise only if it applies its results and un­
dertakes question formulations that hold to the objective social facts. Once
previously objective societal institutions like the press monopolized the
democratic title to public opinion, public opinion became centralized and
therefore moved in opposition to the idea of living subjects, whose diverse
opinion it should record, so opinion research is caught up in the attempt,
equally abstract, isolated, to isolate the naked subjective moment of opin­
ion, the meaning of individual persons, and to confuse that, which is the
naked reflex of objective, societal legalities, with the basis of social reality.
Opinion research then turns into ideology, understandable through the
claim that organs of public opinion like the mass media would have con­
formed to the opinions of the populations, which, for its part, returns to
the manipulation of public opinion. Opinion research easily assists the ma­
nipulation of consciousness at the expense of objective reality. But it shows
through this to the same dialectic as the sphere of the political, to which the
idea of opinion was indigenous and to which it still belongs. It is an ideology
which, once it achieves critical competence, will be able to dissect ideology
and to change its conclusions of existence.
 Notes

Foreword
i . Friedrich Schiller: The Piccolomini, or the First Part of Wallenstein, a Drama
in Five Acts, trans, by S. T. Coleridge, London (Longman) 1800, p. 15

Introduction
1. The appendix provides material from preparatory work for such comparative
research. This material might serve for formulating questionnaires and repre­
sentative surveys for our topic. [This material is not included in the English
appendixes. -Eds.]
2. R. F. Bales: Interaction Process Analysis, Cambridge, Mass., 1951. The funda­
mental difference is the fact that Bales’ interest throughout is in the group as
such, while our study is interested in the group participants. We do not treat
problems of group dynamics as ends in themselves, but rather as evidence of
collective influences on individuals.
3. Consider those experiments, motivated by Kurt Lewin and essentially based
on his topological psychology, that have been conducted in the United States
for about two decades. These experiments seek to investigate group structures
and group phenomena. These experiments are characterized by an experimen­
tal design modeled after natural science. It seeks to manipulate only the inde­
pendent variables and to hold all other factors constant. They thereby create—
quite consciously—such an artificial situation that one can expect an outcome
approximating reality only in the most fortunate cases. See K. Lewin: Princi­
ples of Topological Psychology, New York 1936.
 Notes to Pages i i - i 3 ~ 186

4. See Chapter 4 and T. W. Adorno: Guilt and Defense, Cambridge, Mass. (Har­
vard University Press) 2010.
5. See the series Studies in Prejudice, edited by M. Horkheimer and S. Flower-
man, New York 1950, especially volume III, T W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-
Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford: The Authoritarian Personality.
6. The difference between the quantitative and qualitative was only introduced
into the material by the scientific analysis and must not be considered abso­
lute. Insofar as all quantification refers to qualitative facts, which can only be
analyzed statistically after preparation, the categories of understanding, which
make quantitative studies meaningful in the first place, stem from the qualita­
tive area. We cannot unpack the epistemological problem of distinction here;
we maintain the concepts as developed in actual research. The oppositions re­
fer, of course, to the very deep question of how the objectifying method in so­
cial sciences actually shapes its subject. It also has to be stated that, in the
practice of social science, the separation of quantitative and qualitative meth­
ods can never be accomplished in a pure way. (See B. Berelson: Content Analy­
sis in Communication Research, Glencoe, 111., 1952, pp. 135ff.)
7 . M. Horkheimer (editor): Studien über Autorität und Familie, Forschungsberi­
chte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung, Paris 1936.

i. The Group Discussion Method Compared with

Other Methods of Empirical Sociology and Its Application
in the Study at Hand
1. See S. A. Rice, Preface to P. V. Young: Scientific Social Surveys and Research,
New York: Prentice-Hall 1949.
2. See H. Cantril: Gauging Public Opinion, Princeton 1947, pp. VII f.; E. Noelle:
Amerikanische Massenbefragung über Politik und Presse, Limburg 1940,
p. 36; W. Albig: Public Opinion, New York 1939, pp. 181 ff.
3. See L. W. Doob: Public Opinion and Propaganda, New York 1949, p. 9;
W. Albig: Public Opinion, pp. 18iff.
4. See M. Parten: Surveys, Polls and Samples, New York 1950, pp. 29off.
5. See M. Horkheimer: Eclipse of Reason, New York 1947, pp. 3L
6. Scholarly literature often refers to this point, but research practices often fail
to draw the necessary conclusions from it.
7. See W. Lippmann: Public Opinion, New York 1947, pp. 3h P. R. Hofstätter:
Die Psychologie der öffentlichen Meinung, Wien 1949, pp. 64ff.
8. See M. Horkheimer: Eclipse of Reason, pp. i28ff.
9. Recently, the complicated relation between opinion and attitude has been
thoroughly discussed by G. D. Wiebe: Some Implications of Separating Opin­
ions from Attitudes, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1953, PP· 3 2.8ff.
10. In the interest of better comprehensibility, we diverge somewhat from the con­
ventional but not always uniform terminology offered in the scholarly litera­
ture. At the same time, the terminology cannot always be kept up throughout
the quantitative part of this study. In the case of divergence we provide appro­
priate annotation.
 Notes to Pages 23-27 ~~ 187

As a general rule, the following expresses the problems articulated here in

the stated terminology:
By individual or group opinion we mean the separately formulated and
therefore conscious conception of an object. Attitude is the conception of an
object that underlies the opinion and evaluation of the object.
Conception and judgments can be latent or conscious, fixed or generalized,
or more or less fluent. Hence, they can be more or less influenced by subjective
and external factors.
Stance, behavior, and behavioral pattern: the disposition for judgments and
actions relying on entrenched and to a certain extent generalized conceptions
and forms of reaction.
By mode o f reaction [Reaktionsweise] we mean the formal character of an
expression of opinion, for example, whether the opinion is approving, condi­
tionally approving (ambivalent), or opposing. See Chapter 2.
The word disposition is used as a collective term for attitudes and behavioral
patterns.
11. See P. F. Lazarsfeld and others: The People’s Choice, New York 1949, pp. XIXff.,
pp. 4 off., pp. 6 5 ff.
1 2 . See W. A. MacKinnon: On the Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opin­
ion in Great Britain, London 1888, pp. 15.
13. See L. W. Doob: Public Opinion and Propaganda, pp. 3 if.
14. See W. Bauer: Die öffentliche Meinung in der Weltgeschichte, Potsdam 1950.
15. /. J. Rousseau: Le Contrat Social, Paris 1834, p. 48: “Il y a souvent bien de la
différence entre la volonté de tous et la volonté générale: celle-ci ne regarde
qu’à l’intérêt commun, l’autre regarde à l’intérêt privé, et n’est qu’une somme
des volontés particulières: Mais ôtez de ces mêmes volontés les plus et les
moins qui s’entre-détruisent, reste pour somme des différences la volonté
générale.”
16. F. Tönnies: Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, Berlin 1922, pp. 13 iff. See also F.
Tönnies: Ferdinand Tönnies on Public Opinion: Selections and Analyses, ed­
ited and trans, by H. Hardt and S. Splichal, Lanham, Md. (Rowman & Little­
field) 2000, pp. 137-139.
17. F. Tönnies: Ferdinand Tönnies on Public Opinion, p. 135.
18. See W. Albig: Public Opinion, pp. iff.; L. W. Doob: Public Opinion and Propa­
ganda, pp. 33ff.; A. L. Lowell: The Nature of Public Opinion, in: B. Berelson
and M. Janowitz: Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, Glencoe, 111.,
1953, pp. 2,1ff.
19. H. L. Child: By Public Opinion I Mean, Public Opinion Quarterly, April 1939,
p. 336.
20. Among the many publications describing the development of empirical research,
we merely defer to the text books of Pauline V. Young and Mildred Parten.
2 1. This result was the more surprising since the magazine Literary Digest, which
since 1916 regularly made election prognoses, arrived at a wrong result by
interviewing circa 2 million people.
22. See P. F. Lazarsfeld: The Use of Panels in Social Research, in: Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society, vol. 92, 1948, pp. 405ff.
 Notes to Pages 28-39 188

23. Best translated as Bezugssystem [reference system]. See Glossar zur Verdeutsc­
hung englischer Fachausdrücke aus der Methodik der empirischen Sozialforsc­
hung, Beitrag des Instituts für Sozialforschung, in: Praktische Sozialforschung,
edited by R. König, Dortmund and Zürich 1952, p. 295. [Ironically the trans­
lation offered there is Bezugsrahmen.—Eds.]
24. A common term in survey-method for a type of questions for the answering of
which the interviewee has to choose between a number of preset alternatives.
See M. Parten: Surveys, Polls and Samples, pp. 189L; W. Albig: Public Opinion,
p. 192.
25. See S. Freud: Gesammelte Werke, London 1940-52, vol. X, p. 225; S. Freud:
Instincts and their Vicissitudes, p. 131, in: Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, by J. Strachey, London (Hog-
arth Press) 1957, vol. XIV, pp. 109-140.
26. See P. R. Hofstätter: Die Psychologie, pp. i64ff.
27. See W. Hollitscher: The Concept of Rationalization, in: Journal of Psycho­
analysis, XX, 1939.
28. There might be certain differences between Germany and America, but these
must not be overestimated. The American ideal of extroversion makes it easier
than in Germany to talk about personal matters in a rather unrestrained way,
and the reliability of survey findings might profit from that. However, this will­
ingness seems to have its limits when the discussion transcends the preconscious—
particularly about actually emotionally charged zones. See K. Lewin: Resolving
Social Conflicts, New York 1948, pp. i8f.
29. See C. F. Schmid: Basic Statistical Concepts and Techniques, in: P. V. Young:
Scientific Social Survey and Research, New York 1950, pp. 329ff.; M. Parten:
Surveys, Polls and Samples, pp. 499ÎÎ.
30. See P. V. Young: Scientific Social Surveys, pp. 265ff.; M. Jahoda and others:
Research Methods in Social Relations, New York 1951, pp. 209ff.; T. M.
Newcomby Personality and Social Change, New York, 1943, PP* I 73^·
31. See the description of the circle of participants in Chapter II [not included in
this translation.—Eds.]. The groups between eight and sixteen participants
comprise three quarters of all groups and two-thirds of the entire circle of
participants.
3 2 . See the below section on stimulus analysis.
3 3 . Indeed, such concerns were voiced repeatedly.
34. See S. Freud: Gesammelte Werke, p. 65ff; S. Freud: On the History of the
Psycho-Analytic Movement, in: Standard Edition, vol. XIV, pp. 7-66, p. 27ff.
35. See Chapter 4.
36. See the description of the circle of participants in Chapter II [not included in
this translation—Eds.].
37. See Appendix. [Reference is to an Appendix not included in the translation.—
Eds.]
3 8 . See Appendix. [Reference is to an Appendix not included in the translation.—
Eds.]
39. See the wording in its final version in this volume. In the British zone, the
American was made a British soldier.
 Notes to Pages 40-49 ~ 189

40. See T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. ]. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford:

The Authoritarian Personality, vol. Ill, Studies in Prejudice, edited by M. Hork­
heimer and S. Flowerman, New York 1950, pp. i02ff., 145ff.
41. See e.g.: Trends in German Public Opinion 1946 through 1949, edited by
HICOG Reactions Analysis Staff, nd, pp. 2 and 6; Antisemitismus-Umfrage
des Instituts für Demoskopie, Allensbach 1949.
42. Ethnocentrism is directed against all kinds of out-groups, no matter whether
these are foreign nations or members of a different ethnicity in one’s own nation
(Prussiophobia of the Bavarians) or a minority (Jews, Negroes, and recently
refugees as well). The suppression of the “inferior” Slavic people during the war
is an example of ethnocentrism directed toward the outside, the persecution of
Jews of ethnocentrism directed toward the inside, against a minority.
43. “Displaced Persons” (DPs) is the official name for the workers abducted to
Germany by the Nazis or for foreigners of non-German origin who fled to the
Federal Republic following Russian occupation of their home countries.
44. See T. W. Adorno and others: The Authoritarian Personality, p. 229.
45. Ibid., pp. 759ff.
46. See for example: Schaffner: Fatherland. A Study of Authoritarianism in the
German Family, New York 1948.
47. See T. W. Adorno and others: The Authoritarian Personality, pp. 23off.
48. This argument is related not only to the authority complex but also to one of
the other sensitive areas and, thus, is repeated in this context.
49. See Memorandum betreffend die Konferenz der Mitarbeiter der Gruppenfors­
chung des Instituts für Sozialforschung vom 5. Bis 7. Oktober 1950, Ziff. 5, as
well as the report of the investigators in Hesse, Bavaria, and Northern Germany
in the archive of the Institute.
50. See e.g.: R. Lippit: Training in Community Relations, New York 1949,
pp. 156ff. and pp. 27iff. A. F. Zander: The WP Club, in: Human Relations,
vol. i, 1948, pp. 321 ff. K. Back: Interpersonal Relations in a Discussion
Group, in: Journal of Social Issues, vol. 4, 1948, pp. 6 iff. K. Back: The Exer­
tion of Influence through Social Communication, in: L. Festinger; K. Back,
S. Schächter, H. H. Kelley, J. Thibaut: Theory and Experiment in Social Com­
munication, Ann Arbor 1950, pp. 28E S. Schacter: Deviation, Rejection, and
Communication, in: L. Festinger and others: Theory and Experiment, pp. 72ff.
J. Thibaut: An Experimental Study of the Cohesiveness of Underprivileged
Groups, in: Human Relations, vol. 3, pp. 259ff. L. Carter and others: The Re­
lations of Categorizations and Ratings in the Observation of Group Behavior,
in: Human Relations, vol. 4, pp. 24iff.
51. See R. F. Bales: Interaction Process Analysis, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, p. 8 and
pp. i 7 7 ff.
52. Content analysis is defined as the process of classifying qualitative material
with the help of suitable categories so that it can be described systematically.
See L. Festinger and D. Katz: Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences,
New York 1953, pp. 423ff. B. Berelson: Content Analysis in Communica­
tion Research, Glencoe, 111., 1952, pp. i4ff. M. Jahoda and others: Research
Methods in Social Relations, pp. 539ff. H. D. Lasswell: Why Be Quantitative?
 Notes to Pages 49-62 ~ 190

in: Berelsort and Janowitz: Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, pp.
265ff. B. Berelsort and P. F. Lazarsfeld: Die Bedeutungsanalyse von Kommuni­
kationsmaterialien, in: Praktische Sozialforschung, edited by R. König, pp.
14iff. Institut für Sozialforschung: (Article) Sozialforschung, empirische,
in: Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften, 6. Lieferung, Stuttgart 1954,
pp. 4 3 off.
53. See Chapter 1.
54. See A. H. Barton and P. F. Lazarsfeld: Some Functions of Qualitative Analysis
in Social Research, in: Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, vol. 1.
55. The following statements of one of the leading scholars in American social
research directly relate to “anthropological procedure,” but apply analogously
to all qualitative research. It is said that this kind of research:
“represents only the first step in science, because its rich interpretations
are not based on relations which have been quantitatively established. They
are inferences which either represent a wholistic type of judgment or are
based upon what the investigator regards as his most central observations.
There is little attempt at specification of the types of data which are neces­
sary for the measurement of a given variable. Hence, it frequently makes
difficult and often impossible the verification of relations by another investi­
gator. The history of social psychology illustrates the importance of the rep­
lication of findings in that many of its initial results have not been confirmed
by later investigations. Only when we attain the level of standardizing our
specifications for data can we see the extent to which reported findings are
true generalizations.”
The author then states that the conflict between quantitative and qualitative
method can be solved easily by using the latter only in the initial stage of the
investigation.
“This stage can utilize to the full the advantages of seeing the situation as a
whole and of attempting to grasp the fundamental relationship. From this study
can come the insights which can furnish the hypotheses for later, more detailed
quantitative study.” D. Katz, in: L. Festinger and D. Katz: Research Methods,
pp. 64f.
56. Lately, under the lead of Lazarsfeld, the scholarly literature has been con­
cerned to an increasing degree with the significance of qualitative analyses for
empirical social research. See the summary with bibliographic references of
Dorwin P. Cartwright: Analysis of Qualitative Material, in: L. Festinger and
D. Katz: Research Methods, pp. 4 2 iff.
57. See the preliminary remarks for part III [not included in this translation—Eds.].

2. The Organization of the Discussion Materials

1. See H. Zeisel: Say it with Figures, New York 1950, pp. 4ff.
2. See the section on interpretive coding below [Section III, pp. 70-71].
3. See T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford:
The Authoritarian Personality, vol. Ill, Studies in Prejudice, edited by M. Hork­
heimer and 5 . Flowerman, New York 1950, pp. 2 9 iff
 Notes to Pages y o -j6 —* 1 9 1

4. It follows from the aim of our study as well as from the character of the mate­
rial unearthed by it that the objective significance of the statements, i.e., their
declarative value about reality, cannot be the subject matter of the analysis. Our
interest is focused on the significance of the statements for the attitude of the
participant, not their value for a correct assessment of the question discussed.
5. T. M. Newcomb, Personality and Social Change, New York, 1943, PP· H 9ff
6. Ibid., pp. 2i7ff.

3. Quantitative Analyses
1. In the following, we assume—if not explicitly indicated otherwise—that the
speakers reflect the attitudes of the individual discussion groups as well as of
the statistical group to which they belong. We cannot yet say to what extent
this assumption is backed up by more than experience. The explanations in
Chapter 4 about phenomena of integration, for example, apply to this ques­
tion. Likewise we count among this the impressive internal consistency of the
attitudes of the individuals who make up the discrete statistical groups, as long
as the relevant group contains a minimum number of individuals. Only then
can we expect that the speakers are articulating essential factors and not other,
nonessential influences.
2. Comparing percentages of the individual statistical groups with the average
serves only the purpose of an ordering scheme that establishes relations. One
would have to include the different sizes of these groups in order to arrive at an
exact quantifiable assessment of the demographic groups in their relation to the
average. This is because the larger groups contribute more to the computation
of the overall average than do the smaller ones. As a result, the relatively smaller
percentage deviations of the larger groups (e.g., men or those with grade school
education) are more important for the interpretation than are those of the
smaller groups.
3. Recall that we evaluate the code “approval” as positive attitude, “disapproval”
as negative, etc., except for the topics of the East and German self-assessment
(where we proceed conversely). See Chapter 2.
4. It is worth noting that the small percentage of rejection of democracy among
women and housewives is almost equal, even though the housewives consti­
tuted less than half the women speakers (110 of 274).
5. Even among groups with the smallest ambivalent attitude (unskilled workers
54%, farmers 58%) the number of ambivalent remarks accounts for more
than half of the speakers.
6. In the statistical sense: the circle of participants.
7. Grade school: 25% of rejection; high school: 22%; high school graduate:
15 % ; university: 13%.
8. o- 2 years: 20% of rejection; 2-6 years: 24%; 6 years and more: 32%.
9. With an almost average participation (42%) only 8% of their speakers acted
ambivalently, none positively.
10. 20 years or less: 37% of the speakers; 20-25 years: 49%; 2.5-30 years: 56%;
30 years and older: 48%. [As in the original, the highest age category in the
 Notes to Pages 76-89 ^ 192

footnote is 30 years and older, not 50 years and older as implied in the
text.—Eds.]
11. Up to 2 years of military service: 52% of speakers; 1 -6 years of military ser­
vice: 59%; 6 years and more: 63%.
12. Grade school: 54% of speakers; high school: 50%; high school graduate:
46%; university: 45%.
13. It is remarkable that the university graduates show above-average participa­
tion in all of the other topics. See the profile, Figure 3.8.
14. See the profile, Figure 3.8.
15. See Chapter 1.
16. See Table 30 in the appendix [not included in this translation—Eds].
17. 0-2 years of military service: 78% disapproval, 11% approval; 2- 6 years of
military service: 84% disapproval, 5% approval; 6 years and more: 86% dis­
approval, 4% approval.
18. The significance of the unusually high frequency of disapproving speakers
among unskilled workers is emphasized by the fact that this group’s participa­
tion is generally far below average and it essentially reaches the average for
this topic (32% as compared with 36% on average).
19. Unskilled workers: 82%; farmers: 67%; housewives: 66%; general school:
66%; 20 years or less: 38%; students: 39%; university graduates: 46%; high
school graduates: 48%.
20. Adding rows I and II in Table 3.7 is methodologically justified since an exami­
nation of the transcripts as well as the reports of the assistants in the sessions
showed that the majority of ambivalent reactions evinced approval “at a price.”
21. Men’s participation, however, is significantly higher than women’s (39% ver­
sus 28%), and the negative attitude among women is a little bit higher than
among men.
22. Participation frequency among students: 37%; high school graduates: 39%;
junior high: 42%; university graduates: 47%.
23. In general we refrained from interpreting findings for statistical groups of
fewer than 100 participants. These groups make such small subgroups for
classification that their significance is even more problematic than with larger
subgroups of our “population.” It is still interesting that something like a cor­
relation between degree of education and attitude toward the Germans in also
reflected in these smallest groups.
24. Participation of women = 33%; of men = 28%. The only other topic in which
women participate remarkably more often than men is the topic of Jews (26%
versus 21%).
25. The construction of models of such attitude-types and their confrontation
with profiles gained from statistical material was started. However, it was not
complete at the time this report was finished. See the Afterword.
26. See Figure 3.19.
27. The narrowly limited validity of the underlying data made more complicated
presentation methods seem inadequate.
28. This average is based on the classification of the profiles of the demographic
groups and must not be confused with the average of the attitude toward the
topics.
 Notes to Pages 89-98 — 193

29. Students, for example, were also included in men or women, their age and edu­
cational groups, and according to their military service.
30. The attitude toward the East was not considered for the construction of the
index because the high average of the positive attitude tends to blur the differ­
ences among the other topics. See the difference in average with the East and
without the East on Figure 3.19.
31. The numbers added in brackets display the index. It goes without saying
that these numbers can indicate only the approximate relative position in
the respective order of all groups, and that they serve as a rough illustration
at best.
The second number for each group is the combined index of the “test top­
ics.” Based on the idea that four of our seven topics are particularly character­
istic for the speakers’ attitude toward democratic values, we constructed an
additional measure. It is based on the sum of percentage deviation of the fre­
quency of each group’s attitudes toward the topics of complicity, Jews, the
West, and democracy from the general attitude toward the same four topics.
Introducing this additional index changes the status of the statistical groups.
These changes, however, generally alter the picture only a little. An exception
is the occupational group of unskilled workers, which ranks thirteenth accord­
ing to the index including six topics and advances to the eighth position in the
ranking according to the test topics.
The pro-Jewish attitude was classified as ambivalent in the computation of
the indices. Classifying it as positive together with the non-anti-Semitic atti­
tude changes the status of the groups only marginally. For the indices includ­
ing all topics, the change amounts to one point each for four groups, while the
other sixteen groups maintain their status. For the indices comprising the test
topics, the status similarly does not change in twelve cases; it changes by one
point each for six groups and by two points each for two groups.
32. This does not imply a high degree of ambivalence but that the frequencies of
positive and negative statements roughly balance each other.
33. The graphical profiles are obtained by registering the frequency of speakers of
the respective group for each topic in percentages and comparing them with the
average attitude of all speakers. Each table, furthermore, displays the participa­
tion in the discussion of the group as well as its deviation from the participa­
tion of all groups.
34. Frequency of positive remarks below average for the West (-22%), complicity
( - 20%).
35. According to the index for the test questions, they rank 13.
36. See also Table 1 and Chapter II [These are not included in this translation—Eds.]
37. For the positive attitude: the West -33%, the East -10%; for the negative at­
titude: Jews +16%.
38. For this topic, the average frequency of ambivalence is so high (68%) that
considerable deviations upward are hard to imagine.
39. Among the age group 50 years and older, all these influences are presumably
modified by the experience of the First World War and the years of peace pre­
ceding it. See Chapter II [Not included in this translation.—Eds.].
40. Jews (+29%).
 Notes to Pages 100-119 — * 194

41. We are using this abbreviated group label instead of the inconvenient “partici­
pants with high school diploma but without university education.”
42. “University graduates” (speakers with university education) are ranked in sec­
ond place in regard to the frequency of ambivalent attitudes, immediately fol­
lowing adolescents up to 20 years.
43. In contrast to their silence toward the topic of Jews, the university graduates
participate between 14% and 57% more often in the discussion concerning all
other topics than the average of all groups.
44. The index for the test topics is +125 and takes the fifth position in this rank.
45. The combined index of the farmers is -477; the next highest negative index for
the four test topics is -284 (university graduates).
46. Even though we do not discuss the attitude toward the East in the analysis of
the profiles due to reasons mentioned above, we wish to at least point out that
a friendly attitude toward the East is three times as high among the farmers’
group as among the average of all groups.

4. Integration Phenomena in Group Discussions

1. See A. H. Barton and P. P. Lazarsfeld: Some Functions of Qualitative Analysis
in Social Research, in: Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, vol. i
2. See F. Oppenheimer: System der Soziologie, vol. 1: Allgemeine Soziologie, vol
2: Der soziale Prozeß, Jena 1923, p. 462; T. Geiger: Sociologi, Copenhagen
1939, p. 76; £. S. Bogardus: Sociology, New York 1945, p. 8.
3. See W. Sombart: Grundformen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, in: Handwörter­
buch der Soziologie, Stuttgart 1931, pp. 22iff.; A. Vierkandt: Gruppe, in: Hand­
wörterbuch der Soziologie, Stuttgart 1931, pp. 2.39ff.; L. v. Wiese: System der
Allgemeinen Soziologie, Munich and Leipzig 1933, pp. 384ff.
4. A. Vierkandfs theory of groups can be found in his “Gesellschaftslehre,” 2nd
edition, Stuttgart 1928, pp. 32off., as well as more concentrated in: Archiv für
angewandte Soziologie, Jg. i, Heft 1, Juli 1928, pp. iff., and in the article on
groups cited above in the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie.
5. H. Spencer: The Principles of Sociology, 3rd edition, London 1885, vol I,
pp. 43 5ff.; T. Geiger: Sociologi, pp. 193L and 291; L. v. Wiese: System der
Allgemeinen Soziologie, pp. 157 and 316.
6. See R. M. Maclver and C. H. Page: Society, New York 1950, p. 228.
7. See T. Geiger: Sociologi, p. 291.
8. See F. H. Giddings: The Principles of Sociology, London 1896, pp. 134ff.
9. See Maclver and C. H. Page: Society, p. 228.
10. See E. Durkheim: Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans, by Spaulding and Simp­
son, Glencoe, 111. (Free Press) 1951, 2nd book, Chapters II and III.
11. Integrating is used in the sense of integration throughout this work.
12. See W. McDougall: The Group Mind, Cambridge, Mass., 1921, p. 88.
13. See S. E. Asch: Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distor­
tion of Judgments, in: H. Guetzkow: Groups, Leadership and Men, Pittsburgh
1951,p. 188.
14. See G. Simmel: Soziologie, 3rd edition, Munich and Leipzig 1922, p. 132.
 Notes to Pages 119-138 ~~ 193

15. See Λ. Vierkandt: Gesellschaftslehre, p. 138.

16. Such contradictory behavior was coded as ambivalent attitude. The problem
arises here of whether it would not be advisable to distinguish between am­
bivalence under the pressure of group opinion and an unstable attitude with­
out specific external influence.
17. See L. Festinger: Informal Communications in Small Groups, in: H. Guetz-
kow: Groups, Leadership and Men, p. 41.
18. See G. C. Homans: The Human Group, New York 1950, p. 459; and E.
Fromm: Escape from Freedom, New York, 1941, p. 19.
19. W. Trotter: Instinct of the Herd in Peace and War, London 1916.
20. See S. Freud: Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, in: Gesammelte Werke, Bd.
XIII, London 1947, pp. i32ff.; S. Freudy Group Psychology, in: Standard Edi­
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, by
J. Strachey, London (Hogarth Press) 1955, vol. XVIII, p. 120.
21. See G. C. Homans: The Human Group, p. 177.
22. We distinguish this actual conformity from a phenomenon formally similar to it
that occasionally appeared during the first phase of the discussion. It has a com­
pletely different character from the consensus reached only in the integration
phase, since it regularly refers to only those topics which, from the outset, are
uncontroversial in the respective group. We could talk of “pseudoconformity,”
because it allows space for the greatest differences in opinion within the group
and, thus, must by no means be regarded as a symptom for the last stage of
group integration.
23. See T. W. Adorno: Guilt and Defense, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University
Press) 2010, p. 122.
24. S. Freud: Massenpsychologie, pp. 115ff. (pp. i05ff in the English edition).
25. Ibid., pp. 118 (p. 108 in the English edition).
26. Ibid.
27. A. Vierkandt: Gesellschaftslehre, p. 238
28. See Chapter 1.
29. We have to distinguish this usage from the cases where “we” stands for the
group. See above, section on “Conformity,” p. 123-128.
30. See Chapter 3.
31. See L. Festinger, S. Schachter, and K. Back: Social Pressure in Informal Groups,
New York 1950, pp. 164L
32. See D. G. M arquiSyH. Guetzkow, and R. R. Heyns: A Psychological Study of the
Decision-Making Conference, in: Guetzkow: Groups, Leadership and Men, p. 60.
33. See E. Fromm: Escape from Freedom, New York, 1941.
34. See the interpretation of the group discussion with former General Staff Offi­
cers, unpublished manuscript in the archive of the Institute.
35. K. Young: Social Psychology, 2nd edition, New York 1944, p. 547. On the
problem of the notion of “social control,” see the chapter Social Control by
G. Gurvitch in: Twentieth Century Sociology, edited by G. Gurvitchy New
York 1945, pp. 2.67ff.
36. See K. Lewin: Field Theory in Social Science, New York 1951, p. 272.
37. See G. Simmel: Soziologie, pp. 473L
 Notes to Pages 138-164 — 196

38. See S. Freud: Massenpsychologie, p. n o (p. 100 in the English edition).

39. The term out-group should be understood sociopsychologically, it is felt as an
object of contra-identification as opposed to the in-group to whom one is at­
tached through identification. See T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J.
Levinson, and R. N. Sanford: The Authoritarian Personality, vol. Ill, Studies in
Prejudice, edited by M. Horkheimer and S. Flowerman, New York 1950, p. 104.
40. Ibid., pp. 6o9f.
41. See S. Freud: Massenpsychologie, p. 111 (pp. 10if. in the English edition).
42. See S. E. Asch: Effects of Group Pressure, pp. 177E
43. See Festinger; Schächter; and Back: Social Pressure in Informal Groups, p. 176
and p. 531. Yet silence can also mean approval.
44. See K. Lewin: Resolving Social Conflicts, New York: Harper & Row, 1948,
pp. 51-52.
45. See A. Vierkandt: Gesellschaftslehre, p. 238.

Afterword
1. See T. W. Adorno: Guilt and Defense, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University
Press) 2010.
2. Nietzsche developed a psychological explanation for this form of reaction of
“anaesthetiz[ing] pain through feeling”: “generally this is sought, quite wrongly
it seems to me, in the defensive counter-strike, a merely reactive protective mea­
sure, a ‘reflex movement’ in the case of any kind of sudden injury and danger,
like the way in which a frog still seeks to escape a corrosive acid once decapi­
tated. But the difference is fundamental here: in one instance, the desire is to
prevent further injury, in the other, to anaesthetize by means of any more intense
emotion a secret pain and torment which is becoming unbearable, and so to
exclude it from consciousness for a moment at least. And for this purpose a feel­
ing is required, the most intense feeling possible, and, in order to stimulate it, the
first pretext which happens along. ‘Someone must be to blame for the fact that I
do not feel well’—” From E Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals. A Polemic,
trans, by D. Smith, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 1996, pp. 105E
3. See Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften, Tübingen 1954, Empirische
Sozialforschung, Kontrolliertes Experiment, p. 424.
4. See Chapter 4.
5. See T W. Adorno: Guilt and Defense.

Appendices A & B
1. Theoretically available speaking time = Duration of the discussion/Size of group.
2. See Aspekte der Sprache, vol. IV of the Manuscripts on the “Gruppenstudie”
in the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt am Main.
3. See T W. Adorno: Guilt and Defense, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University
Press) 2010.
4. See Karl Kraus: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, Zürich 1945, f°r example
Act III, Scene 45, pp. 406E
 Notes to Pages ι6 γ -ι8 ο ~~ 197

5. See Theodor Haecker: Tag- und Nachtbücher, München 1947, p. 126.

6. Ibid., pp. 109L
7. This is only an apparent contradiction to what was said above about the phase
of conformity, because in most of the cases the topic is already implied by the
conformistic general attitude.
8. See T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Frankfurt 1951, pp. i82f. Minima Mora­
lia, trans, by £. R N.Jephcott, London (Verso) 1974, p. 102.

O pinion Research and Publicness

i. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (trans.
Thomas Burger), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962.
 Index

Abbott, Andrew, xxvi Bauei; Wilhelm, 24014

Ackerman, Bruce, xxvii, 1 Behrmann, Günter G, xxii, xliv
Adenauer Konrad, 63, 65 Benjamin, Walter xviii, xxi
Administrative research, xv, 182 Berelson, Bernard, xxiv, nn6
Adomo, Gretel, xxxix Bergmann, Wemei; xxxv
Age, attitude according to, 90,96,97,98 Bock, Michael, xxii, xliv
Albig, William, 10m, 2in3, 25018,28024 Bogardus, Emory S., noni
Albrecht, Clemens, xxii, xliv Böhm, Franz, xxiv, xxv, xlvi, 1,148
Altemeyei; Bob, xxii Bolshevism, 170,171,174
Ambivalence, xxxi Bourdieu, Pierre, xxvii, xxxvi, xlviii
Anti-Semitism, xvii, xix, xxix, xxxi, Brecht, Bertolt, xviii
xxxii, 39,41, 44, 59, 61,78, 79* 98,
103,166 Cantril, Hadley, xxiv, 2on2
Apostolidis, Paul, xx Child, Harwood L., 26
Asch, Solomon E., 119013,140042 Claussen, Dedev, xvii
Attitudes, 9,19, 20, 23010, 31,32, 38,44, Coding scheme, xxxi, 65
50,73,74, 89; instability of, 28; of men, Colburn letter xxviii, xxx, xxxv, xxxvi,
95* 96; of women, 92-96 xli, 33, 39,45* 60, 61, 62,114,139,
Austin, John Langshaw, xlix 177
Authenticity, xxv, xxvi, xxxv, xlvi, xlvii, 3; Communists, xxi, 121,154
of opinions, xxx, xlv Complicity (Mitschuld), 76,77,97,104.
Authoritarianism, xxii, 44,47 See also Guilt
Comte, Auguste, 49
Back, Kurt W., 133031,140043 Conformity, 123,113022,124,127,130,
Bales, Robert, xvi, xxxiii, ion2,48,48051 MS
Barton, Allen. H., 49054 Converse, Jean M., xxvi, xlviii
Basic stimulus, 12,44,45, 58,134,141, Corruption, 67, 68,116
144,151,177 Cosei; Lewis A., xviii
 Index ~ zo o

Dahrendorf, Ralf, xxxix, xliii Gallup, George, xxx, 27

Democracy, xxi-xxiii, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, Gamson, William A., xlvii
xlix, i, 15, 44, 67, 115, 116, 117, 121, Geiger,Theodor, n o n 2 , m n 5 , ιΐ2Π7
151,153, 163, 165, 172, 180; attitudes Gender, attitude according to, 90
towards, 59, 74, 75, 92, 97, 153; ideal Germany, xvii, xviii, xxii-xxv, xxvii, xxxii,
of, 68, 89, 104; mistrust against, 153; xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, xlii, xliii, 4, 1 5, 34,
potential of, xxvii, 19, 20 40, 43-47, 61, 62, 72, 86, 115, 118, 122,
Denazification, 60, 61 131, 134, 136, 139, 143, 152, 153, 166,
de Saussure, Ferdinand, xxvii 164, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 177, 178,
Displaced persons (DPs), 42, 42Π43, 59, 61 179; cultural superiority of, 41, 42;
Doob, Leonard, xxiv, 2m 3, 24η 13 custom (deutsches Brachtum), xxxv;
Durkheim, Emile, xxvii, xlv, xlvi, 25, differences with America, 29028; East,
112η 10, 119 140; Nationalism, 59; over-burdened
(überhitzt), 132; rearmament, 83; social
East, 15 1, 165; accord between West and, science in, xxix, xliv, 10, 20
129; attitudes toward, 81, 82, 97, 106; Giddings, Franklin Henry, 112n8
differences between West and, 68, 167 Ginsberg, Benjamin, xxvii, xlix
Education, attitude according to, 90, 93, Gitlin, Todd, xx
99, 100, 102, 106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2
Elections, xxiv, 3, 66, 179 Greenberg, Stanley B., 1
Eliasoph, Nina, xlvii, 1 Group discussions, 10, 15, 33, 34, 37, 52
Emotions, 28, 29, 72 Group dynamics, ion2, 48, 50, 53, 133
Empirical social science, xix, xxix, 10, 11, Guetzkow, Harold, I22n i7, 133032
21, 27, 30, 49; American-style, xix, xxii; Guilt, xxxi, I, 39, 4 3 »4 5 »4 7 » 61, 76, 123,
experimental methods in, 2, 5, 6, 150, 164; attitudes towards, 76, 77; complex,
157; methods of, xxvii, 10 23. See also Complicity (Mitschuld)
England, 59, 62
Erickson, Robert S., xlviii, 1 Habermas, Jürgen, xxxix, xl, xliii, xlv, 1,
Espeland, Wendy Nelson, xlix 181
Ethnocentrism, 40, 4ΙΠ42, 72, 86, 87, 88 Haecker, Theodor, 16705
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13
Familiarity, 120, 130 Held, David, xvii, xxxviii
Federal Republic of Germany, xxiii, xxxvi, Herbst, Susan, xxi
xliv, 9, 36, 36n36, 43, 61, 63, 65, 141, 153 Herzog, Hertha, xxxix
Festinger, Leon, 122η 17, 133031, i4on43 Heyns, Roger, 133032
Fields, Karen E., xxiv High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG),
Fischer, Claude S., xxi U.S., xxii, xxvii, 41041
Fishkin, James S., xxvii, 1 Hitler, Adolf, 4 1 ,4 4 , 67, 114» 17 3 » *74»
Fiske, Marjorie, xxv, xxviii 177, 178; regime, 20; speeches of, 173;
Floweman, Samuel Η., I2n5 Youth, 126, 142
Focus groups, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxviii, xxx, Hofstätter, Peter, xxxv, xxxvi, xlii, xliii, xliv,
xxxiii, xxxiv, xlvii xlvii, xlix, 29, 29026
Foucault, Michel, xxvii, xlv, xlvi Hollitscher, Walter, 29027
France, 59, 61 Homann, Harald, xxii, xliv
Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, xxxv Homans, George C, I22n2i
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer, Max, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx,
xxxvi ii, i, 9, 10, 15, 24, 30, 31, 148 xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxviii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl,
Fraser, Nancy, xlv xli, Ι2Π5, Ι3Π7, 2205, 23n8
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 12η5, 4θΠ4θ Hullot-Kentor, Robert, xxi, xxxix, xli, xlii,
Freud, Sigmund, xli, 12, 28n25, 35Π34, 49, xlix
122, 124, Ι24Π24, 125, 126, 138,
I3 8 n 3 8 ,152 Igo, Sarah E., xxv, xxx, xlviii, xlix
Fromm, Erich, xviii, Ι35Π33 Inkeles, Alex, xxx, xxxvi
 Index ~~ 201

Institut für Sozialforschung (IFS). See Marcuse, Herbert, xv, xviii, xli
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research Marquis, Donald G., 133032
Marres, Noortje, xxxiv, xlv
Jacobs, Lawrence, xlviii Martin, John Levi, xxii
Jäger, Lorenz, xxiii, xxxviii, xxxix Massification, xxi
Jahoda, Marie, xxii, xxxii Mass society, xvii, 169
Janowitz, Morris, xvi, xxiv Maus, Köhne and Heinz, xxxix
Jarkko, Lars, 179 McDougall, William, 12, 119012
Jay, Martin, xxii, xxxii, xxxviii, xlii McFarland, Katherine, xxxiv
Jenemann, David, xvi, xvii, xix, xxii Mendelberg, Tali, xxxiv
Jepperson, Ronald L., xxvi, xxx, xxxvi, xlix Merritt, Anna J. and Richard L., xxix
Jews, xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, 13,41, 4 3 »79» 97, Merton, Robert K., xxv, xxviii, xlvi
98, 108, 139, 165, 166, 171, 178; Military service, attitude according to term
attitudes towards, 77, 78, 100, 101; of, 91,93
problem, 165-166; question, 1 Morgan, David L., xxviii
Morgenthau Jr., Henry, 121
Karplus, Margarete, xxxix Morgenthau Plan, 121
Katz, Elihu, xix, xx Mutz, Diana C., xxxiv
Kellner, Douglas, xlii
Kendall, Patricia L., xxv, xxviii Nagel, Ivan, xxxix
Klinenberg, Eric, xxi National Socialism, xxiii, xxix, xxxiv, xxxv,
Köhne, Rainer, xxxiv, 161 xxxvii, 41-43, 46, 59, 63, 96, 97, 116,
Kohut, Andrew, xlviii 126, 163, 164, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177
König, René, xxii, xliv, i8n23, 161 Neumann, Franz, xxxviii
Korean War, 47, 60, 61, 62, 121, 178 Newcomb, Theodore Mead, 7005
Kracauer, Siegfried, xviii Newport, Frank, xxx, xlviii
Kraus, Karl, ι 64Π4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxxviii
Noelle-Neumann, Elizabeth, xxix, 2on2
Lamont, Michèle, xxxvi Non-public opinion, xxiv, xlvi, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
Language, xxvii, xxxiv, 161, 166, 174; 8, 148, 149
brittleness of, 51; and speech, 174
Lasswell, Harold, xxiv Occupation, attitudes according to, 102,
Latour, Bruno, xxvii, xxxiv, xlv, xlix 103, 104, 105, 106. See also Profession,
Lazarsfeld, Paul, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxiv, attitude according to
xxxix, 23m i, 27022, 49, 49Π54, 50056 Oehler, Christoph, xl
Le Bon, Gustave, 12 Olick, Jeffrey K., xxii, xxiii, xlii, xliv
Leib, Ethan J., 1 Opinion, xlvii, 2, 9, 13, 19, 20, 21, 23nio,
Levinson, Daniel J., 1205, 40040 3 1, 3 2, 5 3, 69; act of holding, 21 ; and
Lewin, Kurt, xxiv, 1 m3, 138036, 141, attitude, 23n8; collective nature of, 33;
141044 contradictory tendencies in, 29; forma­
Lezaun, Javier, xxxiv, xlvii tion, 12; instability of, 28; polling,
Lichterman, Paul, xlvii, 1 xxviii-xxx, xxxiii, xlv, xlviii, 21; public,
Lippit, R., 48050 xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xlv, xlix, 3,
Lippmann, Walter, xxiv, 2in7 5, 7, 8, 9, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 108,
Löwenthal, Leo, xv, xviii 180, 18 1, 183; public, concept of, 21;
Lukâcs, Georg, xviii research, xxiii-xxvi, xxx, xxxiv, xxxvi, xl,
Lynching, 1 3 ,4 1 ,4 3 , 178 xlv, xlvii, xlviii, 1, li, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23,
Lynd, Robert, xvi 25, 3°» 37» J79» 182, 183; surveys, xxiii
Oppenheimer, Franz, 1 ion2
Maclver, Robert Μ., 11 ιη6, 112Π9 Osborne, Thomas, xlix
MacKenzie, Donald, xlix
MacKinnon, William Alexander, 23012 Page, Benjamin, xlix, 1
MacKuen, Michael, xlviii, 1 Page, Charles H., 11 in6
 Index — 202

Paley, Julia, xxvii, xlix Social science, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxx, xlii, 13,
Parten, Mildred, 2m 3, 27020, 28ni4 19, 20; American, xxiii, xxviii, xxix,
Perrin, Andrew J., xxi, xxii, xxvi, xxviii, xxxii, xxxvii, xlvi, 10, 154; methods, xxx.
xxxi, xxxiv-xxxvi, xlii, xlvii, xlix, See also Sociology
179 Sociology, i i , 19, 20,4 9 , 155; in postwar
Piazza, Thomas, 1 Germany, 10
Pickford, Henry W., xx Sombart, Werner, 1 ion 3
Plato, 13 Spencer, Herbert, 11 in 5, 112
Plessner, Helmuth, xxxix Stanton, Frank N., xix
Plessner, Monika, xxxix Steigert, Nikolaus, xxxix
Polling. See Opinion: polling Stendenbach, Franz Josef, xxxviii, xliv
Pollock, Friedich, xviii, xxii, xxiv, Stereotypes, 22, 62, 64, 65
xxviii Stern, Frank, xxix
Princeton Radio Research Project, xv, Stimson, James A., xlviii, 1
xvi Sunstein, Cass R., xxxiv, 1
Profession, attitude according to, 91, 93, Surveys, xxvi, xxvii, xliv, 1, 27, 30, 32, 37;
102 method, 26, 3 1, 32, 43
Publicness, xl, xlvii, 179, 180, 181 Swidler, Ann, xxv, xxxvi, xlix
Public opinion. See Opinion: public
Templer, William, xxix
Radio, xxi, xxiv, 3, 7 Tenbruck, Friedrich H., xxii, xliv
Rae, Saul Forbes, xxx Thévenot, Laurent, xxxvi
Refugees, 132, 139, 167 Thomas, Martin Luther, xx, xl
Remilitarization, attitudes towards, 60, Tiedemann, Rolf, xx
61, 83, 84, 85, 86, 97, 102, 104, 119 Tilly, Charles, xxv
Rice, Stuart A., 19m Tönnies, Ferdinand, 24, 25016, 25017
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 128 Totality, xv, xvi, xvii, xxix, 11, 24, 154, 171
Rose, Nikolas, xlix Totally socialized people (vergesellschaftete
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 24η 15 Leute), 20
Russian occupation, 59 Totally socialized society (vergesellschaftete
Russians, 6, 34, 46, 59, 66, 72, 106, 118, Gesellschaft), xviii, xix, xxi, xxx, xxxiii,
121, 122, 162, 171, 178 xxxiv, xli, xlii, xlv, xlvi, xlviii, 23
Trombadori, Duccio, xlvi
Sanford, R. Nevitt, 12η 5, 40040 Trotter, William, 122
Sasson, Theodore, xlvii Truman, Harry, 46
Sauder, Michael, xlix
Sawyer, R. Keith, xxxiv United States, xvi, xviii, xix, xxii, xxvii,
Schachtei; Stanley, 133031, 140043 xxviii, xxxviii, 59, 61.
Schiller, Friedrich, 3m
Schmid, Calvin F., 30029 Vergesellschaftete Gesellschaft. See Totally
Schudson, Michael, xxviii socialized society (vergesellschaftete
Schweppenhäuser, Gerhard, xviii, xxxix Gesellschaft)
Schweppenhauser, Hermann, xxxiv, 161 Vierkandt, Alfred, 110, 1 ion3, 119m 5,
Science, 4, 14, 26, 31 1 2 7 ,Ι27Π27, 144045
Sell, Hans Joachim, xxxix Volksgemeinschaft, xv, 169, 172
Shapiro, Robert, xlviii, xlix, 1 von Friedeburg, Ludwig, xxxix, xl
Silent participants, xxix, 150, 157; partly, von Haselberg, Peter, xxxix
157,158,159; totally, 157
Simmel, Georg, 119014, 138, 152 Warner, Michael, xlv, xlix
Skocpol, Theda, 1 Weber, Max, 11, 12, 49, 182
Smith, David Horton, xxx, xxxvi Weil, Felix, xviii
Sniderman, Paul Μ., I West, the, xxii, xxxi, 98; attitudes toward,
Social control, 109, 136, 137 80, 81, 97, 102, 103
 Index 203

Wheatland, Thomas, xix Young, Iris Marion, xlv

Wiebe, Gerhart D., 2309 Young, Kimball, 136n3 5
Wiese, Leopold von, 1ion3,11inj Young, Pauline V., 20m, ιγ η ιο 9
Wiggershaus, Rolf, xviii, xxiii, xxxviii, xl 3 in 3 °
Witkin, Robert W, xxi
Wolff, Kurt, xxviii, xxxix, 154 Zaller, John, xlix, 1
World War 1,46,163 Zeisel, Hans, 58m