The Granfalloon Effect
How the Super Bowl and LGBT blah blah blah, black lives matter, and so many other groups on both sides of the aisle are more similar than you think
As Americans sit down to watch the Superbowl, stuffing their gaping mouths full of fake garbage food hypnotized by the circus that is American football, I am reminded of the term Curt Vonnegut coined, Granfalloon, which means a proud and meaningless collection of human beings.
When driving around you can spot an array of different logos from different groups: Sports fans have custom vanity license plates sporting helmets of their favorite teams, Green Bay Packer, Chicago Bears and every other NFL team flags and stickers dot homes and vehicles everywhere. Rainbow flags fly at homes, schools and even churches; bumper stickers with phrases like “I’m so gay I cant even drive straight” are abound. Large pick up trucks fly by with diesel smoke billowing out sporting “redneck” and Make American Great stickers, these but a few examples of the stereotypical uniforms the American populace parade around in. I argue that all these groups, despite extremely differing ideologies are in fact basically the same.
A set of findings put forth by British social psychologist Henri Tajifel described what he discovered was the emotionally powerful persuasive technique called the minimum group paradigm. Tajifel brought together groups of total strangers and formed them into groups utilizing trivial, inconsequential criteria. One study the subjects watched a coin toss that randomly assigned them to Group X or Group W. In another study subjects were asked their opinions on about painters that they in fact had never heard of and assigned to groups that appreciated one that preferred the work of Klee or the other that enjoyed the works of Kandinsky, these random assignments to groups thus creating granfal.
Tajifel and his associates discovered that despite the subjects in the experiment being complete total strangers, that they would never speak to each other again and were totaly anonymous, they all acted as if those who shared their meaningless label were somehow their longtime close friend or family member. They were asked to rate their subjects on a number of criteria such as how pleasant a personality they had or how intelligent they appeared and overwhelmingly it was shown that those who were assigned to the same group rated each higher than they rated the other group despite no actual foundation for these assessments existed.
The research shows two basic psychological processes at work in Granfallooning thinking. One having the view that “I am part of this group” is used to divide and make the difficult realities of life more easily to be coped with. When differences between groups such as football team x versus football team y are exagaerated it is easier to instill the thought of “this is what our group is supposed to do.” A result of this type of mentality is that the other group is ultimately de-humanized, it being easier to revert to the simple terms of Granfalloonian thought instead of looking at the more detailed and harder to understand that people can have unique ideas and personalities. This has technique has been used by propogandists for years helping to create groups such as the Nazis, KKK and multiple other extremist groups that require mental dominance of their followers in order to get them to carry out atrocities.
This may seem improbable that such a simple thing as giving people a certain label can lead them to committing things such as genocide but when we look at human psychology in todays world, esspecially of those in the West who are subject to indoctrination from a young age that ego is something that must be coveted at any lenght that it is better to lie and revert to drastic measures than to ever admitt you are wrong in order to preserve your ego it is shown that by creating Granfal people are able to more easily maintain their self-esteem when faced with the prospect of being wrong. When you adapt the thoughts, symbols and rituals of a certain group that you are somehow always right regardless of the circumstances.
Granfalloon is not a secret as already stated above, proffesional advertisers, propogandists and politicians have been using this for decades. If you give people a ready made way to make sense of our lives and our self-esteem becomes completely tied to a group, then we are absolutley going to defend this group to any length, not doing this with any effect to their concnious but actually doing it with pride. Propogandists, advertisers and politicians explicitly tell us “you are on this side (never mind that I created both sides) now act like it and do what we say.”