The whole who joins movements part. Not at all found in actual research. None of the typologies hold. Practically the whole book. It’s just a eloquent guy ranting. Maybe you could say there are some insights of sorts into perhaps cults, kind of? Not movements.
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Replying to @zeynep
I'd love to check out some of the debunking papers! Can you link me to a paper or two on the topic of who joins movements?
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Replying to @Noahpinion @zeynep
seconded! i love this topic. i would guess that "who joins movements" changes as the movement evolves. early social movements might attract radicals when the cause itself is radical, but for any movement to succeed it eventually has to win over the less radical majority
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that is: i'd guess the sort of person who supports gay marriage in 1985 is really different from the lawyer who signs an amicus brief for the Supreme Court case in 2015 ... but they're both parts of the movement
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Replying to @DKThomp @Noahpinion
His description of early radicals is off, too. People who supported gay marriage in 1985 weren’t senseless fanatics, just marginalized. And the gay movement radicalization in the face of the AIDS catastrophe is very rational. Movement people aren’t irrational fanatics in general.
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Hmm, this sounds more like a competing value judgment than a "debunking". I'd love to see some actual research papers on the topic of personality profiles of people who join mass movements! I can hunt around for links on Google Scholar...
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Note that while Hoffer characterizes movement-joiners as people who need to fill a personal void in their own lives, this doesn't mean he thinks movements are bad things -- indeed, he sees them as necessary for fixing failing societies.
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Also, just as a random side note, "spherical cow in space" is actually a great model for many things. It's how we send spacecraft to other planets! I wish people would stop using it as an example of a model that doesn't work, because it works insanely well... ;-)
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Replying to @Noahpinion @DKThomp
Spherically cow might work for spacecraft! But people’s motivations can be found by talking or looking at behavior, and in any large movement it’s social political and cultural things—rather than fanaticism he describes. I say this for movements I personally don’t like as well.
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So for movements that undeniably do become fanatic and commit various acts of extremism and atrocity, do we have a good idea of why people join them?
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Those are all different categories, though, no. There is cults, terrorism and post-power atrocities. On the movement side, there is high-risk activism (this is the classic study of that https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779717 ).
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Thanks! What about stochastic terrorism of the El Paso type?
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Replying to @Noahpinion @DKThomp
That kind of terrorism is fascinating but it's not really a mass movement (militant or not.) FBI criminologists et al. profile these killers but the ones I read seem to me like massive overfitting—if you applied it as filter, you'd have 99.9 percent false positive rate.
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