says, “with the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy, why a capitalist sees one set of facts and certain aspects of human nature—literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor’s pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to see in common.”
The stereotype is the basis of a large part of the work of the public relations counsel. Let us try to inquire where the stereotype originates—why it is so influential and why from a practical standpoint it is so tremendously difficult to affect or change stereotypes or to attempt to substitute one set of stereotypes for another.
Mr. Martin attempts to answer questions such as these in his volume on “The Behavior of Crowds.” By “crowds” Mr. Martin does not mean merely a physical aggregation of a number of persons. To Mr. Martin the crowd is rather a state of mind, “the peculiar mental condition which sometimes occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.”
Motives of social behavior are based on individual instincts. Individual instincts, on the other hand, must yield to group needs. Mr. Martin pictures society as an aggregation of people who have sacrificed