My recent post, Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story, delved into a controversy surrounding personalized cans of beer sent to a transgender influencer. Bud Light's behavior resembled that of an ogregore. But was its antagonist also an ogregore?
Gender politics, much like the actions of Anheuser-Busch, is a collective social phenomenon. It cannot be attributed to a single charismatic leader, although that may sometimes be true for political movements. Republican-majority states have introduced legislation on gender-related healthcare, transgender athletes, and book bans. On the Left, laws have been enacted to protect transgender people from discrimination, ensure access to gender-affirming care, and challenge gender stereotypes.
However, I'm unsure whether these political movements can be classified as ogregores. I proposed four minimal conditions for an ogregore in a November 2022 blog post: (1) the constituent people share a characteristic, (2) there are reciprocal social ties between members, (3) it demonstrates agency, and (4) there are observable actions and outcomes. Today, I might add a fifth condition: it demonstrates intelligence, as defined by Gottfredson et al. (1997) [endnote 1].
Let's evaluate transgender activism against these criteria:
(1) Yes, the constituents share a characteristic: aligned, passionate beliefs regarding the place of transgender people in society and discourse.
(2) Perhaps not entirely. While there may be members with one-way ties to others (e.g., following them on Twitter without being followed back), I would assume that reciprocal friendships or familial ties exist for most individuals. So, this condition is weakly met.
(3) I'm uncertain if all my criteria for agency (differentiated, autonomous, interactive, adaptive) are met. Movement boundaries are quite diffuse, making it difficult to determine who is included and who is not, unlike in corporations. Hence, the differentiation criterion may not be met. However, they are relatively autonomous and undoubtedly interactive and adaptive [2]. At best, this condition is weakly met.
(4) Yes, there are discernible actions (e.g., orchestrated outrage, boycotts) and outcomes (e.g., legislation, changes in corporate behavior [endnote 3]).
(5) Yes, they exhibit most, if perhaps not all, elements of intelligence provided we extend the Gottfredson definition beyond a singular processor (like a brain or an algorithm) and focus on behavior rather than assumed internal states. Political movements successfully navigate complex environments, learn from experience, solve problems, and plan. It is harder to determine if they reason or think abstractly, as those are subjective, internal states.
Based on this analysis, I conclude that Bud's political antagonists exhibit behavior similar to ogregores, although perhaps not as explicitly as the company itself.
Update 15 June 2023
A placeholder for a more thoughtful treatment: Political movements are weak on at least two agency tests, differentiation and autonomy, and on the reciprocal social ties criterion. However, social resonance might make up for it. By that I mean that all the people in the ogregore tend to react in the same way to the same stimuli, and they reinforce each other's responses. (I was reminded of sympathetic strings like those in the sitar.) This means that the ogregore behaves with more coherence than one might expect based on the weak explicit communication between members.
Endnotes
[1] Intelligence, as defined by Gottfredson et al., was paraphrased by Bubeck et al. (2023) as "a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience."
[2] As I mentioned in a previous blog post, political or social movements have less internal coherence compared to formally organized groups like companies. They are even less coherent than paradigmatic List & Pettit group agents such as courts or governing bodies like the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, which are the Federal Reserve's interest rate-setting bodies.
[3] In a recent article, the WSJ noted a decline in mentions of social-impact initiatives during earnings calls.
No comments:
Post a Comment