Bobo Dolls, Prop 8, and the Media

The fundamentalist and evangelical Christians (including the Mormons), who together comprise less than 18% of the US population, are among the most media savvy group of people in the world. The know about the 1961 "Bobo Doll Experiment," and they know how to apply the science that has risen out of the hundreds of studies that have been based on it over the last 39 years. Yes, the media consultants of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians used the tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment to teach hate to a class of people who, like the children in the Bobo Doll Experiment, instinctively knew to avoid hate.

In 1961, psychologist Albert Bandura did an experiment to study how children responded after witnessing violent behavior in adults, and in particular, on television or in a movie. Last semester my Advanced Media Theory class studied this experiment in detail because the experiment was conducted in the earliest years of television. Here are three slides from the film. The child is holding the Bobo doll down and hitting it repeatedly, throwing it across the room, and hitting it with a hammer.

The experiment has become a landmark event in psychology because of how many other studies were inspired by it. It resurfaced in my mind recently because of a post by one of my Facebook friends who attended the APA (American Psychological Association) Conference in California. I guess a booth or workshop at the conference gave some prominent exposure to the study, or at least to a Bobo doll.

In the experiment there were actually three sequences of film. One just showed an adult being violent against the Bobo doll, another showed the adult being praised for the same violent behavior, and the third showed the adult being punished for the same violent behavior. In the first two instances, the children showed a dramatic increase in how violent they were with the Bobo doll as compared to the group that saw the adult being punished for violent behavior.

Most people, especially moderate Christians (at 66% of the population), would have been deterred by the fact that 50 years of undisputed research has underlined the tangible and harmful consequences of "learned violent behavior" that is taught through media, so you would think that if you were going to spend $40 million on advertising to attract this large voting block of moderate (and educated) Christians you would stick to material that was accurate and truthful. But media savvy fundamentalist Christians knew full well that the truth would not sell their idea to the far more numerous (and did I mention educated) moderate Christians that they needed on their side in order to pass Prop 8. They knew that they had to go further than just "education." As I stated in my thesis, the media consultants of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians used the tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment to teach hate to a class of people who, like the children in the Bobo Doll Experiment, instinctively knew to avoid hate. And it worked.

Proponents of Prop 8 spent an unprecedented $40 million on a media blitz that not only used television and newspaper ads, but went even further. In the true spirit of the Bobo Doll Experiment, their campaign had the equivalent of door-to-door evangelists who did the equivalent of "praising the violent behavior." For the most part, we have the missionary-minded Mormons to thank for that as well.

It would have been different if the material that was used in the Prop 8 campaign had been truthful, but as the recent Prop 8 Trial has shown, the "Six Lies" of the Prop 8 media blitz were just that....they were lies. They had been tailor made by the media savvy Christian groups for a very special purpose. Those lies were designed to not only teach hate, but also to instill fear!

Zero-sum thinking is a fear tactic that has a history of success here in America and around the world. It is based on "us" vs. "them" logic. It basically tells one class of people (almost always the majority), that if another group of people (the "others") gain anything at all in society, it will mean that the desirable class ("us") has been harmed. The fundamentalist Christians knew that in order to build a media campaign to a fever pitch, it needs to instill fear, and nothing instills fear as much as the idea that somebody is taking something away from you.

This is what the Prop 8 media campaign did, and it used blatant lies and the proven tactics of the Bobo Doll Experiment in order to do it.

How do I know it was all lies? Because during the Prop 8 trial the defense did not produce a single witness that could support the material that was used during the campaign. They danced around the "Six Lies" of the Prop 8 campaign and instead produced a witness to support other claims that were not an integral part of the media hype of the period. Early on, when Perry vs. Schwarzenegger was first announced, the defense had promised a "parade of witnesses" that would prove the harm that gay marriage would do to society. They were going to prove that gay couples were inferior as parents, and if the Prop 8 media material was to be believed, this would also mean that homosexuality would be "taught" to school-aged children as a "lifestyle choice" for when they grow up. Worse yet, according to the Prop 8 media, if gay marriages were recognized it would mean that the religious freedoms of America would be lost because churches that failed to perform gay marriages would lose their tax-exempt standing.

So what did this "parade of witnesses" look like when the defense had their day in court? The defense produced one "expert" witness and one non-expert opinion to bolster their claim that gay marriage (and by extension, the "gay lifestyle") was inferior to heterosexual marriage. They deliberately sidestepped all of the "Six Lies" from the media campaign, either because they recognized that none of those claims could withstand cross examination on the witness stand, or because every witness that they approached refused to appear.

If the Florida lawsuit challenging the ban on gay adoption is any indicator, the second option is the more likely of the two. In Florida, after an exhaustive nationwide search, the attorney general could only find one "expert witness" who was willing to attach his or her good name to the support of an unsubstantiated lie. Within a year, this "expert witness," George Rekers, was caught at the Miami airport returning from a 10-day European vacation with an escort that he had found on RentBoy.com. (Link to story.)

As Florida's Bill McCollum found out, expert witnesses who have published peer-reviewed papers in reputable trade journals are hard to find (George Rekers had only ever published with NARTH, which I touch on below). It is one thing to embellish a doctrinal point over the pulpit or to a faith-based audience when you are intent on misleading a congregation, but when, in your heart, you know it is just an opinion and not a fact, nobody wants to swear on a Bible and perjure himself/herself by stating the same sentence in a court of law.

Judge Vaughn Walker was so sympathetic to the defense (after dismissing the testimony of one witness as inadmissible) that he gave them a second chance during closing arguments to produce a better argument. He wrote in his instructions: "Seven million Californians, 70 judges and this long history that you described...why did you present but one witness on this subject?" (Excellent link here to a postmortem on the case.)

History will be the judge on that question, but another question still lingers in my mind on this topic of the Bobo Doll Experiment and fundamentalist Christianity.

My Facebook friend who prompted this post is a psychology student. He is also still attending the Mormon Church, and lives in California, so I watched him closely during the Prop 8 campaign, which he did NOT support. Now, in defense of my friend, he is likely just a Shadow Mormon, which means that he goes through the motions of being a good Mormon because it works for him, so this essay probably does not indict him as it does other Mormons who donated $24 million and testified door-to-door in support of the "Six Lies," but the idea that a university would grant a psychology degree or something akin to that to somebody from the Christian fringe really bothers me. (For an excellent study on Shadow Mormons, there is an excellent documentary: "In The Shadow of the Temple.")

A case in point about granting a religious bigot a degree rooted in scientific research: Augusta State University, a state institution in Georgia, recently refused a degree to a girl who wanted to be a school counselor. They refused to grant her the degree because she refused to take diversity and sensitivity training. She had spent her years at university spouting her opinions about homosexuality as though they were fact and trying to convert her classmates and professors to her version of Christianity, and then she wondered why the university would not give her a degree, and their blessing, to go out and tell school kids that it is okay to marginalize gays. After all, in spite of all she had learned, this student still did not see homosexuality as an immutable trait, but rather as a degrading and immoral lifestyle choice. (Link here for more details on this story.)

Three cheers for Augusta State, but what about the thousands of other students who hold the same beliefs that this girl does, but just hold their tongue and get to walk the stage wearing a mortarboard? These students will just go through school and become psychologists while silently thinking that the APA was wrong in 1973 when they declared that homosexuality was an immutable trait and that attempts to "treat it" were causing irreparable harm. Since 1973 that ruling has been challenged dozens of times by organizations like the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Meanwhile, a dozen other organizations have now joined the APA in supporting their 1973 findings. In all, there are now 148,000 licensed professionals across the nation who believe that reparative therapy is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous (link here). NARTH, in the meantime, has been reduced to a mere 38 practioners, who, by the way are so discredited that their "expert witness" testimony was deemed inadequate for the Prop 8 trial. George Rekers was the 39th, but they booted him out after his "European Vacation."

NARTH, for their part, is out of money, and as evidenced by the Prop 8 trial, out of ideas. They are only able to continue as a group through direct support from none other than the Mormon Church. Their offices were moved from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City to take advantage of the fact that the CEO from the Mormon supported Evergreen International ex-gay group would now serve as the COO for NARTH. I have not checked into the lease arrangements for office space, but Evergreen International is on the 3rd floor and NARTH is now on the 4th floor of a building that is likely owned by a Mormon controlled affiliate organization. The building is within blocks of the Salt Lake Temple and the church-owned City Creek redevelopment mega-project. (The Mormon Church has systematically been buying up downtown Salt Lake City in order to prop up the inner-city area around the iconic Salt Lake Temple from urban decay.)

But back to the idea of a psychologist that tries to hold onto a connection with a homophobic belief system. There are literally thousands of psychologists like my Facebook friend who will not publicly disavow themselves of their religious roots in order to truly comply with the ethics guidelines of their professional association. When you use the word "ethical behavior" in one sentence, and the term "Shadow Mormon" in the next, the contradiction just seems to slap you in the face. What is ethical about pretending to be a "good Mormon" when you know that you don't believe in the infallibility of the prophet? Just because it isn't a bold-faced lie does not mean that it is unethical to allow others to believe something that is not the truth. It is deliberate deceit. I know, because I did that for more than 30 years in order to stay in the good graces of my Mormon family and community.

To the credit of the APA, their ethics guidelines (and those of other similar professional associations) require that a therapist who adheres to fundamentalist Christian beliefs recuse himself/herself in instances where a client has stated that they are convinced that their so-called "same-sex attraction" is immutable. The problem is that up until that instant in time (when the client declares that they are no longer going to try to "overcome" homosexuality) these therapists can get away with trying to help their client adhere to a broken, and ultimately harmful, belief system. This, in the face of the fact that the psychologist has spent upwards of six years or more being taught that study after study has proven such belief systems to be wrong. Essentially, in spite of a stellar education, some fully accredited therapists are still telling gays and lesbians that what they are struggling with is a mere "temptation" rather than nature's call to live authentically as the person they were born to be.

And we wonder why Utah has the nation's highest teen suicide rate?

I guess the APA approach, however imperfect it might be, is working. Forty-nine years after the Bobo Doll Experiment we can look at the success of the Prop 8 trial in overturning the ban on gay marriage as a witness that this country may be willing to stand up against organizations that try to use media to advance violence against others.

As for those psychologists who try to negotiate a "middle ground" for themselves between research-based best practices and their faith-based archaic doctrine, while they may still placate their clients by telling them what they want to believe about homosexuality, they at least now understand that it has no standing in fact. This we know because not one of them dared take a stand against the science of their field in a court of law. The ethics guidelines of the APA have enough teeth as they stand that the consequences of such an act would have been felt financially.

History will be the witness. In her book, "The Fall of the Evangelical Nation," Christine Wicker writes that more than 6,000 people a day are leaving evangelical Christianity. Her findings are supported by the Barna Group, a group that has been studying Christianity in America for decades. Most who leave fundamentalism are becoming "moderate Christians (66% of the population) and skeptics (11% of the population), and that gives me hope for the plight of a gay teen who is faced with the same prospects today that I faced in 1978. Back then the climate was very different, but at the rate of 6,000 a day, the reach of the evangelical is getting smaller very quickly.

I thank Judge Vaughn Walker from the bottom of my heart for the part that he played in this drama, but before Judge Walker there was Ted Olsen and David Boies. History will now remember them for something far more significant than Bush vs. Gore.

The year 2010 was the year that fundamentalist Christianity went on trial in America, and lost. It was also the year that the Mormon Church placed their entire fortune on a single number at the roulette table. The wheel may still be turning, but one thing is for certain. Even if they don't lose their future on this gamble, they lost their credibility by even daring to make such a bet in the first place. It exposed them to be very un-Christlike in how they conduct themselves as a good neighbor and citizen in a nation founded on the principle of separating church and state.

PS. Mormon's are not supposed to gamble. It is one of their 4,300 commandments. (Yes, that is a real number supported by research.)