William Lederer's A Nation of Sheep

Although William Lederer's A Nation of Sheep was published in 1961, its concepts are just as relevant to American politics almost four decades later. The American public continues to be misinformed on foreign policy matters. As the world becomes more globally interdependent, the average American clings to a narrow set of domestic interests. This parochialism allows the U.S. government to use skillful means of publicity to persuade the public on important foreign issues.

One of the glaring examples that Lederer provides of the U.S. government's persuasive powers is its near invasion of Laos during the summer of 1959. The government and the media were duped by the Laotian government into believing that foreign Communist troops had invaded its northern border. The Laotians, fearful that the U.S. was preparing to reduce foreign aid, fabricated the whole story using American diplomatic channels and the American press to spread the news. These rumors took on a life of their own as senior U.S. officials corroborated the story, despite the fact that there were no U.S. eyewitnesses to the invasion: "The truth is that the U.S. government was in almost total ignorance of the facts" (Lederer, 1961, p. 25). The deception was discovered months later, when U.S. journalists and a United Nations team finally visited the area where the "invasion" occurred.

How was the U.S. government able to influence American public opinion based on such haphazard information? The government had

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nformation personally relevant, and thus was susceptible to statements that supported its own beliefs about the Communist threat in the area: "[people] are extremely resistant to positions that differ even slightly from their own, no matter what side of the issue they have chosen" (Brewer and Crano, 1994, p. 65). This concept is defined as an entity's latitude of acceptance. Once an entity has made up its mind about an issue, negative appeals are useless. For example, the U.S. government should have been suspicious that the first announcements of the "invasion" of Laos came from Communist broadcasts. This did not, however, arouse suspicion because the U.S. was so thoroughly committed to its position. In fact, the U.S. probably developed counter-arguments to any sources that sought to disprove the veracity of reports on the Communist invasion. This resistance to pre-set attitudes has been demonstrated countless times in social psychology research: "In a classic 1979 study on persuasion at Stanford University, people for or against capital punishment listened to forceful arguments on both sides of the issue. If the argument was in conflict with their own position, their response was not to change, but to discredit, the per

Category: History - W