In 1953, during the Korean War, Ed Schein was ordered to Travis Air Force Base to interview returning prisoners of war, some of whom were thought to have collaborated with their Chinese captors and come to believe in the superiority of the Chinese communist system.
Chinese tactics were to encourage POWs into minor examples of disloyalty (admitting that America had faults), get them to commit to this position (by writing and signing a list of faults), and then to share their perspective with a wider group (in discussion sessions, or on radio broadcast).
According to Schein: “Only a few men were able to avoid collaboration altogether, the majority collaborated at one time or another by doing things which seemed to them trivial but which the Chinese were able to turn to their own advantage.”
Schein’s classic 1961 book – Coercive Persuasion – boiled down the experience to eight key lessons which Schein believes provide a model for organisational change:
- Group/organizational forces are stronger than individual forces, but under coercive conditions some individuals are more active than others with mixed results. In other words, collaborators and intense resisters were similar in many personality aspects, particularly the temperamental bias toward action.
- Change must be distinguished from “new learning” in that it implies some unlearning which is intrinsically difficult and usually painful.
- Change begins with “disconfirmation,” some upsetting of the “quasi-stationary equilibrium.”
- Motivation to change does not arise until the change target feels secure enough to accept the disconfirming data because the new things to be learned begin be feasible. The change target feels “psychologically safe” if he or she can accept a new attitude or value without complete loss of self.
- Once the individual feels psychologically safe, he or she can accept new unlearning which is information either through identification with others or scanning the environment for new solutions.
- Change then occurs by “cognitive redefinition” through: 1) semantic and usually painful change in old concepts, i.e. the Chinese communist definition of crime and spying was “any behavior that could be harmful to the state” hence innocent postcards could be viewed as spying by passing on potentially harmful information to a potential or actual enemy. 2) Change in “adaptation level” or judgment standards as to how a given behavior or perceived object is to be judged, i.e. seemingly trivial types of information by U.S. standards were viewed as important intelligence information by the communists. 3) Introduction of new concepts and meanings, i.e. the abstraction of the “communist state” which could be harmed in the future and, therefore, justified seemingly excessive protection.
- The more ambiguous the situation, the more the individual will rely on the perceptions and judgments of others, i.e. the prisoner finally learned these new meanings and standards from fellow prisoners more advanced in their “thought reform.”
- New concepts and standards will not survive unless they are socially and personally reinforced, confirmed, i.e. once the repatriate retuned to the u.s. they relearned our own definitions and standards, except in one case of a husband and wife who were imprisoned together and continued to maintain their newly learned views after returning to the U.S.
More on Schein here.
