Social engineering is a concept in
political sciencePolitical science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. It is often described as the pragmatic application of the art and science of politics defined as "who gets what, when and how",...
that refers to efforts to influence popular
attitudeAn attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object...
s and
social behaviorIn biology, psychology and sociology social behavior is behavior directed towards society, or taking place between, members of the same species. Behavior such as predation which involves members of different species is not social...
on a large scale, whether by
governmentA government is the body within a community, political entity or organization which has the authority to make and enforce rules, laws and regulations.....
s or private groups. In the political arena the counterpart of social engineering is
political engineering- Use in Mainland Chinese State Owned Enterprises :Within Mainland Chinese state owned enterprises, the term political engineer 政工师 refers to a function that would be termed human resources in Western corporations...
.
For various reasons, the term has been imbued with negative connotations. However, virtually all law and
governanceGovernance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes...
has the effect of changing behavior and can be considered "social engineering" to some extent.
Social engineering is a concept in
political sciencePolitical science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. It is often described as the pragmatic application of the art and science of politics defined as "who gets what, when and how",...
that refers to efforts to influence popular
attitudeAn attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object...
s and
social behaviorIn biology, psychology and sociology social behavior is behavior directed towards society, or taking place between, members of the same species. Behavior such as predation which involves members of different species is not social...
on a large scale, whether by
governmentA government is the body within a community, political entity or organization which has the authority to make and enforce rules, laws and regulations.....
s or private groups. In the political arena the counterpart of social engineering is
political engineering- Use in Mainland Chinese State Owned Enterprises :Within Mainland Chinese state owned enterprises, the term political engineer 政工师 refers to a function that would be termed human resources in Western corporations...
.
For various reasons, the term has been imbued with negative connotations. However, virtually all law and
governanceGovernance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes...
has the effect of changing behavior and can be considered "social engineering" to some extent. Prohibitions on
murderMurder, as defined in common law countries, is the unlawful killing of another human being with intent , and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
,
rapeRape, also referred to as sexual assault, is an assault by a person involving sexual intercourse with or without sexual penetration of another person without that person's consent....
,
suicideSuicide is the intentional killing of one's self. Many dictionaries also note the metaphorical sense of "willful destruction of one's self-interest"...
and littering are all policies aimed at discouraging undesirable behaviors. In British and Canadian
jurisprudenceJurisprudence is the theory and philosophy of law. Scholars of jurisprudence, or legal philosophers, hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems and of legal institutions. Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was focused on the first...
, changing public attitudes about a behaviour is accepted as one of the key functions of laws prohibiting it. Governments also influence behavior more subtly through incentives and disincentives built into economic policy and tax policy, for instance, and have done so for centuries.
In practice, whether any specific policy is labeled as "social engineering" is often a question of intent. The term is most often used by libertarians, free-market thinkers, and traditionalists as an accusation against anyone who proposes to use
lawLaw is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a primary social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets...
,
taxTo tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law.Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities...
policy, or other kinds of
stateA sovereign state is a political association with effective internal and external sovereignty over a geographic area and population which is not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state...
influence to change existing power relationships: for instance, between men and women, or between different ethnic groups. Political
conservativesConservatism in the United States is a major American political philosophy. In contemporary American politics, it is often associated with the Republican Party...
in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
have accused their opponents of social engineering through the promotion of
political correctnessPolitical correctness is a term denoting language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social offense in gender, racial, cultural, handicap, and age-related usages...
, insofar as it may change social attitudes by defining "acceptable" and "unacceptable"
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
or acts. The right has itself been accused of social engineering due to its promotion of Abstinence-only sex education, the
English-only movementEnglish-only movement, also known as Official English movement, refers to a political movement for the use only of the English language in official government operations through the establishing of English as the only official language in the United States...
,
Sodomy lawA sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as sex crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act which does not lead to procreation. It also has a range of similar euphemisms...
s and state sponsored
school prayerSchool prayer in its common usage refers to state-approved prayer by students in state schools. Depending on the country and the type of school, organized prayer may be required, permitted, or proscribed...
.
History
Before one can engage in social engineering, one must have reliable information about the society that is to be engineered, and one must have effective tools to carry out the engineering. Both of these only became available relatively recently - roughly within the past one hundred years. The development of social science made it possible to gather and analyze information about social attitudes and trends, which is necessary in order to judge the initial state of society before an engineering attempt and the success or failure of that attempt after it has been implemented. At the same time, the development of modern
communications technologyTelecommunication is transmission over a distance for the purpose of communication. In earlier times, this may have involved the use of smoke signals, drums, semaphore, flags or heliograph. In modern times, telecommunication typically involves the use of electronic devices such as the telephone,...
and the
mediaMass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. The term was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. However, some forms of mass media such...
provided the tools through which social engineering could be carried out.
While social engineering can be carried out by any organization - whether large or small, public or private - the most comprehensive (and often the most effective) campaigns of social engineering are those initiated by powerful central governments.
Extremely intensive social engineering campaigns occurred in countries with
authoritarianAuthoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by typically non-elected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom....
governments. In the 1920s, the government of the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of Tsarist Russia with a new Soviet culture, to create the
New Soviet manThe New Soviet man or New Soviet person , as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with certain qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's long-standing...
. The Soviets used newspapers, books, film, mass relocations, and even architectural design tactics to serve as "
social condenserFrom Soviet constructivist theory, the social condenser is a spatial idea practiced in architecture. At the opening speech for the first OSA Group conference in 1928 Moisei Ginzburg claimed that "the principal objective of constructivism...is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age." The...
" and change personal values and private relationships. Similar examples are the Chinese "
Great Leap ForwardThe Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the process of...
" and "
Cultural RevolutionThe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a period of widespread social and political upheaval in the People’s Republic of China between 1966 and 1976, resulting in nation-wide chaos and economic disarray.It was launched by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, on May 16,...
" program and the
Khmer RougeThe Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the totalitarian ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan....
's plan of deurbanization of
CambodiaThe Kingdom of Cambodia , formerly known as Kampuchea , is a country in South East Asia with a population of over 14 million people. The kingdom's capital and largest city is Phnom Penh...
. In Singapore, the government's housing policies attempt to promote a mix of all races within each subsidized housing district in order to foster social cohesion and national loyalty while providing the citizens with affordable housing.
Non-authoritarian regimes tend to rely on more sustained social engineering campaigns that create more gradual, but ultimately as far-reaching, change. Examples include the "
War on DrugsThe War on Drugs refers to the controversial prohibition campaign undertaken by the United States government, with the assistance of participating countries, intended to both define and reduce the illegal drug trade. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that are intended to...
" in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the increasing reach of
intellectual propertyIntellectual property is a number of distinct types of legal monopolies over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law...
rights and
copyrightCopyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and subsequent widening of public literacy. As a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the eighteenth century...
, and the promotion of elections as a political tool. The campaign for promoting elections, which is by far the most successful of the three examples, has been in place for over two centuries.
Social theorists of the
Frankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist sociology and philosophy in the tradition of critical theory, which was associated with the early Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
in Weimar Germany like Theodor Adorno had also observed the new phenomenon of mass culture and commented on its new manipulative power, when the rise of the
NazisNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
drove them out of the country around 1930 (many of them became connected with the
Institute for Social ResearchThe Institute for Social Research is a research organization covering topics such as sociology and continental philosophy, best known as the institutional home of the Frankfurt School....
in the United States). The Nazis themselves were no strangers to the idea of influencing political attitudes and re-defining personal relationships. The Nazi
propagandaPropaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
machine under
Joseph GoebbelsPaul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reichsminister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945...
was a synchronized, sophisticated and effective tool for creating public opinion.
In a similar vein the
Greek military junta of 1967-1974The Greek military junta of 1967–1974, alternatively "The Regime of the Colonels" , or in Greece "The Junta", and "The Seven Years" are terms used to refer to a series of right-wing military governments that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974...
attempted to steer Greek public opinion not only by propaganda but also by inventing new words and slogans such as:
palaiokommatismos (translated as
old-partyism),
Ellas Ellinon Christianon translated as:
Greece of Christian Greeks,
Ethnosotirios Epanastasis translated as
Nation-saving Revolution meaning
coup d'étatA coup d'état , or coup for short, is the sudden unconstitutional deposition of a legitimate government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another, either civil or military...
etc.
Social engineering can be used as a means to achieve a wide variety of different results, as illustrated by the different governments and other organizations that have employed it. The discussion of the possibilities for such manipulation became especially active following
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, with the advent of
televisionTelevision is a widely used telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, either monochromatic or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission...
, and continuing discussion of techniques of social engineering - particularly in
advertisingAdvertising is a form of communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services or support political candidates or ideas. Frequently it communicates a message that includes the name of the product or service and how that product or service could potentially benefit the consumer...
- is still quite pertinent in the western model of
consumer capitalismCapitalism is an economic and social system in which the means of production are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor...
.
George Orwell
A popular novel taught in most high schools is the
George OrwellEric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist...
novel
Nineteen Eighty-FourNineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel, by George Orwell, published in 1949 about the totalitarian régime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control,...
, in which the known world is controlled by three perpetually warring superpowers. The story takes place in a brutal
dystopiaA dystopia is the vision of a society in which conditions of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and...
that bombards its population with propaganda, constantly monitoring every citizen with ubiquitous TV cameras and police patrols.
Karl Popper
In his classic political science book,
The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume I,
The Spell of Plato,
Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th century, and also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy...
examined the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society. In this respect, he made a crucial distinction between the principles of democratic social reconstruction (called 'piecemeal social engineering') and 'Utopian social engineering'
Popper wrote:
"the piecemeal engineer will adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good."
According to Popper, the difference between 'piecemeal social engineering' and 'Utopian social engineering' is
"the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint."
Slang usage
The term social engineering is commonly used as a slang term to refer to an individual act of
manipulation-Physically:*Handling and/or altering some object or information*Joint manipulation*Spinal manipulation*Sleight of hand tricks in magic*Card manipulation*Object manipulation*Puppeteer*Data manipulation-In technology:*Bit manipulation...
(or possibly
fraudIn the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and is also a civil law violation....
) rather than large-scale societal planning.
See also
- Edward Bernays
Edward Louis Bernays was an American pioneer in the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public...
- Paternalism
Paternalism refers usually to an attitude or a policy reminiscent of the hierarchic pattern of a family based on patriarchy, that is, there is a figurehead that makes decisions on behalf of others for their own good, even if this is contrary to their wishes.It is implied that the fatherly figure...
- Propaganda
Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
/ Public relationsPublic relations is the practice of managing the communication between an organization and its publics. Public relations gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment...
- Psychological warfare
The U.S. Department of Defense defines psychological warfare as:"The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national...
- Social constructionism
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena develop in social contexts...
- Social control
Social control includes social mechanisms that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliances to the rules of a given society or social group. Many mechanisms of social control are cross-cultural, if only in the control mechanisms used to prevent the establishment of...
- Total institution
A total institution, also referred to as a voracious institution, as defined by Erving Goffman, is an institution where all parts of life of individuals under the institution are subordinated to and dependent upon the authorities of the organization...
- Framing (social sciences)
A frame in social theory consists of a schema of interpretation—that is, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes—that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. In simpler terms, a person has, through his lifetime, built a series of mental emotional filters. They use these filters...
- Business Process Reengineering
Business process reengineering is, in computer science and management, an approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business process that exist within and across organizations...
Further reading
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
- Social Engineering, Adam Podgórecki