Randomly assembled strangers cannot produce the free discussion the Institute’s group model assumed

Evidence

In practice, it had soon become obvious that Horkheimer’s enticing railway compartment model was misleading. With randomly associated groups, whose members neither knew one another nor had anything basically in common in terms of profession, interests, life-history, and so on, it was often not possible to create a free atmosphere for discussion. For the great majority of the 121 discussion groups, the Frankfurt groupin a manner similar to what Abrams had suggested in his articleused pre-structured and sociologically or ideologically more or less homogeneous groups. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 462

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the railway-compartment model: the theory that strangers sharing a compartment would freely voice public-opinion attitudes.
• XREF: Resonates with the sociology-of-strangers literature on why strangers cannot simply talk freely in public space. — connects to: Small groups cooperate easily but large groups fail without coordination — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 412; Trust between strangers cannot rest on friendship’s personal knowledge model.; Large anonymous groups cannot sustain collective action without some enforcing mechanism — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 412 (+5 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Small groups cooperate easily but large groups fail without coordination — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 412; Trust between strangers cannot rest on friendship’s personal knowledge model.; Large anonymous groups cannot sustain collective action without some enforcing mechanism — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 412 (+5 more)