Psychology - Public Relations: How Psychologists Have Betrayed Democracy
It's a ruse to call a society governed by mass manipulation a democracy.
Mass (need I say, nigh-invisible) manipulation: from public relations to motivation research to advertising to political strategy to perception management (military) to ubiquitous mis- and disinformation.
There is nothing democratic about a society informed by ubiquitous "conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses" (Bernays, 1928).
Two important names in the early history of mass manipulation:
Edward Bernays
Nephew of Freud; propagandist who assisted the United States government in the overthrow of Guatemala; got women to smoke; persuaded the entire population of the United States to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast - among other schemes and deviltries.
[quote=Edward Bernays - Propganda]The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[/quote]
[quote=wiki: Edward Bernays]Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.[5][6] Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Ernest Dichter
Pioneer of the focus group who colluded with psychiatrists and psychologists to advance Bernays' techniques; pioneer of need creation.
[quote=wiki:Ernest Dichter]Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Dichter
The collusion of PR and psychiatry-psychology from circa. Edward Bernays to Century 21 is, to my view, the most heinous betrayal of trust since Judas's kiss.
Mass (need I say, nigh-invisible) manipulation: from public relations to motivation research to advertising to political strategy to perception management (military) to ubiquitous mis- and disinformation.
There is nothing democratic about a society informed by ubiquitous "conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses" (Bernays, 1928).
Two important names in the early history of mass manipulation:
Edward Bernays
Nephew of Freud; propagandist who assisted the United States government in the overthrow of Guatemala; got women to smoke; persuaded the entire population of the United States to eat bacon and eggs for breakfast - among other schemes and deviltries.
[quote=Edward Bernays - Propganda]The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[/quote]
[quote=wiki: Edward Bernays]Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.[5][6] Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Ernest Dichter
Pioneer of the focus group who colluded with psychiatrists and psychologists to advance Bernays' techniques; pioneer of need creation.
[quote=wiki:Ernest Dichter]Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas.[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Dichter
The collusion of PR and psychiatry-psychology from circa. Edward Bernays to Century 21 is, to my view, the most heinous betrayal of trust since Judas's kiss.
Comments (80)
But the average person wants to be told what to eat and wear, how to trim their useless lawns and how to make up for their sins.
They want norms. They want the security of the sheep.
The fascism within us all.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2020.1727403
Possibly, this fascist mindset, this desire to be led, has been exacerbated by ingenius mass-manipulators seeking the pleasure of command. Or it may be at the heart of human nature. In which case, democracy is eternally imperiled.
That's heavy. The light side is that most of us just want to belong.
I get that.
But that light side - when its hazards are swept under the rug - can create a ton of darkness.
True. Using psychology to manipulate is a betrayal. It exploits something intimate and innocent.
The masses are essentially innocent in the hands of expert psychologists and mass-manipulators.
This is not a very jolly thread is it? I'll try and inject a sliver of optimism.
The treachery of psychology is abhorrent and inexcusable, and has multiplied the level of deception in society. However, the internet is undermining the universality of the lie. We become aware of the lie and we become angry. But becoming aware is the first step. We do not know who on this site is a propagandist, and it is a common accusation, and potentially a divisive tool of the propagandists themselves. But this state of global paranoia is an improvement on - for example - the situation during WW1, when the masses were willing turkeys lining up for Christmas for King and Cuntry or Kaiser, or Freedum and Demoncracy, or whatever the flavour was in your grandparents innocent ears. Yes folks, this is the age of gold.
:fire:
And people ridicule, poke fun/laugh at, conspiracy theorists!
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Indeed. He also fraudulently claimed to be the creator of Bearnaise sauce, explaining the difference in spelling as part of an an effort to get women to smoke tobacco from Guatemala after consuming bacon and eggs smothered with the sauce. His effort came to naught, though.
A clown for every hamlet. :scream:
The role of psychologists is to edify the electorate of how their judgment is impaired due to the ever-expanding list of cognitive biases and other pyschological shortcomings we all suffer from; in that sense I disagree with the OP that psychology is anti-democratic.
The red brick school house use to be in charge of shaping citizen / worker behavior and thinking. In that role, schools did a fairly decent job of producing literate, numerate workers who fulfilled the social expectations. A Marxist Classics prof at the U of Minnesota thought that the reason public education has been degraded is because capitalists had found better tools to shape consumer/worker behavior: Mass Media and the PR manipulators.
Advertising got underway in the 1920s, actively encouraging consumers to acquire stuff, (Your average householder back then, and later, lived in a small house with minimal closet and storage space. Ordinary people used to own a lot less 'stuff' so they didn't need lots of storage.
Democracy has always been a some-time thing: Here, there, now, then, this issue, that issue. But the public has mostly NOT been left to make policy without pretty heavy guidance from the elite, in one form or another.
Sauce Béarnaise über alles.
Sure, there are lots of good psychologists out there doing good work.
Well, do you want democracy or not?
If the innocent masses should get to have a say, why shouldn't the expert psychologists and mass-manipulators have a say as well?
If a nation has laws to protect the easily manipulated from a cahoots of the self-serving and devious, is that nation thereby not democratic?
You seem to be confusing democracy with laissez-faire.
Different political options have different ideas about who those are.
For the sake of argument:
The innocent masses = folks who are easily manipulated
The self-serving and devious = marketeers working in cahoots with psychologists with the objective of making a buck via mass-manipulation
Protecting the latter from the former is just fine in a democracy. Not so in a society informed by laissez-faire.
The leftists say that the "self-serving and devious" are the right-wingers.
They also differ in who exactly those "innocent masses" are.
So who is who exactly?
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
If you want to discuss this:
Quoting baker
...you might start a thread in the politics section.
It must be clear to anyone with eyes that Reich's psychology of fascism applies to left and right equally.
Quoting Tate
It is a betrayal of the whole of civilisation, and the whole of community, because it destroys communication, which is the foundation of every social enterprise. Money, at least paper money and digital money consists of promissory notes, and has the value of the trust that is invested in it. Trust is the primary value.
It is not just psychology, but even more so, philosophy, that has betrayed ordinary people by allowing moral nihilism and subjectivism to become dominant in society. The myth of the free independent individual, who does not need society because he has a bulging wallet; it's a joke really, because the bulging wallet is made of mutual trust in what without it would not even make good toilet paper. And with that paper the independent individual buys all the thousands of goods and services of society on which his whole life depends, from farmers, cooks, mechanics, plumbers, tailors, security staff, etc etc.
If it is clear, that even the very special people are totally dependent on the whole fabric of a complex industrial society, that has a medium of exchange founded on trust, then the betrayal of truth by manipulation can be seen as an attack on the very foundation of society.
And this perhaps answers the question as clearly as any psychological theory of sexual energy. Communication breaks down because the prevalence of lies means that no word of anyone can be trusted. One is taught to buy stuff not because the stuff is worth it, but because "You are worth it", whatever that means. One cannot trust the pension fund, the health insurance, the job stability, that the bank will not repossess the house, that the writ of law will run; the people that run all these things are unreliable and have no honour. The loss of communication and the loss of trust is the collapse of society into chaos. And in that chaos, one looks for a saviour who seems to speak the truth. Maybe it is all those Mexicans after all, there's certainly more of them than there were in the good old days. Or maybe it's the Jews. Or the nazis, or the communists, or... There is no condition more vulnerable to manipulation than that of radical loss of trust and the resulting paranoia. He who believes nothing will believe anything.
I don't understand how you're connecting trust and truth here at all. I might trust implicitly someone who is not telling the truth. The two seem unrelated. I wouldn't trust someone who lied, but lying is not the only, or even the most common, reason for not telling the truth. Simply being mistaken is by far the more likely.
I agree with you that trust is foundational, but its erosion is directly the result of a loss in trustworthiness. Someone who is untrustworthy might well be telling the truth (by accident, or because it serves their purpose). Someone trustworthy might well be not telling the truth (an honest mistake). I cannot see any way in which trustworthiness somehow gives one access to the truth.
Literally every scrap of evidence I've ever read has shown the opposite to be the case. What ethnographies are you basing this on?
Yes. Trust is the default because we are born helpless and have to trust. And this continues to be the case even when we are betrayed. You can trust me that I have made the connection even if you cannot quite see it:- until you find out that I have made it up in order to deceive you, at which point you stop attending to what I say if you have any sense. Because the betrayal of truth has become so commonplace amongst advertisers, politicians, and the media, we no longer trust them and their messages lose their meaning. The language itself starts to lose its meaning. Paper money is a written promise that the bank will pay the amount specified, and if the promise becomes a lie, the money has no value. Economists call it "confidence". Folks have to tell the truth to maintain our confidence; the government governs be being believed when, for example it makes laws and specifies penalties.
I am saying, not that truth and trust are the same, but that truth is required to maintain trust. The foundation of society is in flows of information and mutual support that is founded on trust, and when there is no trust, there is no society and no government, but only mafia gangs and paranoid individuals.
Philosophers have thrown away thousands of years of laborious effort in building societies through the development of moral systems that include formal and informal controls to inhibit dishonesty and to foster trust. We cannot communicate without the trust that folks mean what they say, but we have to painfully relearn that sometimes they don't. And relearn also that the best response to this is neither to resort to torture in the vain attempt to force the truth from a liar, nor to elect liars to high office.
Quoting Isaac
Trust give access to another. Trust me, because otherwise nothing I say has any meaning; tell the truth, because otherwise nothing you say has any meaning.
:up:
Well put. Reminds me a bit of Hobbes. The worst thing that can happen is a breakdown of trust that makes all labor unsafe. Why sow what I may not reap ? Why save and plan when soldiers may steal and rape and kill tomorrow? One thinks also of the plague in Athens.
In the US there's a strange terrible background of hate and yet for the most part the usual scene at the grocery store. So I like to think that it's still just a morbid minority that's completely lost that basic trust and therefore trustworthiness, since the paranoid can 'justify' extreme measures in the light of the misperceived extreme threat.
Elsewhere I have suggested that hatred is a secondary emotion, typically a response to a primary emotion of hurt or fear. I imagine that fear is ever-present at the store and at the school, and at the council office over there, judging by the news we see of shootings. It seems, rather like global warming, that there are tipping points into a positive feedback loop where the lunatics take over the asylum, and the crazies drive us all crazy, to the extent that armed teachers in primary schools looks like a sensible policy. Though the bombs are falling, yet we still need groceries, and even that becomes mundane.
I find this quite plausible.
Quoting unenlightened
Good example.
It's a bit insane that instead of guarding gold or cash against De Niro's crew in Heat that we have to think about how to stop maniacs from killing children at no benefit to themselves (excepting whatever strange benefit they calculate in the infamy.)
I connect this vaguely to our atomization. I get used to walking by the homeless lady who just settled on the sidewalk a block from where I live. I go on my own little way, minding my own business. This isn't all bad. It's connected with a vivid and differentiated society. But it's dangerous, for reasons you've emphasized.
Here is a nice piece of anthropology about this crazy tribe who worship The Duke of Edinburgh. Hard for us to understand that, but when they visited us, they could not understand why, if people were homeless, we did not build houses for them. And I cannot understand it either. In fact in my town, during covid lockdown they did provide little homes prefab in the town carpark. But now they've removed them again so the cars can have their home back.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/meet-the-natives
I hope you will be able to access it.
If you understand why you don't build said houses (and instead play philosophy on the internet) then you understand why we don't.
I don't think so. I don't build roads or power stations, but we do. Building even a small house is a big undertaking for one old man, but for a town of ten thousand, 50 houses would not be difficult or unaffordable. Your logic does not work, because one person is almost helpless, but a community is potentially a whole army.
It's a cop-out. We do - because we use political pressure to ensure it gets done.
If you understand why you prefer to play on the internet rather than to apply political pressure to ensure the homeless have homes - then you understand why we turn away from the homeless in parallel fashion.
You know me so well. I did my stint as a volunteer for the Cyrenians, many years ago, and later formed a residents association in Leeds that succeeded in getting about 150 homes taken off the condemned housing list where they had been languishing for twenty years and got them all refurbished and brought up to standard. But now I take a back seat and seek to understand the state of humanity that needs pressure to be applied before it will treat its neighbours with simple decency. I have become lazy and apathetic.
Commendable work.
Quoting unenlightened
That can't be pleasant. Unless it's just retirement.
This Forum in particular has been of no help so far. Every post offers a different opinion and every one peddles a different point of view.
In this context the truth is easy: It's wrong to use a grotesquely smily red and yellow clown, an adorable robber and stuffed purple taste bud (Grimace), or to use a cute, charming cartoon tiger, frog, bear, pelican or minion to sell diabetes and obesity to children.
It's nothing new: but the diabetes and obesity epidemic is new.
For a classic expose, see Marshall McCluhan's The Mechanical Bride.
For adults: There's no love in a Subaru. Twizzlers only make mouths happy. She won't kiss you longer if you're chewing Big Red. Adults get diabetes and obesity too. Few adults have the awareness and integrity to withstand the perpetual onslaught of the adsters.
Quoting Hanover
I hope that helps.
Well no. That is rather the point. What I was doing politically 50 years ago had some small local success, but overall the problem of homelessness and poor housing has gotten much worse. My efforts were useless in the face of a society that does not look after its weaker members as well as a bunch of heathen tribal primitives who are by comparison desperately poor and highly irrational.
I think your praise or blame offered to me rather exemplifies the root of the difficulty. You do not even see what a terrible inditement of our society it is that we cannot, despite our enormous wealth and sophistication, even feed and house ourselves adequately to the climate. The callousness of our society comes very much out of this kind of attitude of moralising the individual, and making the relation between the individual and society one that presumes the moral justice of social circumstance, and thus blames the weak for their weakness, whether it be disability, lack of education, mental illness, addiction, or mere accident.
But how do you know they've betrayed truth? You personally are not expert in the matters they pronounce on, so in order to come to believe they've betrayed truth you must have not trusted them (to some extent) first. You cannot have possibly have had any notion they were lying unless you were inclined to seek out the 'truth' from someone else whom you do trust. So did you really trust them in the first place? And has trust, as a whole, gone away? You've clearly got a perfectly adequate range of people from whom you can get 'the truth' on all matters, so what's the problem?
Quoting unenlightened
Yet still not saying how.
Let's say Jim claims "X!" and Jack claims the mutually exclusive position "Y!". I trust Jim so I believe X. Now how do I come to no longer trust Jim on account of his lying? The only way I can see is if I come to believe Y. But to come to believe Y I have to have already decided not to trust Jim and to trust Jack instead.
If, to use your example, the bank promised that £5 was worth £5's worth of stuff, and later didn't pay, it's not the truth of their promise that's the problem, it's their failure to pay. Trust would be equally eroded if they truthfully promised to pay out, with the sincerity of an angel, but just kept on accidentally failing to do so. I would not trust them with my money.
Broken promises erode trust because of a failure to be able to accurately predict outcomes using them. It makes no difference if the failure was the result of dishonest intent or sheer incompetence.
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
So no jokes then?
If it wasn't your politicians, it'll be your parents, your work colleagues, your wife/husband/significant other...
Advertisers may be responsible for creating a desire among people for the latest chocolate bar (tastes the same as the old one, but with "six different types of bio-molecules which reduce signs of ageing!"), but no advertisers were involved in the initial preference for flannel shirts in the 90s, that was just a cultural movement (at first). It was no less powerful a draw nonetheless.
The problem is not manipulation, it's manipulability. It's not those who fill the gaping hole in our self esteem with obvious lies, it's the gaping hole in our self-esteem available for the filling.
Difficult to disagree that that's the problem. But it's prudent to accept that the vast majority of folks will always be manipulable. At least until our society begins to prioritize education.
Moreover: Advertising influences all of us. Even more insidiously when we believe we're unmanipulable.
Advertisers were absolutely at the heart of it. Without advertisers there would be no TV as we know it. Without TV there would be no MTV.
I assume you accept that the popularity of flannel shirts in the 90s had its origin in the grunge movement given a global platform on MTV. If MTV didn't have advertisers, they wouldn't have the lucre to exist.
This is on the mark. Being a multi-ethnic society, a history of slavery, then discrimination which lasted until the 70s, freedom of thought & religion, the rich-poor gap, basically a huge list of divisive entities, hate in overt & subtle forms is inevitable in a country like the US of A.
However, this isn't a disadvantage as far as I can tell. We must learn to keep the peace not in the absence of animosity (easy peasy) but in its presence (tough as hell) - this defines the greatness of a country or a nation. There will be a few goof-ups to put it mildly (race riots one of 'em) but it'll all work out in the end. Fingers crossed.
Hence: commendable work. If - as appears to be the case - you helped at least one person.
I'm not suggesting you solved the problem.
This is a gross understatement of the power of advertising to influence culture. Advertisers have created a culture of consumerism. To make a buck.
It's imprudent to tell someone what they can and cannot see.
The fact is I see that very clearly.
Your grammar is imprecise: a "relation" can't "presume" something. Only a person can.
Some number of persons I don't doubt choose to make the presumption you point to. But plenty of larger-minded, nobler-minded folks would consider this presumption ludicrous.
All of which is compounded by the insidious influence of advertising.
[quote=wiki][Marcuse] argues that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behavior, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behavior wither away. Against this prevailing climate, Marcuse promotes the "great refusal" (described at length in the book) as the only adequate opposition to all-encompassing methods of control. [/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man
[quote=wiki]
False consciousness is a term used in Marxist theory to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) used the term "false consciousness" in an 1893 letter to Franz Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class willfully embodies the ideology of the ruling class.[1][2][3] Engels dubs this consciousness "false" because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it. [/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
Oddly enough, I think the focus on education is the problem, not the solution. But I agree with the prudence.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
I didn't say they had no part to play. Had transistors not been invented there'd be no televisions and hence no MTV, but we don't blame transistors for the popularity of the flannel shirt. The point was that advertisers neither decided, nor encouraged the trend. They may have helped finance the technology which allowed it, but so did bankers, accountants, HR managers...
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Have they? Or are they a consequence of a culture of consumerism?
Are you familiar with Milgram's thoughts on Arendt? I think you're overestimating the intent behind advertising.
Quoting Isaac
I suggest reading Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter (et al) to get a picture of how a culture of consumerism was intentionally created. They're proud of their work and talk about it more or less openly.
I'm familiar with Milgram's famous experiment and conclusions and familiar with Arendt. I'll take a look at the connection. Thanks for the reference.
Is this what you had in mind?
https://oonae.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/arendt-and-milgram/
Berkowitz tells us that “Arendt rejected… Milgram’s claim that obedience carried with it no responsibility. Instead, Arendt insisted, ‘obedience and support are the same.’” But Milgram is only claiming that being obedient makes us think we aren’t responsible, not that we should be held less responsible. And isn’t this also the meaning of the line cited from Arendt? Obedience and support are the same: Arendt believes it, and Milgram believes it. Obedience vs. support is, for both of them, a false opposition: there is no obedience unless you’ve already invoked an ideology, unless the subject has, as Berkowitz puts it, joined.
Not only read both, but taught classes on them. I think their influence is exaggerated. Take a look at Milgram on Arendt and see what you think.
I'm not here suggesting that advertising doesn't work, or that control on it wouldn't help. I'm just sounding a note of caution as to the real problem. If we raise children to think their social support systems are dependent entirely on these tokens of group membership and reward, then they'll spend their lives trying to work out what those tokens are. If advertisers don't tell them, they'll look elsewhere. The hole needing filling is the problem.
Fair enough.
Yep. That's the line of thinking. It revolves around the idea that social group membership and reward has become so compartmentalised in these broken-up ideologies that what one does to be a 'good member' is no longer holistically relative to being a 'human being' but rather just being a 'good accountant' or a 'good wife' or a 'good advertising executive'. Hence what we do in instances of 'work' is not related to any holistic ideology but rather a localised one in which actions from one sphere might be totally unthinkable in another.
Advertisers do what they do because that's their job. It's what being a good advertiser is. It's their job because their boss told them to do it. Their boss told them to do it because that's his job, that's what being a good boss is.
Sure, a good part of the problem. But the saturation of society by adsters deepens the hole and offers insidious pseudo-solutions to the hole - what Frankl called the existential vacuum.
So I think mass manipulation sustains the existential vacuum. I don't see a way to tease them apart.
Can you expand on this?
I might add that adsters do play a role in determining the content of television programming. They have the power to withdraw financial support.
I can't say whether advertisers played this sort of role in the 90s. But certainly a consumeristic outlook has been at the heart of a number of cultural trends inspired by celebrities. They become celebrities, after all, in light of the saleability of their brand.
Well short of reading Milgram ('Obedience to Authority', if you're unsure) - where he states...
... A good article (if you have institutional access) https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02015.x
For the contrasting position https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354314542368
Genuinely interested in a reference or substantiation for this claim.
Thanks, I do.
Indeed. Free and fair elections require a well informed electorate.
No. I am asking you:
Who are those "innocent masses"?
Who are the "self-serving and devious"?
Your thread topic depends on taking for granted that those categories exist. But it's not clear that they do exist. There is no social consensus about who they are. You can't pinpoint them. So who are they?
I think both concepts, "the innocent masses" and "the self-serving and devious", are artificial constructs intended to serve some ideological purpose.
As for how psychologists have betrayed democracy: By pretending to be morally and ideologically neutral when they're not, and demading from us to act as if this pretense doesn't exist.
Really, people want to be led? I don't see that.
Flannel shirts have been popular among farmers and other physical workers for pretty much as long as those people could afford them. This precedes grunge.
In the spirit of empirical science: How would you go about proving this claim of yours?
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Or maybe they just liked to brag, taking credit for things they didn't do. What else to expect from someone working in or around advertising!
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
This is from a text old more than two thousand years. Or read Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
The existential vacuum and the awareness of it have existed long before modern methods of "mass manipulation".
And you want to be a psychotherapist??
I can see you have an axe to grind. Not interested. Take care. :smile:
You don't "manipulate" your car to avoid crashing into a ravine you cannot see and perishing in agony, you maneuver it. You don't "exploit" a child by putting them in the class they will actually be able to gather information from just because their ignorance is "intimate and innocent", you advance them.
Where do you draw the distinction between education and manipulation? A teacher offering snacks to whoever passes their 3rd grade division exam is some sort of fascist tyrant bent on warping the human mind? Eggs and bacon while high in cholesterol and unhealthy fats are - whether fortunately or not - pretty darn good. If you ask Americans if they had to choose one or the other would they prefer a happy life or a long life, what do you think the majority consensuses would be? To promote this through advertisement, science (skewed and incomplete or not), and ease of distribution is - whether foolish or not - democracy in action.
The quotes you mention are simple facts of human nature. Not hidden or "secret" in any way as you are quoting public statements. The human mind is easily manipulated and controlled, especially when you think you know it all, such as a child often does. Informing the public of this fact is something of a social duty and should be rewarded. Don't shoot the messenger.
Not an easy one to reference. It's my conclusion mainly because of the strength of alternative hypotheses for how we are influenced (and thus leaving only a little left for the advertisers to do).
By way of reference, you might start with Asch and Milgram with their work on peer and authority influences on conformity, then perhaps Erika Richardson on group membership roles and conformity.Tarnow did some work on the mechanism of group conformity in the early part of the millennium, and Martin a few years later expanded on the mechanism showing the role of systemic processing.
Mainly, conformity is the result of numerous influences on our thinking from submission to authority, reversion to mean group beliefs, social hierarchy strategies, even simple prediction error reduction. Advertisers use these influences, but they didn't create them, nor would they be eliminated if advertisers stopped.
What matters, for conformity, is the degree to which each person can see the whole of their society as a functioning unit (reduces submission to authority), the degree to which information is shared (reduces group influence on error reduction) and the egalitarian distribution of status in social hierarchies.
1. We have a duty to educate ourselves, keep ourselves well-informed.
2. The state has a duty educate us and keep us well-informed.
My hunch is we're guilty of dereliction of duty on both counts. How much spoon-feeding can the state sustain? We must keep our end of the bargain.
:cool: Thanks
Clearly, you're interested in staying on the surface of things, pushing your particular ideology.
[quote=Eric Berne, M. D - Games People Play]Hence in order to get away from the ennui of pastimes without exposing themselves to the dangers of intimacy, most people compromise for games when they are available, and these fill the major part of the more interesting hours of social intercourse. That is the social significance of games.[/quote]