Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [416]
But with the advent of scientific psychology, it became possible for informed people to use certain findings of the new science to influence the minds and feelings of others by methods not generally recognized as persuasive techniques.
This can be well-intended. The sophisticated techniques used by teachers in motivating children to learn and by psychotherapists to inspire patients to change are examples of the many ways in which covert psychological persuasion is employed for the benefit of others.
But the techniques can also be used to induce behavior that is harmful to the subjects, not merely in terms of concrete costs but at the price of freedom of choice. Those who are persuaded may be deprived of their rationality and become little better than Skinner’s Ping-Pong-playing pigeons, mindless creatures blindly obeying the will of others, heedless of their own best interests.
The use or abuse of psychology to persuade had become so pervasive by the early 1990s that social psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson called their 1992 study of the subject The Age of Propaganda. They meant not just political or religious propaganda but any “communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to ‘voluntarily’ accept this position as if it were his or her own.”59
Since we are interested in the misuse of covert persuasion, we will bypass overt forms of persuasion, like honest advertising; techniques of propaganda that rely not on covert use of psychological principles but on “disinformation” (the [George W.] Bush administration’s fraudulent assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction); deceptive labeling (the administration’s switch, when no WMD were found, to the claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq to liberate the Iraqis from oppression); unconcealed appeals to easily aroused emotions (a picture of an adorable baby sitting in a Michelin tire, or of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima); and, finally, certain military uses of psychology, including nontorture POW interrogation techniques and brainwashing, which are hardly covert and, in any case, are considered ethically justifiable during warfare.
But the use of psychological knowledge to persuade covertly is very common in advertising. Much advertising, to be sure, forthrightly portrays the product in an attractive light, praises its virtues, and states its price. However, a considerable part of the $400 billion spent each year in America on advertising of all types pays for messages conveyed by covertly persuasive techniques derived from psychological principles. As the journalist Vance Packard revealed long ago in The Hidden Persuaders, a muckraking 1957 exposé of these methods, psychoanalytic principles were then being used on a large scale—and, he later said in 1980, still were—to “channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes… Many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.”60
The early applications of psychological principles to advertising by Walter Dill Scott, John B. Watson, and others were relatively aboveboard, but in the late 1940s devious, cunning, and more potent applications were introduced by several people acquainted with Freudian theory. The best-known of them was the late Ernest Dichter. Born in Vienna, he earned a doctorate in psychology at the University of Vienna and briefly practiced psychoanalysis but, being Jewish, fled the Nazis in 1938 and came to the United States. Unlike most other refugee