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"There's no words that can make robots out of people" How do you explain cults? How do you explain the effects of advertising? How do you explain the uniform

by tmuir 9y ago

"There's no words that can make robots out of people" How do you explain cults? How do you explain the effects of advertising? How do you explain the uniform levels of discipline achieved by basic training? How do you explain phone scammers? How do you explain the success of the public relations industry? How do you explain Bernie Madoff? How do you explain cigarette smokers? How do you explain the effects of what we refer to as echo chambers? Everyone of these consists of people being programmed or brainwashed in one way or another. You hear the word brainwashing and immediately think of someone thats hypnotized, or a zombie, the typical hollywood trope. But its a far more common thing. If you're interested in reading about this, there is a book by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober... One interesting persuasion trick is to start with extreme opening bids in negotiation, and then back off to what you really want. This is how the actors of Watergate were able to convince others to go along with the plan to break in to the Watergate. The original plan was far more involved, with a $1,000,000 budget, and included kidnappings. G Gordon Liddy used this as an extreme opening bid, and eventually convinced everyone that what eventually took place was a reasonable compromise. After, its not like they kidnapped anyone, and they only needed $250,000.

Karunamon 9y ago
Most of your litany of questions can be answered by saying that nobody became a cultist by only reading words on a screen of what the cult believes. Take Scientology for instance. I have access to the whole of their printed words online, yet I am not a Scientologist. You wouldn't be either. You can sub out "Scientology" for any other cult or any other odious group (including race nationalists, terrorists, etc.) and the statement remains true. The reason being that nothing is being engaged here other than reading, writing, and thinking. No money is changing hands, no leader is demanding my obedience at literal or metaphorical gunpoint. In the case of a web forum the absolute worst thing that could happen to me is that I'll get rude comments or be unable to participate further. The only difference between discourse and propaganda is the aim of the people doing the talking. This is a subjective value judgment on what you think of the speech, and when it comes to analyzing it, this amounts to noise. Are you trying to propagandize at me? :)
- tmuir 9y ago
  The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines. Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply one of the most effective methods of placing someone under emotional stress. It is once these people are under emotional stress that their defenses are down, and they are vulnerable to brainwashing.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    Fair, but how do you continuously put people under stress using only words on a screen? The comment you originally replied to asserted that "There's no words that can make robots out of people", and so far you've provided counterexamples that use many more things; none of which are restricted to internet comments. Keeping the original topic in mind, we're talking about online comments. Not cults, not marines, not anything other than words on screens.
    - spiralx 9y ago
      > Fair, but how do you continuously put people under stress using only words on a screen? Once someone has become afraid of something, it doesn't just vanish after the event that caused it is over.
  - tmuir 9y ago
    @Karunamon: I'm not sure why, but I have no reply link under your latest post, so I'm posting as close to it as I can. I don't think its controversial at all to say that both Facebook and Reddit are brainwashing people. Not to say that the companies themselves are doing the brainwashing, just that they are effective platforms for anyone to do it on. Do you really not know anyone who literally lives on one of the two sites? They are both highly addictive echo chamber services that people willingly return to, hoping that the next page load will contain their unicorn story that confirms everything they want to be true. Its the dopamine cycle of what makes social media interesting in the first place. These are two of the four most visited sites in America. I can't control for peoples previous experiences, or say that Reddit or Facebook are the exclusive causal factors, but I think that just the fact that they are excellent at getting users to self select for interesting content, at the expense of content that may challenge their opinions, is enough to count these services as brainwashing platforms. People are figuratively screaming to the void "I want to be entertained!!!" Trump answered the call. The repeated dopamine cycle of discovering outrageous content, and then eventually petering out to boredom, is the stress. Once you are sufficiently stressed out, you are far more susceptible to believing that the media is lying, and the FBI is biased, the intelligence community and government at large is filled with evil actors with their own agenda. I mean, how interesting would that all be, right? Another point to consider is that I don't necessarily think any one organization has caused all of this to happen. Internet addiction has obviously existed nearly as long as the internet. My theory is that Facebook and Reddit effectively teed up millions of people for someone else to come along, and capture their minds. As I've said throughout this thread, I'm not suggesting a minority report situation, or that circumstantial evidence should depose a president, or that censorship is the answer to any of this. What I'm more lamenting is that the charlatans are winning, and their methods are nearly impervious to defense in a modern democracy. As best I can tell, all I can do is try to convince people of what I think is at play, and hope that it resonates.
smsm42 9y ago
> How do you explain cults? People have strong drive to belong to an in-group. There are multiple experiments that assigning random markers to random people and making them participate in certain activities lead to "group cohesion" effects and people start assigning deep meaning to those markers, despite them being completely random. Cult is just when people take it to the extreme - likely because they didn't find satisfaction for their in-grouping drive elsewhere. > How do you explain the effects of advertising? Which specifically effects? It's mostly brand recognition, aka availability heuristics - if you have brand A, B and C and you heard before that A is good, you're more likely to choose A than unknown B and C - and just plain informing people things like brand A exist. And a touch of in-grouping ("if you drink Coca-Cola, you are in a group of cool people"). And a tad of signaling ("if we have money to but expensive ad spot on TV, we must be a successful company that can afford to create good product, would not disappear tomorrow and values its reputation so we would not cheat you"). > How do you explain the uniform levels of discipline achieved by basic training They are not that uniform, but again in-grouping plus other guys will be literally shooting at you (though research shows a lot of this shooting is much less targeted than previously thought). > How do you explain phone scammers? How do you explain the success of the public relations industry? That's plain persuasion, with various ethical fences either present or absent. > Everyone of these consists of people being programmed or brainwashed in one way or another. Again, if by "programmed" you mean "persuaded in something, in which they most likely inclined to believe from the beginning due to selection and grouping effects" then sure. People can be persuaded to buy a shampoo especially if they wanted to buy one already, and people can be deceived especially if they're already out to look for something the deceiver seemingly offers, and people can be blind to arguments especially if those arguments challenge their prejudices. The only thing different here is tobacco smoking - that's physical addiction, it is a different mechanism. > If you're interested in reading about this, there is a book by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. Yeah I know about Cialdini. It has a lot of nice tricks, but it's not magic. It's much less magic then it's made out to be. And yes, reframing and anchoring is one of the tricks. If you watch Trump carefully, you can see all these tricks employed, he does it all the time. He didn't invent it of course - expensive stores have been putting items with outrageous prices on prominent display for ages, to make regular item prices seem lower in comparison. It does confuse some heuristics for people. But anybody is capable of approaching the prices - or Trump - rationally and see the actual price. There's no "programming" to prevent it - if one makes minimal effort, one can always do it.

by tmuir 9y ago

Karunamon 9y ago

Most of your litany of questions can be answered by saying that nobody became a cultist by only reading words on a screen of what the cult believes. Take Scientology for instance. I have access to the whole of their printed words online, yet I am not a Scientologist. You wouldn't be either. You can sub out "Scientology" for any other cult or any other odious group (including race nationalists, terrorists, etc.) and the statement remains true. The reason being that nothing is being engaged here other than reading, writing, and thinking. No money is changing hands, no leader is demanding my obedience at literal or metaphorical gunpoint. In the case of a web forum the absolute worst thing that could happen to me is that I'll get rude comments or be unable to participate further. The only difference between discourse and propaganda is the aim of the people doing the talking. This is a subjective value judgment on what you think of the speech, and when it comes to analyzing it, this amounts to noise. Are you trying to propagandize at me? :)

tmuir 9y ago
The flaw in your argument is that the obedience must be demanded at gunpoint. In actuality, the obedience can be gained through a combination of continuously putting people under stress, and framing yourself as the only viable solution to the stress. Its how you train dogs, and how you train Marines. Narcissists and con artists don't need to threaten violence to achieve their means. The threat of violence is simply one of the most effective methods of placing someone under emotional stress. It is once these people are under emotional stress that their defenses are down, and they are vulnerable to brainwashing.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Fair, but how do you continuously put people under stress using only words on a screen? The comment you originally replied to asserted that "There's no words that can make robots out of people", and so far you've provided counterexamples that use many more things; none of which are restricted to internet comments. Keeping the original topic in mind, we're talking about online comments. Not cults, not marines, not anything other than words on screens.
  - spiralx 9y ago
    > Fair, but how do you continuously put people under stress using only words on a screen? Once someone has become afraid of something, it doesn't just vanish after the event that caused it is over.
- tmuir 9y ago
  @Karunamon: I'm not sure why, but I have no reply link under your latest post, so I'm posting as close to it as I can. I don't think its controversial at all to say that both Facebook and Reddit are brainwashing people. Not to say that the companies themselves are doing the brainwashing, just that they are effective platforms for anyone to do it on. Do you really not know anyone who literally lives on one of the two sites? They are both highly addictive echo chamber services that people willingly return to, hoping that the next page load will contain their unicorn story that confirms everything they want to be true. Its the dopamine cycle of what makes social media interesting in the first place. These are two of the four most visited sites in America. I can't control for peoples previous experiences, or say that Reddit or Facebook are the exclusive causal factors, but I think that just the fact that they are excellent at getting users to self select for interesting content, at the expense of content that may challenge their opinions, is enough to count these services as brainwashing platforms. People are figuratively screaming to the void "I want to be entertained!!!" Trump answered the call. The repeated dopamine cycle of discovering outrageous content, and then eventually petering out to boredom, is the stress. Once you are sufficiently stressed out, you are far more susceptible to believing that the media is lying, and the FBI is biased, the intelligence community and government at large is filled with evil actors with their own agenda. I mean, how interesting would that all be, right? Another point to consider is that I don't necessarily think any one organization has caused all of this to happen. Internet addiction has obviously existed nearly as long as the internet. My theory is that Facebook and Reddit effectively teed up millions of people for someone else to come along, and capture their minds. As I've said throughout this thread, I'm not suggesting a minority report situation, or that circumstantial evidence should depose a president, or that censorship is the answer to any of this. What I'm more lamenting is that the charlatans are winning, and their methods are nearly impervious to defense in a modern democracy. As best I can tell, all I can do is try to convince people of what I think is at play, and hope that it resonates.

smsm42 9y ago

> How do you explain cults? People have strong drive to belong to an in-group. There are multiple experiments that assigning random markers to random people and making them participate in certain activities lead to "group cohesion" effects and people start assigning deep meaning to those markers, despite them being completely random. Cult is just when people take it to the extreme - likely because they didn't find satisfaction for their in-grouping drive elsewhere. > How do you explain the effects of advertising? Which specifically effects? It's mostly brand recognition, aka availability heuristics - if you have brand A, B and C and you heard before that A is good, you're more likely to choose A than unknown B and C - and just plain informing people things like brand A exist. And a touch of in-grouping ("if you drink Coca-Cola, you are in a group of cool people"). And a tad of signaling ("if we have money to but expensive ad spot on TV, we must be a successful company that can afford to create good product, would not disappear tomorrow and values its reputation so we would not cheat you"). > How do you explain the uniform levels of discipline achieved by basic training They are not that uniform, but again in-grouping plus other guys will be literally shooting at you (though research shows a lot of this shooting is much less targeted than previously thought). > How do you explain phone scammers? How do you explain the success of the public relations industry? That's plain persuasion, with various ethical fences either present or absent. > Everyone of these consists of people being programmed or brainwashed in one way or another. Again, if by "programmed" you mean "persuaded in something, in which they most likely inclined to believe from the beginning due to selection and grouping effects" then sure. People can be persuaded to buy a shampoo especially if they wanted to buy one already, and people can be deceived especially if they're already out to look for something the deceiver seemingly offers, and people can be blind to arguments especially if those arguments challenge their prejudices. The only thing different here is tobacco smoking - that's physical addiction, it is a different mechanism. > If you're interested in reading about this, there is a book by a psychologist named Robert Cialdini, called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. Yeah I know about Cialdini. It has a lot of nice tricks, but it's not magic. It's much less magic then it's made out to be. And yes, reframing and anchoring is one of the tricks. If you watch Trump carefully, you can see all these tricks employed, he does it all the time. He didn't invent it of course - expensive stores have been putting items with outrageous prices on prominent display for ages, to make regular item prices seem lower in comparison. It does confuse some heuristics for people. But anybody is capable of approaching the prices - or Trump - rationally and see the actual price. There's no "programming" to prevent it - if one makes minimal effort, one can always do it.