Tinfoil Hat - Mind Control and Coercive Psychological Systems

Introduction

Skews Me — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:38:38 +0000

Reading through email spam or the classified advertisements in a progressive newspaper, one may find offers for everything from assertiveness training¹ to sexual domination hypnosis² to computer software designed to flash brief messages on the screen with the goal of quitting smoking or losing weight.³ These are just a few of the many household Mind Control products marketed today promising that their simple tricks will allow anyone to be the master of their domain. While the efficacy of these programs is debatable, the science behind them is quite sound.

The basics of Mind Control are as ancient as mankind itself. Convincing someone to adopt an idea or perform a task is commonplace in every family. Children thus begin learning how to rationalize, peer pressure, beg, bribe, bully, guilt, or resort to any number of other tactics including blackmail and all out violent assault in order to get their way. As author Eric Schlosser notes in Fast Food Nation, James U. McNeal, a leading authority in marketing to children, “classifies juvenile nagging tactics into seven major categories” in his 1992 book Kids As Consumers:

A pleading nag is one accompanied by repetitions of words like “please” or “mom, mom, mom.” A persistent nag involves constant requests for the coveted product and may include the phrase “I’m gonna ask just one more time.” Forceful nags are extremely pushy and may include subtle threats, like “Well, then, I’ll go and ask Dad.” Demonstrative nags are the most high-risk, often characterized by full-blown tantrums in public places, breath-holding, tears, a refusal to leave the store. Sugar-coated nags promise affection in return for a purchase and my rely on seemingly heartfelt declarations like “You’re the best dad in the world.” Threatening nags are youth forms of blackmail, vows of eternal hatred and of running away if something isn’t bought. Pity nags claim the child will be heartbroken, teased, or socially stunted if the parent refuses to buy a certain item.⁴

An increasing number of teens and young adults are beginning to hone these skills in order to control family, friends and coworkers. Bullying has become epidemic, for example.

“Flicking through some of the saner sections of neuro-linguistic programming texts (minus the new age content) brings up the subtle use of language and body-language to influence other people,” states United Kingdom Defense Contractor “Mom” in personal correspondence. One method of this technique is through “mirroring” ⁵ the actions and words of the other person, which Mom explains:

Mirroring fosters a sense of ease or trust. Courting couples tend to do this intuitively (watch dating couples and see how they mirror things like sipping coffee, taking a bite of food, etc.) but it can be used as a way of making the mirrored party susceptible to persuasion. By doing the opposite to mirroring, the other party can be made ill-at-ease and be less amenable to persuasion (basically it rubs them up the wrong way).

Annie Finnigan reports on body language for Women’s Day magazine:

“Up to 80% of what we communicate is nonverbal,” says Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent turned nonverbal communication expert and author of What Every Body Is Saying. That means every gesture, look, mouth twitch, eyebrow raise, even the way we stand sends a message.… We relate to people in three ways: verbally (with words), vocally (tone of voice), and visually (body language), says Albert Mehrabian, PhD, emeritus professor of psychology at UCLA and author of Silent Messages. But the three V’s don’t always line up.… “If there’s an inconsistency between the verbal, vocal and visual, our words give off the least information,” he says. “Our facial expressions play the greatest role.”…

“Poker players are good at hiding nonverbal cues,” [says poker champion Annie Duke]. “But I always watch them very closely, and if I see them blinking fast, licking their lips or flashing a quick grimace before they smile, chances are they’re bluffing.” ⁶

Mom points out entertainer Derren Brown⁷ whose website reveals that he “can seemingly predict and control human behavior. He doesn’t claim to be a mind-reader, instead he describes his craft as a mixture of magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship.” Brown “primes” his audience members using subtle clues to respond in predetermined ways. The effect is dramatic.

Mom also notes a Mind Control game that primes players based upon their personality: conformists will end up visualizing one image (e.g., an elephant in Denmark) while nonconformists will see another (e.g., an emu in Dubai). This phenomenon may be found in simpler form per a circulating email that has the reader calculate the number six several times then asks for a vegetable. It claims 98% of readers will choose carrot.

A documentary at the YouTube.com website, “The CFR Controlled Media Cabal (Part 3),” reports:

The human mind is like a computer no matter how efficient it may be. It’s reliability is only as great as the information fed into it. If it is possible to control the input of the human mind, then no matter how intelligent a person may be, it’s entirely possible to program what he will think; and yes, it’s even possible to program people to laugh at the mere mention of the word “conspiracy.” ^{8, i}

From its application in the classroom to its use in the workplace, psychology has become a hot topic. The discipline is even finding its way into homes. Today’s television programs like “Nanny 911″ and “Supernanny” demonstrate what the power of a little Mind Control can do. The children on these shows would surely be required by schools to take a “chemical straightjacket” ⁹ such as Ritalin, but in a week’s time the behavior modification programs transform these tiny terrors into little angels.

Notes

ⁱ A conspiracy may be a continuing one; actors may drop out and others may drop in; the details of operation may change from time to time; the members need not know each other or the part played by others; a member may not need to know all the details of the plan of the operation; he must, however, know the purpose of the conspiracy and agree to become a party to a plan to effectuate that purpose.
— cited from the Californiia Court of Appeals decision, Craig v. U.S. C.C.A. Cal. 81 F2d 816, 822.

Related books

Information Control is Mind Control

Skews Me — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:35:40 +0000

In a 12 November 1816 letter to George Logan, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall take warning from the example [England] and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.” ¹ By December 2000, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 were corporations and 49 were countries, according to information compiled by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies in their Report on the Top 200 corporations as reported by the Corporations.org website.²

Source: Media Reform Information Center

According to the Media Reform Information Center:

In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called “alarmist” for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote “in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media” – controlling almost all of America’s newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.³

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

As former intelligence insider Mark Phillips notes, “Information control is mind control.” Phillips with Cathy O’Brien co-authored Trance: Formation of America in 1995 submitted for Congressional Record and Access Denied: for Reasons of National Security in 2004 about Mind Control slavery in America.

“The Old Gray Man of the CIA,” William “Bill” Colby, known for exposing The Company’s “family jewels” from his tenure as Director in the 1970s – abruptly replaced by George H.W. Bush – to Colby’s suspicious disappearance and death in late April 1996, let us know that “the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” ⁴

A documentary at the YouTube.com website, “The CFR Controlled Media Cabal (Part 3),” reports:

It’s a sobering fact that the hidden power structure of international finance has exherted tremendous influence over public opinion in this country through its virtual control of higher education and major segments of mass communications.⁵

Source: Mind Control in America: Exposing the Strategy to Manipulate Your Mind

As the website MindControlInAmerica.com notes:

Under the right circumstances, people can be led to believe things that are not true.… On October 30, 1938, thousands of people fled from a crisis that had no existence except in their imaginations. A radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” led thousands of listeners to believe that the planet earth had been invaded by Martians! “We are ready to believe almost anything if it comes from a recognized authority,” writes Howard Koch in his book, The Panic Broadcast. Koch wrote the radio script performed by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on CBS.⁶

Related audio

The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938), The Mercury Theatre on the Air, at http://www.mercurytheatre.info, MP3 at http://sounds.mercurytheatre.info/mercury/381030.mp3 (retrieved: 3 January 2011).

Related books

Obedience to Authority

Skews Me — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:11:04 +0000

During the 1970s, neobehaviorists performed countless experiments on adults and children alike. Colleges jumped at the opportunity to test new theories.

In 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated that normal people can easily turn into sadistic “guards” while reducing their “prisoners” to blind obedience. Scheduled to run two weeks, the study was halted on day six due to ethical concerns. According to Stanford News:

The arrestees were among about 70 young men, mostly college students eager to earn $15 a day for two weeks, who volunteered as subjects for an experiment on prison life that had been advertised in the Palo Alto Times. After interviews and a battery of psychological tests, the two dozen judged to be the most normal, average and healthy were selected to participate, assigned randomly either to be guards or prisoners. Those who would be prisoners were booked at a real jail, then blindfolded and driven to campus where they were led into a makeshift prison in the basement of Jordan Hall.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

[Psychology Professor Philip] Zimbardo’s primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. “I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects,” Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.¹

According to the Standford Prison Experiment PrisonExp.org website:

There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were “good guys” who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners.²

Prisoners coped with their feelings of frustration and powerlessness in a variety of ways. At first, some prisoners rebelled or fought with the guards. Four prisoners reacted by breaking down emotionally as a way to escape the situation. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash over his entire body when he learned that his parole request had been turned down. Others tried to cope by being good prisoners, doing everything the guards wanted them to do.… By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or hospitalized mental patients. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner.³

[By the fifth night it became apparent the experiment had to be stopped. The experimenters had created] a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the “good” guards felt helpless to intervene.⁴

Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.⁵

In 1974, Stanley Milgram published his infamous Obedience to Authority study. He discovered that normal people were willing to inflict excruciating pain on a subject at the behest of an instructor as related by Muskingum University:

People who are doing a job as instructed by an administrative figure are following the instructions of that administrative outlook and not the outlook of a moral code. The feelings of duty and personal emotion are clearly separated. Responsibility shifts in the mind of the subordinate from himself/herself to the authority figure. There is a well defined purpose behind the actions or goals of the authority, and the subordinate is depended upon to help and meet those goals.⁶


© The Simpsons

According to a short biograpgy of Milgram compiled by Michael Goret et al:

In most versions of this experiment two individuals would arrive at a testing center simultaneously. Here they would meet an instructer who appeared to be conducting the experiment. This instructor superficially appeared as an authority figure by displaying the necessary crudentials [sic] as a professor such as a white lab coat and clip board. The two “subjects”were then taken to a room where one was strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode was placed on their arm. Next, the other individual who was called the “teacher” was taken to an adjoining room where he/she was instructed to read a list of two word pairs. He/She would then ask the “learner” to read them back. If the “learner” got the answer correct, they would then move on to the next set of words in the series. However, if the answer was wrong the “teacher” was informed by the instructor that they were required to administer shock to the “learner”. These shocks first started at 15 volts and increased to 450 volts for each incorrect response. This occured in 15 volt increments. The “teacher” was never cohersed into doing so they were simply told by the instructer that the experiement required them to continue. This in fact is what made this study so intiguing; the “teacher” could have discontinued the experiment at any time but you will soon see that the majority continued to shock. The “teacher” was fully under the assumption that he/she was administering discipline to the “learner” however, they were never really doing so. The “learner” was actually a confederate,a student or actor, who were never actually harmed.…

Today the field of psychology would deem this study highly unethical because of the great deal of stress layed upon the subjects, however it is quite evident that this research yielded some extremely important findings. The theory that only the most severe monsters on the sadistic fringe of society would submit to such cruelty is disclaimed. Findings indicated that, “two-thirds of this studies participants fell into the category of ‘obedient’ subjects. These participants represented ordinary people drawn from the working, managerial, and professional classes” (Obedience to Authority). Ultimately 65% of all of the “teachers” punished the “learners” to the maximum 450 volts.⁷

Herd Mentality

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:15:14 +0000

“Herd mentality describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviours, follow trends, and/or purchase items,” explains the EveryTherapist.com website:

People in these herds are broken up into two groups, explains Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher who coined the phrase. One lended itself to the religious points of views — their beliefs and how those dictated their actions — while the other lended itself to influence by the media — based upon what others perceive as ‘right’ (following trends, social norms, etc.). Nietzsche perceived these two forms of subservience to be a weakness among the common man, and that the “Superman” as Nietzsche terms is the one who overcomes the values of the fallible herd.…

Herd mentality implies a fear-based reaction to peer pressure which makes individuals act in order to avoid feeling “left behind” from the group. Herd mentality is also sometimes known as “mob mentality.” ¹

“Researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence a crowd’s direction — and that the other 95 per cent follow without realizing it,” reports the PsychCentral.com website:

[University of Leeds Professor Jens Krause], with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.

The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organizing, snake-like structure.

“We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.” ²

Marketing

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:20:11 +0000

The American Marketing Association defines ‘marketing’ as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” ¹ “The roots of the American Marketing Association can be traced to the early 1900′s when the National Association of Teachers of Advertisers and American Marketing Society, comprised of marketers and marketing researchers, merged to bring together all marketers, across all specialties to collaborate and inspire one another.” ² “Many companies today have a customer focus (or market orientation),” writes Wikipedia. “This implies that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands.… A firm’s marketing department is often seen as of prime importance within the functional level of an organization.” ³

The American Marketing Association also defines ‘marketing research’:

Marketing research is the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information — information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research specifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications.⁴

“Marketing has many aspects, but promotion, persistence, and patience are three key elements which are critical to achieving successful results,” writes Kirk Bannerman in “Successful Network Marketing Depends Upon These Three Factors.” “The key point to be made here is that you must have an active promotion campaign designed to bring in a steady stream of new prospective downline members.” ⁵ As an historical example of promotion:

source: The Crazy Little Dot in Space

In the early days of newspapers, when newspapers were the primary method of delivering the news, when something big happened, the publisher would not only publish the normal daily paper, but would also publish an Extra. The newspapers were sold on the street, often by newsboys, who had a stack of papers and would sell them to passersby. When an Extra came out, they would chant “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” to call attention to the fact that something big has happened, and an Extra paper has been published.

Over the years, marketing evolved from word of mouth, to printed advertisements, to radio and television, and beyond. “A Brief History of Television Advertising” by Steven Chabotte notes that “It all began with radio:”

Broadcasting was originally developed as a means for companies to sell radios. But once commercial entities realized that many households were listening to their radios a significant amount of time every day, they started to explore this medium as a way to get their message across to the masses.… By the late [1920s] radio advertising had advanced in a dramatic way. It was now dominated by advertising agencies who took control of the schedules by buying the available air time and selling it to their customers. They also handled the creative aspects of the commercials and programs and in fact even created entire series that were designed to sell one product or another.…

source: olx.com

Full time telecasting didn’t really take hold until 1948 as it took that long for the United States to recover from the Depression and World War II.… As television was a totally new phenomenon — i.e. offering both sound and moving pictures, the advertising industry moved into this arena cautiously as they were not sure what methods would work best to promote their clients products on television.… After study and many surveys, the advertising agencies determined that the most effective way to reach consumers with a strong message would be by creating shows that featured a single product or a line of products from a single company. From this concept arised the typical television shows of the 1950′s including such titles as Kraft Television Theater, Colgate Comedy Hour, and Coke Time. As with radio, these television programs were produced by advertising agencies for their clients rather than the studios as is common practice currently.…

But as the television gained more popularity and there were more people watching it,… the ever increasing costs…forced a massive change in the relationship of all the parties: the advertising agencies, the clients/sponsors and the television networks.… NBC executive Sylvester L. “Pat” Weaver…introduced the “magazine concept” of television advertising. In this arrangement, the sponsors would purchase blocks of time (typically one to two minutes) in a show rather than be a sponsor for an entire show.… Like a magazine, the networks would now control the content as no one advertiser would “own” a particular show.… By 1960, the magazine concept dominated television advertising, as it has ever since.⁶


Americhip video-in-print CBS ad in Entertainment Weekly	source: The Wrap

In September 2009, this magazine concept of television advertising got a role reversal when “a print advertisement with a small, embedded video screen [enabled New York and Los Angeles⁷] readers of Entertainment Weekly to sample 40 minutes of its upcoming shows.” ⁸ “BBC News reports that the video ad is a rechargeable chip that is about the size of a mobile phone and can store up to 40 minutes of footage,” writes The Christian Science Monitor.⁹ BBC News also notes that “it is not the first time that publishers have experimented with digital technology in magazines. [In 2008], for example, men’s lifestyle magazine Esquire published the first using e-ink technology, with a cover that flashed in alternating patterns.” ¹⁰

“Americhip creates sensory experiences in print,” the company writes on their YouTube channel. “Engaging customers, influencing the decision making process and elevating brand recall through Sound, Sight, Touch, Scent and Taste technologies. We call this Multisensorizing.” ¹¹

Cradle-to-Grave

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:25:02 +0000

The 1980s have been called “the decade of the child consumer,” notes Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation:

Hoping that nostalgic childhood memories of a brand will lead to a lifetime of purchases, companies now plan “crade-to-grave” advertising strategies. They have come to believe [that] at person’s “brand loyalty” may begin as early as the age of two. Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.¹

The process of adopting new behaviors was addressed in 1953 by Howard Becker in “On Becoming a Marihuana User” for the American Journal of Sociology:

That the presence of a given kind of behavior is the result of a sequence of social experiences during which the person acquires a conception of the meaning of the behavior, and perceptions and judgments of objects and situations, all of which make the activity possible and desirable. Thus, the motivation or disposition to engage in the activity is built up in the course of learning to engage in it and does not antedate this learning process. For such a view it is not necessary to identify those “traits” which “cause” the behavior. Instead, the problem becomes one of describing the set of changes in the person’s conception of the activity and of the experience it provides him.²

The proficient use of social and psychological cues is crucial to grab an audience’s attention amongst the hundreds if not thousands of advertisements the average American is bombarded with every day.³ “The average child sees more than 20,000 commercials a year – some as many as 40,000,” writes Jim Hightower in Thieves in High Places citing the American Academy of Pediatrics.⁴ “Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: consume, consume. And then consume some more,” writes Morgan Spurlock, the investigator behind the documentary “Super Size Me” in his article “The Truth about McDonald’s and Children.” The article notes:

Today, corporations spend more than $15bn every year on marketing, advertising and promotions meant to program American children to consume.… Why? Because they realize that children not only have more expendable income of their own, but they influence how their parents spend their hard-earned bucks, too – to the tune of more than $600bn a year.…

McDonald’s and the other fast-food chains make no secret of the fact that kids are their primary targets. “We have living proof of the long-lasting quality of early brand loyalties in the cradle-to-grave marketing at McDonald’s, and how well it works,” James McNeal, a well-known children’s marketing guru and the author of Kids As Customers, has said. “We start taking children in for their first and second birthdays, and on and on, and eventually they have a great deal of preference for that brand. Children can carry that with them through a lifetime.” ⁵

Medial mogul Disney has gone even further by targeting maternity wards at hospitals. “The reps are offering new moms, within hours of giving birth, a free Disney Cuddly Bodysuit for their babies if they sign up for e-mail alerts from DisneyBaby.com,” reports NPR:

The idea is to encourage mothers to infuse their infants with brand loyalty as if it is mother’s milk.… Getting an expectant mom thinking about her family’s first theme-park visit while her child was in the womb, an exec told the [The New York Times], would be like hitting “a home run.”…

The Advertising Educational Foundation already hails infants 1 year and under as… “a more informed, influential and compelling audience than ever before.” Children as young as 12 months, the foundation adds, can recognize brands and are “strongly influenced” by advertising and marketing. Like that’s a good thing.

The truth is, some studies show that children under 8 years old can’t distinguish between ads and entertainment. Until then, they don’t fully comprehend that advertising is trying to sell them something. That gives marketers an unfair – not to mention predatory – advantage over our kids. No wonder so many other countries have tight restrictions on marketing to children under age 12.⁶

“Studies over the years have demonstrated that many people, especially young people, unquestioningly accept the reality presented by television,” notes the MindControlInAmerica.com website. “Popular culture (movies, television and music) carries messages about how society works and how people should behave.” ⁷

Related books and films

What’s in a name?

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:27:15 +0000

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

In Act II, Scene II of playwright William Shakespeare’s lyrical tale of “star-cross’d” lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet “are doomed from the start as members of two warring families,” explains the eNotes.com website:

Here Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person who is called “Montague”, not the Montague name and not the Montague family. Romeo, out of his passion for Juliet, rejects his family name and vows, as Juliet asks, to “deny (his) father” and instead be “new baptized” as Juliet’s lover. This one short line encapsulates the central struggle and tragedy of the play.¹

“Does your name play a role in determining what career you choose or how successful you are within your chosen profession?” asks Steve Tobak of CBS News. “There’s certainly a ton of anecdotal evidence that names and career choices are related and additional evidence that people don’t necessarily choose doctors, lawyers, and who knows what else, completely at random from a list.” ²

Rachel Emma Silverman and Joe Light write in The Wall Street Journal:

In a controversial, widely cited 2002 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo found that people were more likely to choose professions with names that are similar to their own first names. Another study, out of Wayne State University, Detroit, found that medical doctors and lawyers were more likely to have last names that somehow evoked their professions. It was published [in 2010] in the journal “Names: A Journal of Onomastics.” ³

The CBS News article continues:

Not surprisingly, there are dissenting views in academia. Frank Nuessel, professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Louisville, who edits [the Names journal] and coined the term “aptonym” — when your name reflects your profession — says he doesn’t really believe in “nominal determinism.” ⁴

The Wall Street Journal quotes Professor Nuessel: “I really don’t believe in nominal determinism. Probably most of these tend to be accidental.” ⁵

But Jozef M. Nuttin, Jr., in 1987 “showed that individuals tend to like both their names and initials, called the name-letter effect,” notes Psychlopedia. “In particular, they appear to like their initials more than other letters of the alphabet.” ⁶ According to Wikipedia, “The name–letter effect is one of the widest used measures of implicit self-esteem:”

This effect has been found in a vast range of studies. In one such scenario, participants were given a list of letters, one of which contained letters from their own name and the other of which contained other letters, and asked them to circle the preferred letter. This study found that, even when accounting for all other variables, letters belonging to the participants’ own names were preferred [Nuttin, 1985].

Similar results have been found in cross-cultural studies, using different alphabets [Hoorens, V., Nuttin, J.M., Herman, I.E., & Pavakanun, U., 1990].⁷

“The name-letter effect has been ascribed to implicit egoism, as propounded by Pelham, Carvallo, and Jones (2005),” continues Psychlopedia. “In particular, individuals like to perceive themselves favorably. Hence, any object or concept they feel is connected to the self is also conferred this favorable status.” ⁸

Brand Identity

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:30:16 +0000


History of branding	source: www.2-speed.com

“People become attached to the identities of well-known brands,” writes Branding Strategy Insider:

When they are comfortable with a given identity, they don’t want it changed. Changing brand identities is risky business, not only because it has the potential to reduce brand recognition, recall and key associations, but also because it could cause customer dissatisfaction.¹… Brand identity can and will evolve over time, but usually it does so incrementally so that the new identity is a refreshed extension of the old identity. In this way, one does not lose the recognition and positive associations that existed with the previous identity.²

Brand identity is more critical today than ever before, as more and more businesses and products compete for consumer attention across an ever-increasing variety of channels,” writes the ScentAir.com website. “The powerful brands of tomorrow will create a brand experience that extends the traditional paradigm of sight and sound. They will immerse their customers in an environment that not only appeals to the senses of sight and sound, but also the senses of touch, taste and smell.” ³

“Brand loyalty is hard to break for some,” writes David Butler for the Northern Colorado Beer Examiner. “The beers you started drinking when you were a young adult often become the beverage of choice later in life.… For some, it becomes part of their identity.” ⁴ According to the aysymtomatic.net website in their “Brand Addiction” article:

The big corporations aren’t worried about brand addiction to brands that aren’t their own. For example, Budweiser doesn’t care that you are brand-addicted to Miller, even though they have beer that is comparatively identical in its flavor similarity to water. They’re just biding their time until they strike the right nerve with their advertising and you suddenly switch brand loyalty. Until then, they have their own brand-addicts that they need not advertise to. It’s a big game to them.⁵

According to a 1990 paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association:

A study examined whether billboard advertising of tobacco and alcohol products is differentially targeted toward White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic neighborhoods.… The study suggests that the modeling of social cues can serve to motivate product use, disinhibit behavioral restraints, and reinforce existing habits.… Furthermore, the analyses of the content of the billboards revealed that alcohol and cigarette advertisements use social modeling cues such as anticipated rewards, attractive models, and similarity.^{6, i}

“Like adults, young children are highly influenced by branding, experts say,” writes Steven Reinberg for HealthDay Reporter:

“Children, it seems, literally do judge a food by its cover. And they prefer the cover they know,” said [Dr. David Katz, the director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut].… Most 3- and 5-year-olds who taste-tested a variety of foods said they preferred the ones in the McDonald’s wrapper — even though the foods were exactly the same.… After taste-testing, the children more often said the chicken nuggets, fries, carrots and milk wrapped in the McDonald’s logo tasted better.…

“It’s really an unfair marketplace out there for young children,” [Dr. Thomas Robinson, the director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Packard Children's Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, in Stanford, California] said. “It’s very clear they cannot understand the persuasive nature of advertising.” ^{7, ii}

Notes

ⁱ The magazine Advertising Age cited Ronald McDonald as No 2 on its list of top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century. Who was No 1? It was the Marlboro Man.
— Morgan Spurlock, “The Truth about McDonald’s and Children,” Independent/UK, 22 May 2005, at CommonDreams.org, http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0522-20.htm (retrieved: 13 May 2011).

ⁱⁱ It is estimated that McDonald’s spend more than $1 billion dollars per year on U.S. advertising.
— Steven Reinberg, “Foods Taste Better With McDonald’s Logo, Kids Say,” 6 August 2007, at http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=4508191&page=1&singlePage=true#.Tx9QFlyiO48 (retrieved: 24 January 2012).

Gaming Addiction

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:35:11 +0000

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) reports that “psychiatrists are concerned about the wellbeing of children who spend so much time with video games that they fail to develop friendships, get appropriate outdoor exercise or suffer in their schoolwork,… [but that] the APA does not consider ‘video game addiction’ to be a mental disorder at this time. If the science warrants it, this proposed disorder will be considered for inclusion in DSM-V, which is due to be published in 2012.” ¹

The APA has also reported that “players of violent video games have significantly higher feelings of aggression and differences in brain activity during both cognitive motor activity and resting periods.… Researchers led by Gregor R. Szycik, Ph.D., with Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany, investigated intensive use of first-person shooter games on the brain function of young male adults, particularly looking at both the possible impact of such games on morphological and functional structure of the brain and its relation to processing cognitive tasks.” ²

“Screen technologies cause high arousal which in turn activates the brain system’s underlying addiction,” neurologist and Oxford Professor Baroness Greenfield said in October 2011, as reported by the Daily Mail website. “This results in the attraction of yet more screen-based activity.” The report continues:

The first genuinely scientific attempt to analyse the emotive subject has thrown up astonishing results that suggest she is right. Differences in brain activity between young men who played violent games and ones who didn’t were visible in a randomly assigned sample in just one week.…

After one week, the ‘gamers’ showed less activity in certain regions of the brain when they were scanned. Dr Yang Wang, assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis said to Medical News Today: “For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home.”

“These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.” ³

Source: Cracked.com

“Every computer game is designed around the same central element: the player. While the hardware and software for games may change, the psychology underlying how players learn and react to the game is a constant,” expounds John Hopson in “Behavioral Game Design” for Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games:

The study of the mind has actually come up with quite a few findings that can inform game design, but most of these have been published in scientific journals and other esoteric formats inaccessible to designers. Ironically, many of these discoveries used simple computer games as tools to explore how people learn and act under different conditions.… Psychology can offer a framework and a vocabulary for understanding what we are already telling our players.

• Contingencies and Schedules.… A contingency is a rule or set of rules governing when rewards are given out. The anecdote about this discovery (as passed to [Hopson] by one of his students) is that one day B. F. Skinner ran low on the small food pellets he gave the rats in his experiments. Rather than risk running out and having to stop work for the day, he began to provide the pellets every tenth time the rats pressed the lever instead of every time. Experimenting with different regimens of reward, he found that they produced markedly different patterns of response. From this was born a new area of psychology, and one that has some strong implications for game design.

• Ratios and Intervals.… There are essentially two fundamental sorts of contingencies, ratios and intervals. Ratio schedules provide rewards after a certain number of actions have been completed.… Fixed ratio schedules typically produce a very distinct pattern in the participant. First there is a long pause, then a steady burst of activity as fast as possible until a reward is given.… Once participants decide to go for the reward, they act as fast as they can to bring the reward quickly.…

source: education.com

There are also “variable ratio” schedules, in which a specific number of actions are required, but that number changes every time.… Under variable ratio schedules, participants typically respond with a steady flow of activity at a reasonably high rate. While not quite as high a rate as the burst under a fixed ratio schedule, it is more consistent and lacks the pausing that can cause trouble.… In general, variable ratio schedules produce the highest overall rates of activity of all the schedules.

On the other side of the coin there are interval schedules. Instead of providing a reward after a certain number of actions, interval schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time has passed. In a “fixed interval” schedule, the first response after a set period of time produces a reward.… Participants usually respond to fixed interval contingencies by pausing for a while after a reward and then gradually responding faster and faster until another reward is given.… As in the fixed ratio, there is a pause that can cause problems for a game designer. Unlike the fixed ratio, there is no sharp transition to a high rate of activity. Instead, there is gradual increase as the appropriate time approaches. The pause remains, a period where player motivation is low.

There are also “variable interval” schedules, where the period of time involved changes after each reward. A counterpart to the variable ratio schedules, these also produce a steady, continuous level of activity, although at a slower pace. As in the variable ratio schedule, there is always a reason to be active.… The motivation is evenly spread out over time, so there are no low points where the players’ attention might wander. The activity is lower than in a variable ratio schedule because the appearance is not dependent on activity.

Experiments have shown that [game designers] are very good at determining which consequences are the results of [their] own actions and which are not.… Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity [designers] want from [their] players.⁴

“Notice [the] article does not contain the words ‘fun’ or ‘enjoyment.’… Instead it’s “the pattern of activity you want,” observes David Wong in “5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted” for the Cracked.com website:

His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. He invented the “Skinner Box,” a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets.…

It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing – and paying – until the sun goes supernova.

Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.…

Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:
Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.… That’s why the highest court in South Korea ruled that virtual goods are to be legally treated the same as real goods. And virtual goods are now a $5 billion industry worldwide.

There’s nothing crazy about it. After all, people pay thousands of dollars for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A video game suit of armor looks pretty and protects you from video game orcs. In both cases you’re paying for an idea.⁵

Perceived Value

Skews Me — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 19:38:16 +0000

“For many years researchers have investigated customers’ response to product pricing,” notes KnowThis.com in their “Market Pricing: Psychological Method” article. “Some of the results point to several interesting psychological effects price may have on customers’ buying behavior and on their perception of individual products.” ¹ So-called “odd-even” pricing has become commonplace as a result “based on the belief that certain prices or price ranges are more appealing to buyers,” writes the BusinessDictionary.com website.²

“Odd-even” pricing relates to whole number pricing where customers may perceive a significant difference in product price when pricing is slightly below a whole number value. For example, a product priced at (US) $299.95 may be perceived as offering more value than a product priced at $300.00. This effect can also be used to influence potential customers who receive product information from others. Many times a buyer will pass along the price as being lower than it is either because they recall it being lower than the even number or they want to impress others with their success in obtaining a good value. For instance, in our example a buyer who pays $299.95 may tell a friend they paid “a little more than $200″ for the product when in fact it was much closer to $300.³

“Originally, this practice was meant to prevent pilfering of cash by forcing a cashier to open the cash-register (to pay change to the customer) and thus register the transaction,” notes BusinessDictionary.com in their explanation of odd-even pricing.⁴

“Another psychological effect, called prestige pricing, points to a strong correlation between perceived product quality and price,” KnowThis.com continues:

The higher the price the more likely customers are to perceive it has being higher quality compared to a lower priced product. (Although there is point at which customers will begin to question the value of the product if the price is too high.) In fact, the less a customer knows about a product the more likely they are to judge the product as being of higher quality based on only knowing the price. Prestige pricing can also work with odd-even pricing as marketers, looking to present an image of high quality, may choose to price products at even levels (e.g., $10 rather than $9.99).⁵

“Price lining or product line pricing is [another] method that primarily uses price to create the separation between the different models,” further explains KnowThis.com in their “Market Pricing: Price Lining Method” article:

With this approach, even if customers possess little knowledge about a set of products, customers may perceive they are different based on price alone. The key is whether the prices for all products in the group are perceived as representing distinct price points (i.e., enough separation between each). For instance, a marketer may sell a base model, an upgraded model and a deluxe model each at a different price. If the differences in features for each model is not readily apparent to a customer, such as differences that are inside the product and not easily viewed (e.g., difference between laptop computers), then price lining will help the customer recognize that differences do exist as long as the prices are noticeably different.⁶

Tinfoil Hat - Mind Control and Coercive Psychological Systems

Introduction

Notes

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Marketing

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Gaming Addiction

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Perceived Value

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