Abstract:

The fusion of psychology and advertising, especially as it is used in politics under a capitalist democracy, is dangerous and exacerbates the problems of populism as a means of social engineering and control by the plutocracy. In this paper, I will explore the incorporation of psychology into advertising, as well as the history of advertising in politics, the propaganda model as posited by Noam Chomsky and its relation to the current political climate in the US, as well as expand on ties to social psychology, namely Social Identity Theory, and finally expound on what the future may hold with regards to technology.

Key words: Conformity and Obedience, Culture, Chomsky, Edward Bernays, Advertising, Politics, Social engineering, Freud, Psychology, Social Identity Theory, Aesthetics, Propaganda

Psychology, Advertising, and the Illusion of Choice

Democracy holds at its very heart the ideal of free choice, with an informed and rational populous being the rulers of their own destiny. A necessary prerequisite to this ideal is the notion that we actually have the ability to make these decisions of our own free will. A major contributor to this ability is being informed and thus able to make rational decisions. The news, and media in general, are major sources of information, or misinformation, and can be very adept at filtering the information flow, thus controlling our view of the world. Most major media organizations are owned by a few companies that also have vested interests in policy. If we are fed propaganda by these sources, especially that which is built on the back of known psychological and sociological theories tailored to exploit our natural biases, this propaganda removes our autonomy and effectively hijacks democracy out of the hands of the public and concentrates power with the plutocracy. This power can be harnessed by capitalists to amass a fortune on the backs of exploited peoples with their own manufactured consent. The close ties between corporations, the media, and government are ripe for exploitation by the ruling class. And the goals of capitalism itself dictate an unsustainable march towards class divide and subjection.

I: Defining the Problem

The more we learn regarding the underlying drives and psychological baseis for our behaviors, the more we can understand why we behave in the ways we do. This can help us modify our behaviors to maximize pro-sociality and happiness, as well as combat thoughts and behaviors that are harmful to our own mental health. With this comes a risk as well, since this knowledge also creates a means for manipulation. From a social psychology perspective, this can mean giving a minority the ability to direct and control the behaviors of the masses. When combined with capitalistic goals, or political drives for power, this can result in manipulation and the use of propaganda to treat the general populous as a means to an end. Utilizing the psychology of influence, advertisers and politicians can effectively limit the free will of the voting public. One example of this tactic is to capitalize and exploit the Social Identity Theory. The use of psychology as a means for guiding consumer behaviors is the first step in the process, and thus knowing the history of advertising in this regard is imperative.

II: The History of Advertising and Psychology

Psychology in advertising as we know it today is a relatively new field. One key player in the incorporation of the tactics we will discuss was Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud. “It was Bernays during the 1920’s who gave public relations practitioners not just a job and a paycheck, but a purpose, that of ‘manipulating public opinion’ (Bernays’ expression, used positively) in order to counter ‘the whimsical forces of life and chance.’ He realized that the pursuit of propaganda is the logical step once belief in a God sovereign over human activities is no longer present. The way to the goal was through working on the leaders, and through them their followers. Bernays argued that an authoritarian system of control could be preferable to such a ‘democratic’ system.” (Olasky. 1984) Bernays’ philosophy for advertising was heavily influenced by the psychological theories of his uncle. “Intrigued by Freud’s notion that unconscious desires and irrational forces drive human behavior, Bernays sought to harness those forces to sell products for his clients. He combined Freudianism with Trotter’s instinct theory. In 1925 Bernays gave a speech before a group of public advocates and civic leaders where he declares ‘the individual and the group are swayed by only a very small number of fundamental desires and emotions and instincts’ including ‘sex, gregariousness, the desire to lead, the maternal and paternal instincts’” (García 2015) This idea of harnessing the unconscious drives of the consumer to control their behavior formed the basis of his marketing strategy. And although many of Freud’s theories hold less weight today, the basic premise is still in use by modern advertisers.

Bernays had a hand in many prominent and successful advertising campaigns in the early to mid-twentieth century. One tactic often used was to tie a social change with the marketing of a specific product. “He promoted Lithuanian independence and salad dressing, Cartier jewels and racial equality. …He was the one, it appears, behind the carving of Ivory soap in schools–he was the Oz behind the curtain. He orchestrated a celebration of Edison that has been called ‘one of the most astonishing pieces of propaganda ever engineered in this country during peace time.’… In his work for the American Tobacco Company, his invisible hand got physicians to issue findings favorable to tobacco. He stage-managed a Fifth Avenue demonstration under the banner of women’s rights, and in the midst of the Depression got fashionable New York to go crazy over green, which happened to be the color of a pack of Lucky Strikes.” (Justman. 1994) More specifically, with regards to tobacco and the women’s suffrage movement in the US, at the time is was not socially acceptable for women to smoke. So Bernays himself went to suffragette marches and dispensed cigarette packs to the women, espousing a narrative of liberation and calling them “freedom torches”, then ensuring the women were photographed and reported upon during their act of smoking rebellion. (Curtis. 2006) This then encouraged the relation between women’s rights and their rebellious act of breaking the taboo of smoking, and thus effectively doubled the market for the tobacco companies. This had the result of inducing a priming effect, whereby the act of smoking itself or viewing women smoking, could elicit feelings of freedom and empowerment. This is similar to a campaign in Germany that linked the sale of household items such as soaps, to the suffrage movement. These campaigns were undertaken at such a time as to be socially advantageous for those worried about the changing roles of women following their receiving the right to vote. “Housewifery had seemingly lost its luster for the young generation. At a time of falling birth rates, high divorce rates, and a so-called surplus of single women, whose potential husbands fell in the war, anxiety over the nation’s moral and demographic future ran high across the political spectrum. The parties, for example, uniformly depicted monogamous marriage as women’s true station and hearts’ desire. Propaganda and the press presented rationalization as a cure for young females’ supposed disinterest in their domestic and maternal duties. Persil’s 1924 ad, along with the Wanderlehrerinnen, neatly complemented this agenda. It highlights the soap’s scientific merits while mystifying the actual labor of washing. Other Persil ads from the 1920s-indeed nearly all detergent ads-displayed only the dazzling white results of washing, never the process itself. Erasing the taint of drudgery thus fulfills an important social consideration by option for German women. “Voting” for Persil entailed a raft of benefits for both housewives and the nation as a whole.” (Sneeringer. 2004) By capitalizing on the newly acquired voting rights and attempting to foster the sense of choice and freedom stemming from them, this was not only a means of advertisement for the product itself, but also an attempted form of social engineering.

III: Advertising in Politics

Based on what has just been described with the psychology of advertising and its’ links to social engineering, it’s an obvious segue into political advertising. This includes not only advertising for specific candidates or political parties, but influencing overall thoughts on issues. There are many tricks and tools from the fields of psychology and sociology that can be leveraged in this regard. One is to play off of our inherent confirmation bias. “using eye-tracking methodology. We exposed participants to political ads by liberal and conservative parties placed next to neutral political ads and tracked eye movements unobtrusively. Findings showed that individuals paid more visual attention to political ads that were consistent with their partisan ideology. Additionally, we found that individuals tended to avoid political ads that were inconsistent with their partisan ideology, which provides some evidence for selective avoidance processes.” (Schmuck, Tribastone, Matthes, Marquart, & Bergel. 2019) This type of insight into confirmation bias, and many other studies on various phenomena, can assist political advertisers in exploiting our biases and tailoring advertising for maximum effect. This can be done without us being aware, as is shown with the eye movement study, since we are not conscious that this bias exists.

Advertising in politics, as with the marketing of products, has moved away from stating facts or information and moved towards aesthetics and emotion inciting text and imagery. This further separates us from the ideal of the informed voting populous. “It seems that an increasing number of politicians are resorting to the strategy of ambiguity in their public representations. These messages are difficult to interpret because, like their commercial counterparts, they defy the standard criticism that almost any culturally competent voter has in his or her political toolbox. That is, we cannot invalidate these messages by simply saying that the candidate is just trying to project a desirable but falsely grounded image. Our interpretive task is compromised by the fact that the candidate’s message is (also) about the making of the image, hence its ambiguity. For the study of political advertising, this is a significant change. Present-day citizens hardly call it news that politics has become a form of artistry and that aesthetics rather than, say, analysis of ideology, informs our reception of ads. As this conception is shared by most politicians today, it is evident that the aesthetic nature of politics is itself becoming the subject of public commentary, including political advertising.” (Mykkanen. 2007) If our goal through our political system is to have a functioning democracy whereby voters make informed decisions about who best to represent them and what policies would be most beneficial, shouldn’t we then be focusing on ensuring they are well informed on the issues? Not if the overall goal is to utilize psychological tricks to win their vote at all costs. It is more beneficial from the perspective of those in power, to use any and all methods available to secure the win. Especially when the financial incentives are great.

IV: Propaganda Model

The propaganda model is a theory postured by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in detail in their book, The Manufacturing of Consent. Throughout this book, they give many examples of the propaganda model in action. “The crux of the model is its unworthy / worthy victims thesis, which posits that because of a filtration process which results from the institutional structure of the media, there will be dichotomized news media coverage of important elections, atrocities, massacres and wars along the lines of the interests of the White House. ‘What is on the agenda in treating one case will be off the agenda in discussing the other,’ wrote Herman and Chomsky.” (Kennis. 2006) Limiting media coverage in this way is an effective means of controlling the exposure to and narrative of the general public. This can affect our heuristics and view of the world in general and can thus be used to influence the way we vote. Some examples of this from their book are regarding the treatment of government sanctioned murders on citizens from either US backed “burgeoning democracies” or communist countries. The former being limited not only in the scope of their coverage by the media, but also often being reported with less sensationalized language than their counterparts. Much of the sourcing for these events comes from the US government itself, and even if the conglomerates who own the media sources themselves didn’t have a vested interest (which they most assuredly do in many cases) they would also face a backlash if they went against the accepted narrative. (Chomsky. 1993) This results in a polarized and biased view of the political climate around the world which encourages the proliferation of neoliberal ideals among the voting population in the US.

A comprehensive recent revisiting of the propaganda model by Andrew Kennis from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign stated, “The findings of this study, when taken together with the other recent findings of the works just cited above, comprise yet another piece of the growing body of evidence that the institutional constraints of the commercial media in the U.S. prevent it from carrying out one of the most essential elements of democracy: supporting a vibrant and critical press that brings light to the ills wrought on society by its most powerful and unaccountable institutions.” (Kennis. 2006)

V: Social Identity Theory

The psychology used to manufacture consent links to many current theories in social psychology. For the purposes of this paper we will focus mainly on social identity theory. Social identity theory was contributed by Henri Tajfel in 1979. Its basic premise is that “Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s)… [and that] the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to [are] an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world. Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate: 1. the differences between groups 2. the similarities of things in the same group.” (Mcleod. 1970) This natural tendency is exploited in political advertising.

According to a study on politics and its relation to social identity theory, “Cross-sectional data reveal a significant association between issue alignment and negative out-party affect that is neither mediated nor moderated by partisan identity. A first-difference approach using two panel studies then addresses potential heterogeneity bias by testing a change-on-change model within individuals. Both panels, which are from different time periods, covering different issues, reveal significant associations between issue alignment and outgroup dislike. In contrast, partisan identity was only significantly associated with ingroup affect.” (Bougher. 2017) This study basically illustrates that we fall victim to our ingroup bias when it comes to political issues, siding with our party even on issues that we didn’t necessarily feel so strongly about on their own, but we thus become much more adamant about our position and hostile to the positions of our supposed enemies. This social identify can be used against us by radicalizing a base of voters with an “us versus them” mentality. There are other cognitive biases that can be used for the manufacturing of conformity and obedience such as the aforementioned Confirmation Bias and Priming, as well as the Bandwagon Effect, the Halo Effect, the Anchoring Bias, and the Choice Supportive Bias. Psychological manipulation of a polity also relates to theories of motivation in the way it drives engagement with populist political movements. Being aware of these biases and their potential use in limiting free choice as it relates to democracy is the first step towards combating the control of the plutocracy.

VI: The Way Forward

It is imperative that we are aware of the exploitative tools utilized today by political advertisers as not only is research that can be weaponized surrounding social psychology theory ever growing, but the amount of data advertisers have at their disposal that can be leveraged for more effective targeted advertising is increasing as well. “[T]he smart phone, virtual assistant household devices, and personal fitness devices have allowed surveillance capitalists to harvest significant amounts of information about consumers’ daily lives. This includes information about the locations to which users travel, the foods they eat, the times they sleep, the products they view, and the purchases they make. In many cases, this information is harvested without users’ knowledge or consent. However, to utilize many applications, users must agree to a long and complicated set of terms and conditions. In many cases, the permission to harvest users’ information for surveillance capitalist purposes is included somewhere within the document.” (Biscontini 2019) Data like this can be used to create even more effective marketing strategies that can be used to manufacture the consent of the voters. The first step is awareness, we must be aware that our data is being used for this purpose, we must safeguard against its exploitation. Second, we need to be more cognizant of the psychological tools being wielded against us with regards to propaganda. Being more aware of social psychology theories and our own biases and limitations will assist in this regard. Finally, we need to take a stand against the neoliberal plutocracy and their goals, we need to exercise our rational thinking abilities while correcting for our biases, to ensure democracy is as effective as possible while minimizing harm. We need to foster pro-social behaviors and not allow our social identity to be exploited in a tribalistic “us versus them” fashion for political gain.

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