The Psychology of Mass Manipulation and Persuasion
… And how to avoid becoming a mindless follower
Free will is useless if you can’t make a conscious choice. How can anyone be considered free if they’re being manipulated, intentionally or not, into believing something. Psychology and sociology play an important role in studying how groups of people can be swayed into acting in a certain way or spreading a specific belief. It’s crucial to your own freedom to be able to steer away from thoughtlessly accepting what you’re told and blindly following the mass.
In this article, we’ll analyze various ways people can be persuaded and manipulated, and how to avoid falling victim to logical fallacies and the influence of the mass.
Ipse dixit
Imagine you’re attending a lecture on modern history by your favorite professor. He briefly mentions how the reasons for the recent war in Ukraine were deeply rooted in the intervention of America during the second world war. He then changes the topic without providing any further explanation.
You, as a student who admires your professor, are more likely to blindly accept his statement both because you trust him and because you consider his teachings invaluable and almost always evidence-supported. Without further research, you may end up believing him on the word and, in case that idea was wrong, you might become guilty of unknowingly spreading misinformation.
The Latin sentence “ipse dixit” literally translates to “he said [that] himself” and is used to describe how the words of authority — e.g. a scientist or famous author — seem to have an intrinsic value in people’s minds. When we have high esteem towards a person, we tend to associate positive thoughts and feelings with that person, which in turn sways us towards easily accepting their words without the need for a rational argument.
Ad hoc citations and impersonation
Picture a debate about racial superiority between an Israelite and an Aryan. The Israelite knows that the Aryan is a pious Christian, so he decides to argue that the Jew people were chosen by God himself and therefore superior to any other race.¹
In this case, you can notice how the Israelite purposely manipulates a concept from the Bible to support his position, knowing how susceptible the Aryan is to his faith.
Consider now the following similar example. You read an article that promotes controversial experiments on humans as part of Bill Gates’ ideals of necessary innovation². You, as an admirer of Bill Gates’ values, are more prone to develop positive feelings associated with the proposed experiments because of your esteem towards Gates, even though he never proposed such unethical research. The author has forged the ideas of an influential character to better fit his point in order to be more persuasive.
Heuristics and confirmation bias
Imagine you’re walking down a street. Suddenly, you start paying attention to every footstep. You look down to see what you are walking on. You stop trusting the asphalt below your feet and need to touch it to know it’s solid. Now you lose trust even in your own senses and wonder whether everything around you is even real. And no, we’re not talking about The Matrix. This is a hypothetical situation where you stop making assumptions about the world around you.
A heuristic is any approach to problem-solving that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate good enough approximation. Intelligent beings evolved to use heuristics because of their power to enhance efficiency. Back to the previous example, imagine if you had to consciously think about whether every step you take is safe. Unless you’re in an unknown environment, it’s impractical and not efficient to devote so much effort to checking every corner of your own house for potential dangers. For this reason, you assume it’s safe to walk around your home.
By the same logic, you are naturally inclined to trust your information sources, especially if you’ve known them for a long time. Also, you don’t usually spend your time personally fact-checking what you’re been taught since that would require reinventing the wheel over and over again. After all, it’s through collaboration and trust that societies can accomplish great goals. However, while using heuristics is part of our nature, not every source is reliable and the assumption of validity can sometimes lead to misbelief.
Another source of fallacious thinking arises from the so-called confirmation bias. In psychology, confirmation bias is described as the tendency to focus on evidence that supports one’s initial belief while ignoring information that suggests the opposite.³ Confirmation bias is especially dangerous when combined with heuristics, as we aren’t inclined to fact-check what we already agree on.
For instance, say you, a flat-Earther, are attending a lecture about how the Earth is flat. Since you already agree on the hypothesis, you aren’t likely to make the effort to check it yourself: it would be an absolute waste of time and energy. As a result, you assume the lecturers are right without raising any doubts.
Empathy and morality abuse
Empathy is an evolved trait that has always played a fundamental role in shaping social relationships in animals. The ability to understand and share feelings and emotions allows for better cooperation and thus facilitated the formation of communities and stronger social bonds.⁴
It’s no wonder our thinking and behavior are highly subject to emotional influence: it’s part of our nature as social animals. Consider how you’re more prone to liking a certain song, a movie, or any piece of art if it induces strong emotions. Similarly, this is why ads for charity use expressive imaging, touching narratives, and sympathetic music.
However, every tool can be turned into a weapon, and empathy is no exception. Think of how love, hate, fear, envy, and the supposed call of morality and duty shape our actions, even the most cruel and irrational ones. We carried out inhumane torture, genocide, and harmful discrimination in the name of religion, self-preservation, and supposedly moral ideals. This is how religious tyranny and fascism were able to spread and thrive so easily. People usually act according to their beliefs and moral values. If you can convince someone your ideas fit in their view of righteousness, you got control over their behavior.
Between the 19th and 20th century, African Americans were the victim of brutal public lynchings, inhumane torture, and merciless murders, all in the name of moral justice.⁸ Black men were condemned without trials, mutilated, and mobbed in order to “protect the purity of white women”. A general feeling of hate, fear, and disgust spread across America against the “negros”, which contributed to justifying the historical mass genocide.
Masked silver lining
Imagine you’re an Italian politician who wants to rise to government and implement your own agenda. To achieve that, you must gain the approval of the wider population first. You notice that the south experiences high immigration rates from poorer countries. With careful planning, you start demonizing immigrants through mass propaganda and ethical arguments against them. Those illiterate black Africans will steal people’s jobs, bring organized criminality, and replace us Italians. They won’t pay taxes on their near-to-zero salary, if any. Furthermore, they are illegally crossing state borders only to bring chaos to the nation.
After a while, people will start believing immigrants pose a real threat to their interests. That’s exactly what you wanted: you just created a shared problem. Now, all is left is to sell a solution. As a politician, you base your next electoral campaign on defeating the evil African immigrants and restoring racial purity in Italian territory. Spoiler: it all worked perfectly.
How come so many people blindly follow such a leader? This kind of demonizing propaganda works by making a large group of people feel oppressed and threatened by some external cause: the perfect situation for the formation of an in-group/out-group social dynamic. An in-group is a community or ideal we identify ourselves as belonging to. An out-group, on the other hand, is a group we don’t identify with, and often viewed as fundamentally different. An in-group/out-group dynamic refers to a situation where a person favors their in-group over an out-group, often holding prejudices and engaging in discriminatory behavior.⁵
Back to the example, propaganda was used to induce negative feeling and sprejudice against the immigrant out-group. In contrast, the politician who offers a solution to the threat and risk posed by the out-group is viewed as a silver lining, and thus associated with positive feelings. The politician, as part of the in-group and being associated with absolute positivity, is more likely to be trusted and his agenda approved.
Conformity
As the shepherd calls the sheep to himself, they all start to chaotically move. One goes left, another goes right, but most of the herd follows the shepherd’s commands. As the beasts move, they bump into each other, bleating asynchronously while following the path opened by their neighbors. One sheep wants to head backward, but it’s immediately blocked by the other animals moving in the same general direction, so it’s left with no other option than to conform with the rest of the herd.
The herd behavior is observable when social animals gather in groups large enough that the individual becomes no longer significant. Conformity happens when going along with a group is beneficial or easier than being on your own. Seeing people you trust act or think in a certain way also makes you more likely to accept it as being right, much like you tend to trust family friends more than complete strangers. In addition to that, some people perceive the wider community as being more knowledgeable than themselves and, because of this, they tend to accept the common consensus as being correct.⁶
Another reason people conform to the majority is that they perceive it as being the norm. Consider a young boy, Tom, born into a fascist family in a fascism-dominated country. He has always been subjected to fascist propaganda and media. As a result of his polarized nurturing, Tom considers fascist ideals to be absolutely normal and righteous.
Furthermore, social behavior in animals evolved because it was beneficial to survival and development. Most individuals don’t do well alone and thus tend to conform to a group so as not to be left out on their own, even if they don’t share the same ideas as the group. Also, most social animals don’t like being alone, so they look for company.
How to resist manipulation
Taking everything into account, it seems hard not to fall victim to the flow. So, how do you avoid becoming a mindless follower? It’s crucial to always be skeptic and inquisitive when reading information and learning about new things. Always check if what you’re being told makes sense logically. Anectodes and proverbs are often shared without giving them much thought and slowly become part of a culture.
When you’re not able to determine on your own the validity of an argument, either because you don’t have the necessary knowledge or because you can’t wrap your head around it, you should check the cited sources, if there are any. Alternatively, you can look at related research or reputable works of experts in the field.
Additionally, you should always be educating yourself about new things or topics you intend to discuss or, even more importantly, ideas you will act upon. The more knowledgeable you are, the better you can recognize fallacies and patterns that can lead to negative outcomes. A critical study of history and social sciences is a great way of gaining a wider view of the world we live in and how it works, allowing you to make well-informed decisions and spot potential dangerous patterns that have historically led to undesirable situations.
Finally, a critical thinking approach is crucial to understanding the world around us and avoiding passively acting like a puppet in the hands of a selfishly-motivated leader or mindlessly following the mass. Carefully analyzing the situation is key to making conscious and informed choices that time proves to be good. After all, you have a brain. So why not use it?
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have anything to add, please share your thoughts in a comment. Thanks for reading!
If you’re interested in learning more about why critical thinking is so hard and how you can make better-unbiased judgments, I suggest you should take a look at this story below:
References
[1]: Christian Bible. Deuteronomy 7:6
[2]: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates Foundation values
[3]: OpenStax. Psychology 2e. Problem Solving
[4]: Aalto Design Factory. The evolution of empathy
[5]: OpenStax. Psychology 2e. Prejudice and Discrimination
[6]: OpenStax. Psychology 2e. Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
[7]: Moyers, Bill. “Legacy of Lynching”. PBS. Retrieved July 28, 2016
