Propaganda is trapping you in other people’s anxiety. Here’s 5 ways to reclaim your own world.
“Propaganda is making puppets of us. We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates.” — Everett Dean Martin
Propaganda is generally considered to be a simple, one-sided message with a purpose which works mainly on the emotions of the recipient to direct a particular opinion or behaviour.
I’m not intending to dive deep into the history and examples of different types or methods of propaganda but rather to look at how and why it works, and what you can do to protect yourself from it.
Information in the form of propaganda can be dangerous not only in its misleading and partial character, but in its tendency to fossilise the past, close down debate and polarise opinion.
What are you missing? — The Cognitive Miser and the Shortcut World
“People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can.” Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (1984)
It’s almost 100 years ago Walter Lippmann introduced the idea of stereotypes to modern psychology in his book Public Opinion, which identified the tendency of people to construct a simpler model of a complex situation.
Later, Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor introduced the cognitive miser, an umbrella term in social cognition theory first used in 1984 to describe the limited resources of the human mind and builds on the basic idea of the stereotype.
It is a counterpoint to the concept of the ‘naïve scientist’ proposed by Fritz Heider in 1958, where humans are believed to act in a detailed and rational way when dealing with both complex and routine tasks. Emotions in Heider’s model are seen as error prone aberrations.
However, Fisk and Taylor noticed that there were several biases at work which they came to believe were the result of limited cognitive resources.
It turns out emotions are crucial in the processing of a certain type of message, and the propagandist is all too aware of this.
Efficiency Good, Efficiency Bad — knowing when stuff is missing
With new and complex information placing an exhausting burden on the human mind we tend to employ clever efficiencies to deal with this.
This shortcutting and filtering of information is nothing new. Early humans didn’t stop to count the leaves on a tree before declaring it a tree, the declaration would be made in a split second from previous knowledge.
Unfortunately, these efficiencies leave the door open to manipulative external forces that are largely hidden from us, especially when we are cognitively overloaded.
One of the first steps in identifying when we are subject to propaganda is to be aware when we are taking these shortcuts. Common sense tells us that a shortcut leaves a lot of the journey untaken, so it would be a serious error at this point to mistake the feelings generated by a propaganda message for objective certainties based on evidence.
Check Your Anxiety — Why Information Overload is leaving you wide open to manipulation
“Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level.” — Joseph Goebbels.
The 19th century sociologist George Simmel was one of the first to notice that mental over-stimulation from an excess of information interfered with people’s ability to react to new situations. People were becoming jaded by the relentless pace and over-stimulation of urban life.
We are all so familiar with information overload we take it as part of daily life. Besides the large quantity of information directly received on email and social media, marketers estimate that we are exposed to between 4000 and 10,000 adverts a day.
As a result, we spend a lot of time in a state of partial attention, never deeply thinking about any one topic because we’ve allocated cognitive resources to a neurotic, anxious, filtering surveillance of an overwhelming amount of information.
Imagine the cognitive load if we were not able to filter these messages and had to individually evaluate each one. Instead, we largely screen them out in favour of focussing on those we are personally interested in.
This may seem obvious and somewhat trivial, but it plays a crucial role in forming the mental habit of filtering incoming information on the level of personal impact and therefore emotion. Crucially, it primes us to receive messages that are goal driven; “buy this, do that, read the other”, rather than “accurately interpret and critically assess this message.”
Sadly, the inbuilt efficiencies of the human cognitive process dealing with this overwhelm are something that the propagandist can exploit.
The mental ground has been prepared for simplified messages with cognitive overloading. The next task is to create a message that triggers an emotional attachment strong enough as to be seen as almost natural, something so self-evident that its premises, for example the character of a particular nation or race, are almost entirely beyond question.
And, of course, they will not be questioned, because your poor tired and overloaded brain is already not concentrating or thinking analytically and is busy finding shortcuts.
Motivated Reasoning — if it’s got a goal, you’ve lost control.
One of the reasons that propaganda works so effectively is that it works by encouraging motivated reasoning.
When reasoning in this way evidence gathering is weighted towards achieving a goal or reinforcing a particular conclusion, so an obvious step for the propagandist is to trigger an emotional response. This might be via fomenting a sense of injustice or unfairness in the target audience. Propaganda must always have a goal. It is about achieving a particular behaviour or belief, it is never about imparting information.
Directional goals enhance the access to memories, knowledge and information that are consistent with the goal. The work of Milton Lodge and Charles Taber closely tied cognition to emotional affect.
People draw instantly on stored information when called to evaluate new information. Crucially, this process is marked with emotional affect.
This heuristic mechanism (a practical method for reaching a short-term goal that is not necessarily rational or accurate) then leads people to reflect on how they feel about the topic at hand, resulting in the selection of information that maintains the existing emotional reaction.
The goal of maintaining the existing emotional reaction is a way of reducing the anxiety that the propagandist provoked in the first place.
As with Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”, reality is governed by what feels right, and information, facts and any sense of objectivity, is lost.
So, how do you avoid the emotional mind control?
Here are 5 suggestions
1. Call Time
One of the most obvious ways, given the context of anxiety and emotive messages, it to call time on the thought process.
This could be difficult given the speed at which these attributions between cause and effect happen in the human brain. However, when you see a piece of propaganda that you can feel provoking a response, even if it is comforting in that you agree with it, call time.
You could use the much-used anti-anxiety technique of verbal interruption. People often use words like ‘Stop’ or ‘Enough’ to deal with rumination or generalized anxiety.
The anxiety provoked by propaganda is a little different and more specific to the message so in this context you could use the word ‘Really?’ This will not only stop the emotive thought process but trigger a critical one.
Which brings us onto…
2. Just One Thing
Once you’ve called time on the emotive reaction, look at the image or message being aimed at you and ask just one question about it.
Take the image at the top of this article.
Ask yourself if any of the three images of people, left to right, could happen anywhere. If so, there is no necessary link to communism. We don’t even need to get past the left-hand image to see the truth in this.
Can we think of another nation, under a different economic system, that routinely beats down people of a darker colour? I think we can.
As you can see, this process took almost no time, and destroyed the illusion of the image immediately.
3. The minute before the message
Were you angry/annoyed/anxious before you saw the image? If not, it’s played you and done its work.
Ask yourself if the emotions you are feeling now are the results of your experience of life, either generally or right now.
If you don’t feel good, what triggered that? Bet it wasn’t you.
If you were not experiencing the outrage or anger or whatever they are provoking, then you can safely bin that new emotional line of thinking. There is no need to jump on that train. It’s theirs, not yours. Let them live it. Other people’s agenda and blood pressure are not your problem.
4. Get happy not knowing
Do you know everything about everything? I’m guessing not. So why feel the need to try?
You don’t need a complete picture of the world. You don’t need to fill in all the gaps with stereotypes, let alone ones that are made of emotions and invisible content just because you were cognitively overloaded and fed a shortcut.
The message feels like it’s calmed your anxiety, but in reality, all it did was provoke it in the first place.
The propagandist crapped on your carpet, cleaned it up and then wanted a pat on the head. Better if it just cut the crap.
Just get comfortable with the phrase “I don’t need to worry about that”, or better still, “I don’t know what to think about that.” This way you keep your own mind. There may be gaps in your knowledge, but at least you didn’t allow someone else to fill them with fact-free nonsense.
5. Resign from the Team
As Yascha Mounk, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, has pointed out
“At a certain point, so many lies pervade the system, and so few facts are generally agreed upon, that even people who are highly informed about politics can no longer get to the bottom of things. As a result, politics becomes a competition between rival realities — one in which you have little choice but to believe whatever narrative your own team puts out.”[1]
You do not have to be on any of the teams. We like our individuality, right? Then don’t hand it over, don’t let other people pull the strings and take you over. Don’t let yourself become their foot soldier, especially as you most likely don’t really know who ‘they’ are.
