So many people that take psychology courses end up working in the advertisement industry because that’s where the jobs are if you have a psychology degree. Very few people sit back and think about the implications of the scientific study of the mind being used by companies to distort peoples perceptions and make them buy things.
They are literally trying to control our minds. It’s not a conspiracy theory this is out in the open public information. If some companies decided to they can make you depressed to sell more things to you and you wouldn’t even know it.
Imagine the pick a teenage boy. This boy is a bit shy and insecure. Now, psychology was originally intended to help people. Under the capitalist model it doesn’t. Now this teenage boy instead of being recommended stuff to help them will instead be recommended the likes of Andrew Tate and so on. This person won’t even know what hit them and won’t even understand the turn of events that will lead to those videos being recommended. But they are recommended to him. Suddenly his change in behaviour pushes people away and he falls deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole.
They get more depressed. More lonely so they start buying shit like AI girlfriends but they aren’t real. They get recommended more hateful content as well. They will sprial deeper into depression. This person will likely seek help at this point. Perhaps they’ll recommend putting effort into real world connections so they download something like tinder. But all these apps are designed to make you pay in order to succeed so he pays to get special access. Now the ad companies know they’ll loose money if this now grown man becomes confident so they start recommending content that’ll make them more anxious and depressed about the experience. They give up and retreat further into depression. The whole time the person who is being targeted, their family, their therapist and their loved ones will never be able to put the dots together. They’ll wonder what went wrong not knowing that their personality was already decided for them by ad companies years ago.
So like that they add companies weaponising human psychology can target a teenage boy and basically plan out the next ten years of their life. Think about how dystopian the weaponisation of psychology is when a family member of yours goes down the alt right pipeline after “suddenly” being recommended such videos.
I “joke” all the time that the CIA ended their mind control programs because they succeeded and moved all if it into the private sector in advertising.
All humor has a bit of truth in it, else it wouldn’t be pertinent.
Humor can work simply because you fear something is true. Or want it to be true. It doesn’t have to actually be true. It just has to be plausible.
Shit, we own the private sector. Or they own us, I can never remember
Capitalists own the private sector. Everyone else is just human capital.
You comment would get more votes if it didn’t creep everyone in the hell out because you’re totally right
Yea, for a novelty account sometimes I kinda just say stuff then regret it
Yes, it’s absolutely horrific where we’re at. But there is an upside!
If you’re able to acknowledge its existence and protect against it, you’ve built a tremendous foundation for preserving your mental health that will last a lifetime.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that these ad companies (and the companies who deploy their services) only have control over you if you give them permission to.
- Block ads whenever you can.
- Avoid apps/websites that use dark patterns. .
- Work to improve your health (physical and mental), find meaningful tasks, be with people in real life or enjoy the outdoors alone; the less time you spend on ad territory, the less impact they will have on you.
- Buy from ethical companies, if possible.
- Avoid “influencers”, people who constantly promote “sponsored content”, and other strongly bias sources for your information or entertainment.
These are great suggestions. I’ll add a book to that list: “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Cialdini. (Not so coincidentally, his doctorate is in social psychology.)
It’s been a few years since I read it, and if I’m remembering correctly it’s oriented toward business people. Regardless, it teaches you what to watch out for and how to mitigate its effects on your own psychology. People use this book everyday to exploit others, so why not learn their tricks?
“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Cialdini.
Thanks for the recommend! I’m going to check my library for it!
Building on this, I also want to warn against the attitude that ‘ads don’t work on me’. A lot of people seem to think that they have some kind of mental filtering system such that they are immune to manipulation. They sometimes talk about how they deliberately make a point of not buying from some company who advertised in a way they didn’t like, or whatever.
I’ll just say this: you don’t have a special power. The ads do work. Maybe not every ad has the effect that you think they are aiming for, and not ever ad is targeting you. But if you are exposed to advertising, then it will affect how you think - and some of the people making these ads are serious experts with lot of research to help them manipulate your habits and behaviour. It’s a type of social technology that has advanced over time. It’s better to avoid it rather than assume you are immune.
I.e. you are not immune to propaganda
I am digging up this old thread to add that the social media scrolling epidemic probably employs a behavior modification technique named ‘partial reinforcement’ when the desired behavior is not always rewarded but occasionally https://www.simplypsychology.org/schedules-of-reinforcement.html#Partial-Intermittent-Reinforcement-Schedules The learned behavior is stronger. You see people scrolling endlessly even in platforms there is no advertising. Or you see people, even the Internet is out, they will still kill some time on the computer or phone playing games they would never open otherwise. They have been conditioned to be in position to consume “content”. This persistence of learned behavior is typical of the partial reinforcement schedule. Now what is the reward? Perhaps rage, arousal, or other stimulation. You scroll and scroll anyhow, till something dopamine-inducing comes up. The behavior persists even in other platforms. If you are interested I have started a thread about an attrition approach to major platforms (https://lemmy.ml/post/17679530/12103132), and what OP calls the weaponization of psychology by advertising platforms is something that doesn’t sit well with me, from a humanitarian and anarchist perspective.
For even more comprehensive of an understanding, another resource is Adam Curtis’ documentary: The Century of the Self
Thanks for the recommendation.
I finished watching it, and I’m both fascinated and furious.
Yes. It is knowledge you almost wish you didn’t have.
We as a society aren’t okay with it. There’s tons of pushback against it. But the corporations own the politicians that make the laws. We need to revoke the “corporations are people” ruling to make any progress on this and many other fronts.
Fully agree. I would also hope to see a complete ban on advertising to children, and to get rid of obnoxious billboards.
One thing I love about where I live is that billboards are illegal. Every time I go somewhere that has a lot of billboards I’m overwhelmed with how intrusive they are.
Corporations are also practiced at using advertising campaigns to sway the general public against policies that would weaken the company’s power.
So to change this, some brave politicians would need to act not only against the financial interest of themselves and their political party, but also possibly against a large chunk of the general public pushing back against the changes (most likely led by ‘mainstream media’). Politicians willing to do this kind of thing exist… but unfortunately not enough of them.
That’s exactly where I wanted to work, but before you hate, I wanted to get into advertising because I didn’t like what I saw and thought I could do better. I got the degrees, took the psych classes, and set off to change the world for the better. Nobody hired me.
You can’t buy what you don’t know exists, and there are some awesome things out there. But being hammered by messages or propaganda is lazy and abusive; I don’t put up with it.
So yeah, I’m an wannabe advertiser turned massive ad blocker/privacy supporter. Screw the industry.
I saw a lot of my own experience in your comment, and wanted to add a bit of my story. I work in web development, and years ago I was tasked with learning Google Ads so we could start offering it as a service to clients. So exciting at first, learning the ins and outs of such a powerful platform – But in practice, it was a cynical and dehumanizing experience. Dissecting thousands of real human beings’ search phrases for some untapped keyword, in an effort to cash in on their weakest moments. Not what I got into this field to do, either.
Also can’t forget gaming companies that have turned many modern games into Skinner-boxes.
I just flatout refuse to play a game that has any kind of monetization in the first few menus. It’s amazing how many games that cuts out.
If you advertise DLC before the game loads? Instant refund.
ill pirate games, and those come with all the dlc out of the box, no bullshit. its awesome.
Welcome to capitalism babyyyyyy
You know all that research that gets done by colleges that gets published? You know how they’re all bound by ethical guidelines about how they conduct those studies?
You know who doesn’t publish their studies? You know who’s not bound by those same ethical guidelines? Merely by law? You know who has way more expendable cash? And a vested interest in spending it this way?
Look into the careers of guys like Ernest Dichter or Louis Cheskin. And those guys only did it into the 80s.
Imagine the knowledge some of these companies have with smartphone usage data and shit. It’s wild.
Young girls have had this happening for decades. Today they’re constantly being fed fake images and cartoonishly filtered women in videos as the base standard of beauty. They’re told that their flaws are “ugly” and “embarrassing”.
But buy our makeup / skincare / acne treatment / anti-fat tea and you’ll finally be beautiful and people won’t think you’re ugly flith!!
My idea of what a woman is permanently warped and my idea of what the averqage breast size is seems stuck as “Big boobed anime lady” and my idea of big boobs is “Hyper Breasts”
Thanks Beauty Industry!
It also counters the consumer-as-rational-agent model that underlies most mainstream economics.
This isn’t a recent thing, it’s been going on since the beginning of psychology in the early 20th century. The doco ‘The century of the self’ explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
since the beginning of psychology in the early 20th century
TIL tha psychology is not as old as I thought it was
I recently found out that you can watch full youtube videos without ads if you only watch the… whatsitcalled…thumbnail?.. you can even enabke the sound. No adds! That feels like a loophole. There’s better solutions, but this one feels special, since it’s in the official youtube app. I can’t believe they left that in on accident though, but I’ll take it.
That’s the beautiful thing about weaponizing psychology; if you’ve done it well enough, people won’t even realize that you’ve done it
Reminds me of Minutemen’s song Shit From an Old Notebook: “Let the products sell themselves Fuck advertising, commercial psychology Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed”
we had this for solid few years already https://archive.org/details/the-alt-right-playbook-how-to-radicalize-a-normiee
brought to you by CIA
