Human evolution has been a journey from primal survival instincts towards a complex, organised, and efficient society. Our ancestors navigated a world fraught with immediate dangers, driven by the basic needs of food, water, and reproduction. Today, we find ourselves in an era where this evolution brings both remarkable advancements and profound challenges.
In the past century, we've gained remarkable insights into the workings of the human brain and behaviour. This knowledge raises a critical question: what if entities — be they institutions or individuals — could understand our psychological and behavioural patterns better than we do ourselves? The possibility that they might use this understanding to influence or manipulate us for their own personal gain is a disturbing prospect.
What I want to show is how cognitive mechanisms and human fallibility have been exploited for over 100 years — beginning with the father of PR, Edward Bernays and "The Engineering of Consent" — and especially now by big media and news corporations to keep the masses actively hooked on their channels, services, screens and seductive entertainment, solely for economic gain and political power.
The massive revenues from advertising are tainting the facts. The greenwashing of fossil fuel companies through advertorials and the purchases of News Corporations by private owners with their own economic agendas all conspire to create a false view of the world. Some of our cognitive biases are being manipulated to purposefully create a continuing hostile and untrustworthy state within our societies. And the consequent messages and persuasive nudges being served to us further erode our cognitive reasoning ability.
Critical thinking is an intellectual journey that involves meticulously dissecting and evaluating information while keeping the doors of the mind ajar for fresh evidence. It's about recognising and adjusting for our own cognitive biases, scrutinising the calibre and trustworthiness of the evidence, to forge a well-rounded and self-reflective perspective.
You might be so inclined to think that there is nothing wrong with the way in which we think, that we are sensible, rational, decision-making people and that we can be relied upon to form balanced opinions. However, that is plainly not the case.
Man has always sought to influence others in favour of an idea or way of thinking. In the 4th Century BCE Aristotle developed his treatise "Rhetoric." Since that time it has been consistently employed by politicians, lawmakers, emperors and kings across the ages.
However it is only since we began to discover the inner workings of the human mind and the associative links with behaviour that consistent, reliable leverage could be put to effective use. Those foundations were laid by Wilfred Trotter, Gustave LeBon, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But it was Edward Bernays — the nephew of Sigmund Freud, heralded as the father of Public Relations — who closely studied the learnings from these founding fathers and laid a clear path of how human fallibility could be leveraged for another's gain.
His "Torches of Freedom" campaign in 1929 capitalised on the cognitive bias linked to social norms and the desire for social equality. He hired women to march in the New York City Easter Sunday Parade while smoking cigarettes, linking the act with the fight for women's equality. This is semantic priming. Thought meets desire, and is steered.
In 1947 he wrote "The Engineering of Consent," proposing that by understanding the psychological and social motivations of the public, leaders and institutions could influence and guide the masses. The concept suggested that public consent could be engineered through strategic communication, media manipulation, and appeal to subconscious desires.
These 175 media juggernauts amass an advertising revenue that astonishingly ranges from a quarter to a third of the staggering global debt of $307 trillion. Their output spans news, entertainment, gossip, and drama, with a particular penchant for the latter. The reason? They've tapped into a fundamental human instinct — akin to the compelling urge that causes drivers to slow down at the sight of an accident.
The brain consumes roughly 20% of the body's energy. To support these functions the brain has evolved over thousands of years to use energy in very efficient and optimised ways — creating a set of useful shortcuts, or heuristics, to speed up processing.
The problem we now face is that the flip side of this efficiency is that it has made us highly susceptible to manipulation. Here is just a tiny selection of biases actively used within media to increase engagement and subvert your autonomy:
The Confirmation Bias: The tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs. It can cause people to ignore or undervalue evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
The Availability Heuristic: Making decisions based on the information most readily available in our memory, rather than all relevant information. This can lead to overestimating the probability of events that are more memorable or recent.
The Negativity Bias: The tendency to pay more attention to negative events or information than positive ones. Studies have shown that we are more likely to respond faster to negative stimuli — bad events, danger, terror, and bad words increase user engagement.
Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles: Algorithmically-curated feeds tend to show users content similar to what they've previously liked or interacted with, reinforcing their existing views and keeping them engaged longer.
The 2020 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation — authored by researchers at the University of Oxford — reveals a global network of deceit and digital manipulation. The number of countries employing social media for computational propaganda jumped from 70 to 81. Forty-eight countries have engaged private entities for computational propaganda, with nearly $60 million spent since 2009.
These campaigns are not only about promoting government propaganda but also attacking opposition and fostering societal division. Methods range from automated bots to human-operated accounts and hacked or stolen accounts.
The effect on the individual is subtle but cumulative. Events no longer become encountered events but pre-packaged narrative with a voltage to get you jacked-up. War is dramatised, climate is politicised and economic instability is personalised — with you left carrying the emotional baggage of a global theatre.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff masterfully explores the burgeoning world of data commodification. Google, while starting as a mere search engine, began harnessing user data to refine its search algorithms — a seemingly innocuous shift that burgeoned into a full-blown business model centred around the harvesting and exploitation of personal data for predictive analysis and targeted advertising.
We are being observed, categorised and nudged continuously. Not with speeches, but with sliders. And the cumulative effect is not ideological conversion — it is a quiet, persistent erosion of the capacity to think for oneself.
Unless a new mechanism can be installed to restore some of the balance for individual critical thinking, the future of autonomous human judgment becomes increasingly fragile.
The jar is being shaken. The question is whether you notice it happening.