In the case of lorry-driver Franz G., the report of a road accident, which presumably came from a police officer, was qualitatively reinforced by three newspapers which reproduced it without checking its accuracy. Qualitatively, because there is a general inclination to believe something seen ‘in black and white’. Indeed, large numbers of people tend to accept press conjectures as matters of established fact.
Remembering that Rule No. 1 listed the media as one of our six main opponents in the daily manipulation game, we may take this example as a warning against uncritical acceptance of the printed word. Since the media themselves — i.e.
television, radio and books, as well as newspapers — already enjoy greater credence than, say, information transmitted by an acquaintance, they make a perfect platform for the qualitative reinforcement of messages.
This happens, for example, when a newspaper or magazine reports: ‘The celebrated American scientist Professor
Anthony Wyler has established, after years spent testing and observing its effects on 4000 patients, that the Pill can cause cancer in women with low blood pressure.’
Reinforcement of this message is conveyed by the following factors:
It is there in print.
The views of any professor, let alone a ‘celebrated American scientist’, are bound to carry exceptional weight with most recipients of such information.
Credibility is further buttressed by a reference to Wyler’s having based his
conclusions on ‘years spent testing and observing’ women — ‘4000’ of them, no less.
Qualitative reinforcement by the printed word and by someone who possesses an unusual degree of credibility is here coupled with the quantitative reinforcement of number.
It is only natural that advertising men, politicians and countless other skilled
‘salesmen’ should exploit the principle of repetition for their own purposes. Generally speaking, they favour the methods we have christened ‘quantitative multiplication’
and ‘qualitative reinforcement’.
Listening to my car radio a few weeks ago, I repeatedly heard a commercial in which the well-known racing driver Jackie Stewart stressed the merits of a particular make of car which had — with the benefit of his advice — scored triumphs in a number of gruelling races. To a certain class of sports-conscious road users, Jackie
Stewart’s repeated commendation must have seemed an exceptionally credible reinforcement of the message.
There is a particular fondness for corroborating statements by citing groups of experts who enjoy special esteem with the general public. This esteem depends primarily on the fact that their achievements and pronouncements are a closed book to the layman. As long as they are plausibly presented, we cherish a natural
reverence for things we fail to understand.
Imagine, for example, that we are lectured on the workings of a computer by a layman devoid of awe-inspiring status: we shall be far less inclined to give him credence than someone who is introduced to us as an eminent computer technician, even though the latter’s remarks may be far less intelligible.
Again, we may tend to distrust a politician who quotes statistical evidence of his own successes. We are far more likely to believe him if — on the same television screen — he submits the identical figures but adds that they are the fruit of lengthy investigation by a committee of noted experts —and this despite the obvious fact that he would hardly quote findings detrimental to himself.
We daily encounter less spectacular examples in every sphere of existence.
When someone at work comes round with a subscription list for Mr X’s leaving present, we’re almost bound to ask: ‘How much are the others giving?’ Whatever the others are giving will seem an acceptable amount to us as well.
When an anonymous voice on television declares ‘One million housewives are already using our flavouring cubes — that proves they’re good!’, the message is bound to carry weight even if nobody ever produces evidence of such an assertion.
Every technique quoted here can in future be employed by you — for your benefit.
Forgiving an opponent's mistakes may be generous, but many people are experts at turning them to their own advantage
A very widespread method of exploiting the repetition principle is to harp on some blunder, weakness or uncertainty. This simultaneously impairs an opponent’s selfconfidence and reinforces the manipulator’s position. In many instances, the correct application of this method can ultimately create a strongly dependent
relationship.
A classic example of this is often found in the family domain. Here, many wives skilfully take advantage of their husbands’ mistakes or weaknesses to attain their own ends. My wife told me recently of a case involving a married couple of our
acquaintance.
The husband had failed to come home after concluding a successful business deal. Instead, he and his partner had whooped it up in a bar till the small hours.
Nothing but champagne was drunk, so the bill was a steep one. When he did stagger home, the husband actually confessed to his wife that it amounted to half his
commission on the order.
Commenting on the affair next day, his wife told mine: ‘I wasn’t particularly
bothered, but I gave him absolute hell. At least I’ll be able to rub his nose in it for the next few months. That way I can squeeze a bit more housekeeping out of him.’
Another variant of this method is still more subtle. It shrewdly combines flattery with disparagement. The formula runs as follows:
‘Considering how good you are at your job and how hard you work, they ought to give you a rise or promote you. Do something about it — then we’ll be able to lash out a bit more.’
The first few times a wife says this to her husband, he may feel flattered.
Innocently, he expatiates on his work and unrewarded talents and basks in her spurious admiration.
But next time, having skilfully steered conversation round to the dish-washer acquired by a neighbour, his wife develops her message:
‘Mrs N says it leaves her much freer to look after the children. If only you brought more money home we could afford a dish-washer too, but you let the firm walk all over you. Look at Mr N — he works much shorter hours than you do but he earns a lot more.’
The husband won’t like swallowing this reproach. For the sake of peace, he’ll promise to take action. He may know perfectly well, even at this stage, that he won’t do anything because it would be useless. On the other hand, he may take on a spare-time job to bring in more money and earn his wife’s commendation.
Sooner or later, however, there comes a stage when she starts to reproach him again for devoting too little time to her and the children. The game begins afresh, still
with her on the attack and him on the defensive.
Little by little — as the message is constantly reiterated — he comes to the conclusion that he’s a deadbeat who fails to provide for his family as well as other men do. By this time, however, his wife has long ago seized the reins and can assert herself virtually at will. As for him, he acquiesces — merely in order to demonstrate his masculine magnanimity from time to time.
We need not be surprised by the number of marriages in which wives quite openly manipulate their husbands to their own advantage. The simple fact is that husbands tend to lay themselves open to attack by their wives. I know women who are still needling their menfolk for extra-marital affairs they had ten or a dozen years ago. This is a pretty crude method but it works, as many a reader may know to his cost.
I should like at this juncture to point out that use of the above-mentioned technique — flattery plus disparagement — is far from confined to shrewd wives intent on their own interests. Two of the fields in which it finds most frequent application are advertising and politics.
Advertising flatters the consumer in his capacity as a prospective customer. On the other hand, it does everything
possible to render him dependent on the need which a given product undertakes to fulfil. This is precisely what happens when a toothpaste commercial presents us with the drastic and reiterated spectacle of teeth falling out. Watching it, we sense the unspoken threat: ‘It’ll happen to you too, if you don’t use Brand Z!’
In politics, parliamentary representatives flatter us at intervals to extract our votes when the next election comes.
I sometimes catch myself waiting at an intersection late at night and wondering:
‘Why do I bother to wait till the lights go green when there isn’t another car in sight?’
Such are the unceasing messages of the powers-that-be. Their implication is:
‘We’ll tell you when you can cross because you’re too dumb to judge for yourself.’
Continuous repetition of this insidious formula — ‘Don’t think. You don’t understand. We’ll do it for you. Just leave it to us. We know better.’ — is further reinforced by threats of punishment. It gradually manoeuvres us into a state of manipulative dependence similar to that which afflicts the hen-pecked husband.
The use of this method by government differs from advertising in two important respects:
The individual can combat advertising’s endeavours to manipulate him by discriminating, adopting an active approach to life and studying his opponent’s methods. He retains wide scope for free decision-making and can use it as his personal judgement and sense of responsibility decree.
Manipulation by government imposes far tighter restrictions on the individual’s freedom of decision. Here, the manipulation game is played on unequal terms.
Shrouded in the anonymous cloak of higher authority, coercion by threat of
punishment becomes part of a legal armoury which leaves little room for personal initiative.
Rule No. 5
Most people’s actions are determined less by rational deliberation than by emotional attitudes — by momentary surges of feeling like rage and joy or emotionally coloured value- concepts such as integrity, manliness, honour and courage, all of which are susceptible to manipulative stimuli.
Anyone who knows how to take advantage of such given factors in the
manipulation game will very probably be able to determine his opponent’s reactions in advance.
Anyone who can critically stand aloof from his emotions will make it hard for an opponent to exploit them to his detriment.
Recognize the power of emotion and your approach to many aspects of life will be transformed overnight
However shrewd, intelligent, sophisticated and emancipated you consider yourself, review the course of your life to date and be honest: isn’t everything you do ultimately determined by emotional rather than rational considerations?
When ambitious people make millions and do great things, part of the credit naturally belongs to their personal ability. Whether or not they admit it, however, the motive power that propels them is an emotion which few of them can properly explain.
They may say ‘I like success’, or ‘I enjoy wielding power’, or ‘Money makes me happy’. Quite frequently, we meet people who have risen to dizzy heights out of sheer
cussedness. Some time or other, someone scornfully told them: ‘You’ll never make the grade — you’re far too dumb.’ Wounded vanity has imbued these people with a drive and perseverance whose sole motivation is a wish to ‘show them’. It is not surprising, in view of this, that small men and ugly women often develop more ambition and a greater thirst for power than their brothers and sisters. They want to show the whole world that the runt of the litter or ugly duckling which everyone used to elbow aside has ‘made it’ after all.
Have you ever considered what a crucial part emotion plays in something as seemingly prosaic as the purchase of a car? You will, of course, begin by working out how much you want to spend and what the car will cost per month or year in terms of petrol and maintenance. This is a wholly rational basis for your decision, but you will have devoted far less time and thought to the question: ‘Do I really need it?’ I recently met a young man who proudly informed me that, in addition to his battered
Volkswagen, he had now acquired a second-hand Jaguar. Asked what had prompted him to do so, he grinned broadly and replied: ‘Well, there’s quite a difference between a Jag and a clapped-out Beetle when it comes to driving a girl home.’
‘Typical!’ you may say, or ‘Youngsters have too much money these days’, or ‘The boy must be crazy’. If you consider it crazy to cherish a quite irrational desire to count for something in other people’s eyes, you’re perfectly right. But rest assured that millions of other people buy or select their cars for just the same crazy or unthinking reasons.
Or do you think it rational for millions of tormented holiday-makers to clog the roads every summer and spend hours inhaling the exhaust fumes of the cars in front?
Or for you yourself to stare covetously at some gleaming monster stationary beside you at the traffic lights — with bigger tyres, flashier body-work, more chromium, style, elegance and horsepower than your own modest vehicle? ‘My dream car,’ you sigh, although you must know perfectly well that it can’t go any faster than yours in a traffic jam.
Do you realize how different your world and mine would look if we consistently acquired everything on the principle: ‘Buy nothing you don’t genuinely need’? My study wouldn’t now contain a handsome portable TV, for a start, because I should presumably have realized that the set in our living- room is quite sufficient for the whole family.
This is just one example that occurs to me as I write these lines. If you’d like to examine the question in more detail, get a pencil and paper and draw up a list, item by item, of all that occurs to you in the next ten minutes in response to the question:
‘What have I bought in the past year that wasn’t an absolute must?’ You can use the right-hand margin to jot down what your inessentials cost you.
If you conduct this little investigation, you’ll soon notice that it’s far from easy to classify certain purchases under the alternative headings ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’.
You may find yourself saying:
‘Oh well, I simply had to have it.’
Or, as many people say when justifying the purchase of a car:
‘A person’s incomplete without one.’ Likewise: ‘A car makes you more independent.
Are these really apt and cogent reasons for buying? ‘I simply had to have it’ may be cogent enough from your point of view. The one thing it isn’t, is rational — not if rationality is contrasted with the emotional urge to buy.
I have been writing about purchases and financial expenditure the whole time.
These, of course, are only one major aspect of daily life, but one which clearly reveals the influence exerted on us by emotion.
We always like to appear the great and rational creatures we allegedly are, but the truth is that our emotions rule us to the extent indicated by Ernesto Grassi in his previously quoted account of the characteristics of man in the mass:
‘Reason is replaced by emotion and instinct, hence the extreme suggestibility of the masses, whose actions are governed by emotion alone, not reflection and discernment.’
Millions of people react almost identically and with predictable certainty to specific manipulative signals when their emotions are engaged, but only if the authors of such signals have mastered the controls which enable emotion to be used as a spur to action.
How else can it happen that somewhere, someone decrees: ‘From now on, bare thighs are all the rage’ — and next day half the world’s young women are walking around in hot-pants? Or that a singer comes out with a song which awakens the yearnings that slumber in all of us, and in no time his record is spinning on myriad turntables? The same emotional rules apply to drug addiction and heroism and other
totally irrational things for which some people are even ready to stake their lives.
Am I implying that emotions should be abolished — that we should either suppress or refrain from acting in accordance with them?
Far from it. That would be not only impracticable but frightful, nor is it the object of these remarks. My sole aim is to demonstrate the extent to which emotions rule us and, what is far more important, the extent to which they can be used to influence us.
In the days when I worked as a copywriter in an
advertising agency, the wall of our office was adorned with a huge notice: ‘One appeal to the emotions is worth a hundred sophisticated arguments.’
Whoever devised the formula, one thing is certain: people have known of it from time immemorial and used it to manipulate their fellow-men with the utmost success.
At the risk of repeating myself, here once more is what Professor Grassi goes on to say: ‘Anyone intent on securing mass approval will aim at the lower end of the intellectual scale and dispense with logical argument. Observation has repeatedly confirmed that human beings in the mass are gullible and will indiscriminately applaud a succession of speakers whose statements are diametrically opposed.’
You can, of course, join in the popular refrain: ‘Manipulators outl Manipulators out.
You can condemn manipulation and feel sorry for its victims. Self-pity is yet another emotion to which masses of people surrender in exculpation of their own failure to resist the manipulators. Very well, but what good is self-pity in the hard school of everyday life?
Why it’s no accident that we rate courage good and cowardice bad, not vice versa
Emotional manipulation, to which we are constantly exposed, derives first and foremost from our dependence on a large number of emotionally coloured
value-concepts which affect our decisions and entire life. These concepts include:
honour, loyalty, courage, justice,obedience, order, discipline honesty, manliness — and countless others.
We have learnt to live with them, pay heed to and comply with them. Although these criteria serve as universal guides to action, each of us has his own quite
personal relationship with them. Honesty means far more to one person than another.
There may be various reasons for this. One of them could be that honesty is more
convenient than dishonesty.
For instance, if a businessman pays his taxes down to the last penny, he can claim to be honest and — to put it no higher — pride himself on a clear conscience.
For instance, if a businessman pays his taxes down to the last penny, he can claim to be honest and — to put it no higher — pride himself on a clear conscience.