Nudge and Sway and a drunken walk

Have any of you read the books "Nudge" or "Sway" or some of those mainstream sellers like that about human behavior? They sometimes have stupid self-help-ish subtitles like "improving decisions about wealth and happiness" that might scare you off. But if you get past the superficial mass-marketing strategy, there is some insightful examples that illustrates just how easily humans can be influenced or effected - often at a subconscious level - and in general how irrational human beings tend to be. When you think about how little people think about things, it explains a lot. And it is humbling to realize how often we who consider ourselves "thinkers" can also fall victim to these influences and poor judgements.

They coin a term "choice architecture" in Nudge. Here's part of an Amazon interview with the authors

Amazon.com: What is "choice architecture" and how does it affect the average person's daily life?

Thaler and Sunstein: Choice architecture is the context in which you make your choice. Suppose you go into a cafeteria. What do you see first, the salad bar or the burger and fries stand? Where's the chocolate cake? Where's the fruit? These features influence what you will choose to eat, so the person who decides how to display the food is the choice architect of the cafeteria. All of our choices are similarly influenced by choice architects. The architecture includes rules deciding what happens if you do nothing; what's said and what isn't said; what you see and what you don't. Doctors, employers, credit card companies, banks, and even parents are choice architects.

There is another book called "the Drunkards Walk" too which does a decent job of illustrating how people lives are more effected by random influences than they assume. Have you ever noticed how a lot of successful people think that they (their choices, personality ...) are the sole reason for their success. They don't understand how many lucky breaks had line up in order for them to end up in the situation they found themselves in.

I am pointing this out because I think there are some people who are more instinctively attuned to these kinds of almost subliminal factors. I have often had the feeling I was "being sold a bill of goods" even if I couldn't put my fingers on exactly how. We are always being sold a lie in one form or another by tiny decisions that others have made. I have often felt that people's personal judgements of me do not align with the facts (or reason) and there is ample scientific evidence supporting the cliche about being judged on first impressions or word of mouth or other irrelevant values or inaccurate perceptions. Bottom line, is that there is preponderance of scientific evidence that human beings have lazy minds. They often (maybe even 'usually') take intellectual short-cuts. Maybe it's because it is too difficult and life-impairing to give thought to everything. Some of the burden that weighs us down might be related to these types of issues. I think others have mentioned that they have been told that they "think too much".

I've been thinking about the unconscious mind for years. You know about Sigmund Freud's nephew and how he used his uncles theories in advertizing, right? It is related to what you are saying as far as feeling you are being lied to (sold to).

I had written about it in the whywork forums. Trillions of dollars in research and production have been spent to manipulate your subconcious into accepting their PRODUCT as a necessity of life. They want you to think you are a biological failure if you lack a Hummer shell.

Our own worth is sold to us in print, sound and images. This is one of the reasons to avoid watching television. Even Hollywood films are props for selling new products. Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, died in 1998 at the age of 105. He was the founding father of the global-mind control we call modern advertizing. During World War I, Bernays was hired by the United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to participate in the Creel Commission, the mission of which was to sway popular opinion in favor of entering the war, on the side of Britain.

The war propaganda campaign of Bernays produced such an intense anti-German hysteria as to permanently impress American business with the potential of large-scale propaganda to control public opinion.

In 1928, Edward Bernays wrote:The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Hollywood and the Pentagon have a long history of making movies together.

Here's a link to an article, The Incorporation of Dreams: Freud's Machiavellian public relations relation and how he sold the world on capitalism, in which

Dennis Lim wrote:The Century of the Self, an engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.

Installing Freud as unwitting godfather, Curtis fingers Edward Bernays, Freud's American nephew, as the Machiavellian mastermind who first thought to introduce psychoanalytic techniques into the sphere of big business.

The true subject of Curtis's lucid, pessimistic film, it turns out, is the frightening adaptability of consumer capitalism.

You can watch the film at Information Clearing House