Shattered 🏛️🗳️
"It's well known that the physical universe isn’t fair. Nevertheless, it's difficult to decide which is more provoking: good people suffering or evil people prospering."
—Author Susan Cartwright
> the persuaders | campaign ads
Political campaigns in the United States were poised to spend over $12 billion on advertising in 2024 alone and shatter previous spending records.
Such ads target our intuitive, unconscious minds with emotionally charged themes.
- "Even a single ad, if compelling enough, can set agendas," wrote a Harvard University politics and media professor in 2015.
Candidates and their teams of consultants are fully aware of our many documented human tendencies that we can't consciously "see."
These tendencies make us far more knowable, measurable, and predictable than we realize.
Human beings are good at acquiring information in our minds for later retrieval. But when retrieving it later, we’re often not able to remember where it came from.
Was it an attack ad or CNN?
Campaigns exploit this human tendency by creating ads that resemble newscasts with fake reporters and anchors.
Other research shows that campaign ads are stickier if the messaging is negative over positive.
Mind experts say that's due to humanity's shared negativity bias.
- Scientists say the human mind makes 35,000 decisions each day.
- It's impossible to be consciously aware of them all.
What are these decisions saying without us consciously knowing it?
Hiding among those thousands of decisions are fallacies and illusions and cognitive errors and mental lapses. They can drag down and distort our judgments while we’re blind to what’s happening.
Detectives, parents, judges, baristas, doctors, presidents, and people who think they’re smarter than everyone else are just as vulnerable to cognitive errors and illusions and fallacies and negative attack ads as anyone else.
So are you. So am I.
- next time Chapter end
- listening Propagandhi "Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes"
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