Mind Control!

How I wish I could fulfill all the expectations that are raised by that title!

What I mean by “mind control” isn’t the popular clichés captured by comic book hypnosis advertisements, or conspiracy theories warning of secret mind control technologies being used to soften us up for the coming totalitarian takeover (or alien invasion, or appearance of the anti-Christ, depending on who you ask).

If I had the inside scoop on any of this, we’d be having a different conversation.

What I’m talking about is much less sexy, but still very important, and it has the added virtue of not being a figment of someone’s paranoid anxiety.

For the purposes of this course, I’m defining “mind control” as the intentional use of our knowledge of human nature for the purpose of manipulating the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of people at an unconscious level.

If you prefer we can call it “intentional unconscious persuasion”.

But that’s a mouthful, and my fingers will lock up typing that over and over. So let’s stick with “mind control”.

If you’re familiar with the content on this site you know this isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up. I’ve talked about the importance of background knowledge as a component of critical thinking, and one area of background knowledge that I have repeatedly emphasized is the study of cognitive biases and the psychology of human judgment and decision-making.

So let’s be clear — the study of cognitive biases isn’t mind control. Nor is the mere fact that our behaviors are driven by unconscious cognitive processes.

When a person or group (let’s call them the “controllers”) intentionally sets out to exploit unconscious cognitive biases and other psychological mechanisms for the purpose of making people believe and do things that are in the interests of the controllers? That’s mind control.

Mind controllers don’t have to understand theoretical psychology, or the cognitive mechanisms underpinning their strategies, to be mind controllers. Many effective influence strategies are embedded in the tips and tricks that people learn in on-the-job training.

Restaurant servers, for example, learn early on that a short, friendly conversation with a customer can increase the size of the tip they get. Many restaurants leave small gratuities with the bill (a mint, a chocolate) as a matter of policy, knowing that doing so is correlated with larger tips.

The tv show South Park did an episode that illustrates this kind of training. The episode is set in a restaurant named Raisins, inspired by the Hooters restaurant chain. All the young girl servers are named after sports cars (Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, etc.). It is Ferrari’s first day, and the experienced Mercedes goes over the basics with her:

Mercedes: First of all, there's a five foot rule. If you come within five feet of a customer, you need to acknowledge them, even if they're not at your table. "Hey, cutie." [waves and winks] When you're not serving food or talking with customers, you need to dance around and have fun. We use things like Hula Hoops, silly strings, and water guns to play with the other girls. Be sure to giggle a lot, and be sure to show off your raisins. Now, when you take a customer's order, you need to sit down at the table with them and make them think you're interested. Write your name down for them and make them feel special. "Oh man, I am so bored. Thank God you guys came in." If you want good tips, the most important thing is physical contact. Just a simple hold of the arm can mean the difference between five and twenty dollars. "I'll be right back with your order, guys." [holds Ferrari's shoulder]

This kind of training goes on any profession where a central goal is to get people to perform some kind of action — purchase a product, sign a donor card, vote for a political candidate, sign a contract, negotiate a treaty, and so on.

Principles of effective persuasion are learned through experience and passed down through training and mentorship, without having to be framed in the language of neuropsychology and cognitive science.

Indeed, in many contexts we don’t think of these practices as manipulative in any negative sense. We may think of an effective salesperson simply as “good with people”, not a mind controller.

This leads us to an important element of the definition of mind control that I’m using here.

I’m not defining “mind control” as something that is inherently good or bad. The definition is neutral on this question.

Let me repeat, I am NOT assuming that mind control — the intentional use of our knowledge of human nature for the purpose of manipulating the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of people at an unconscious level — is by its nature, a bad thing.

We need to distinguish the descriptive issue of what does or does not constitute mind control, from the normative issue of whether any particular instance of mind control is good or bad, justified or unjustified.

To illustrate why we need the distinction, consider stage magic for entertainment purposes. Mind control techniques are used extensively in magic acts, they are fundamental to the practice. But in the context of stage magic the manipulations and deceptions are used to delight and entertain us, not to exploit or hurt us.

Intentions and goals matter to our assessment of these cases. We don’t condemn stage magic or mentalist acts simply because they use mind control techniques. But when the very same techniques are used to con or scam people out of money, we rightly condemn the practice as unethical.

So, let’s agree that we can all imagine cases where what I’m calling mind control is unobjectionable, and we can imagine cases where it’s deeply objectionable.

Now, I’m going to be honest up front. One of the issues that drew me to this topic is that in thinking about mind control techniques in the context of everything I’ve learned about human psychology over the past several years, I find that I’m often deeply conflicted.

On the one hand, some cases seem obvious. Mind control in the service of stage magic is okay. Mind control in the service of conning people out of their money is not okay.

But there are a wide range of cases where my intuitions are genuinely conflicted, and when I survey the opinions of friends and colleagues, many of them are conflicted as well.

In the next lecture I’ll present a case that pulls people in different directions.