Psychopolitics Is Back

Psychologists know how to achieve compliance. Big Tech is already using it.
Big Science is teaching Big Government how to control the citizens with it.

 

The kids are excited as the delivery truck shows up with the big new Smart TV dad ordered for Christmas. After the crew sets it up and leaves, the family turns it on and watches some of the built-in demos of things the family can do with this dazzling new toy. The kids laugh at cute animal videos from TikTok. Then mom or dad starts going through the Setup procedure, choosing video and audio settings and device connections. One screen comes up with the Privacy Policy. Dad scrolls through a few pages of the boring legalese, noticing that the TV has Alexa built in, requires a login account, and will monitor everything they watch, collect personal data on the family’s habits, their connections and app accounts, their location and a dozen other things, and will sell it to third-party companies (“partners”) that are not disclosed, which might include even far-East governments. “Eeuw, that’s creepy; we don’t want that,” he mutters, then tries to skip to the next screen. There is no next screen. He must hit “Accept” to proceed. The kids are waiting impatiently, so he submits and lets them fight for the remote to see all the things they can watch and do.

This is known as “Choice Architecture,” and Big Science loves it. As advisors to Big Government, the National Academy of Sciences just told them more about how to psychologically manipulate the populace with “the nudge.” It’s not a recent idea; four psychologists from the University of Geneva in Switzerland already knew about the 2008 “breakthrough” that taught scientists how to get people to willingly cooperate with authorities. Now it’s in the refinement stage, researching which nudging techniques are most effective.

Mertens et al., “The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) January 4, 2022 119 (1) e2107346118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107346118. Edited by Susan Fiske, Psychology Department, Princeton University.

Old-school democratic governments, you know, like those in the Adams-Madison-Jefferson era, thought to influence public opinion with reasoned arguments (e.g., The Federalist Papers), based on their belief that human beings were free moral agents with rational minds. That’s so 1789. Today, psychologists “know” that people are not rational, because they are evolved animals. So science needs to step in and nudge the hominins into nice, cooperative members of the culture. Science has that obligation because some animals are more equal than others. The dumb ones must be manipulated to do what is best for the regime—the global regime.

Changing individuals’ behavior is key to tackling some of today’s most pressing societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change. Choice architecture interventions aim to nudge people toward personally and socially desirable behavior through the design of choice environments. Although increasingly popular, little is known about the overall effectiveness of choice architecture interventions and the conditions under which they facilitate behavior change. Here we quantitatively review over a decade of research, showing that choice architecture interventions successfully promote behavior change across key behavioral domains, populations, and locations. Our findings offer insights into the effects of choice architecture and provide guidelines for behaviorally informed policy making.

It is hard to overstate how dangerous this line of thinking is. For one thing, it is clearly elitist. These authors are not writing to debate what is good or desirable for society; they already know. Issues like forced vaccination against the last holdouts, and “climate change” (which is not just polite conversation about the weather, as everybody knows by now) – those are examples of leftist goals lusted after by today’s totalitarians. Can you think of others? Redistribution of wealth? Global governance on education, including CRT and science standards about evolution and climate? Restrictions on family size to prevent overpopulation? Increased  access for abortion paid for by government? Limits on private property? Limits on carbon footprint by individuals? Open borders? Reduced choices on vehicles? Government child care to reduce parental influence on the young? As we have repeatedly shown, Big Science is invested in all these goals (e.g., 22 May 2021).

Choice Architecture

The authors conclude that “Choice Architecture” is an effective method of nudging non-cooperators away from their “undesirable” attitudes. It means what it says: architecting or configuring the choices available to a person. Do you want fish sticks, or fish cubes? Do you want to accept our Privacy Policy, or use your TV to play old DVDs? Pick your default news channel: do you want MSNBC, ABC, or CBS? (Notice: Fox News is not listed.) On the ballot, do you want to vote for the Dear Leader, or against his opponent? See—you have a choice! We respect your freedom. We just want to he’p you make the right decision. In fact, you don’t need to choose at all. We have configured the default response for you. If you do nothing, you get it automatically. It’s so nice and easy, you don’t even have to think about it. What? You want to opt out of the Privacy Policy? You can do that. Just write a letter to [obscure overseas address] within 30 days, explaining your reasons, and our corporate board will get back to you within nine months to inform you of their decision whether or not to honor your request. We suggest you accept the policy in the meantime so that you can begin to enjoy all the features of your new TV.

The technique rests on the premise that human beings are not rational. They tend to react to the limited information available to them. With so much “misinformation” out there that hasn’t been canceled yet, people cannot be trusted to make rational decisions. The elites in society must push them toward “desirable” behaviors, like taking the vaccine. The nudgers make the ‘right’ choice easy, while making it difficult to get an exemption. Choice architecture thus involves both positive and negative manipulation of options.

It’s a step up from eugenics, which also involved positive and negative strategies: positive eugenics, urging relationships between more-fit individuals, and negative eugenics, preventing breeding between undesirable individuals by psychological coercion, forced sterilization or even genocide.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Nudging may be a gentler form of psychopolitics than torture, but the attitude behind it is the same: achieving compliance and removing obstacles to “progress” as defined by the regime. This is to be achieved by behavior modification instead of logical persuasion.

Many of today’s most pressing societal challenges such as the successful navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic or the mitigation of climate change call for substantial changes in individuals’ behavior. Whereas microeconomic and psychological approaches based on rational agent models have traditionally dominated the discussion about how to achieve behavior change, the release of Thaler and Sunstein’s book Nudge—Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness widely introduced a complementary intervention approach known as choice architecture or nudging, which aims to change behavior by (re)designing the physical, social, or psychological environment in which people make decisions while preserving their freedom of choice. Since the publication of the first edition of Thaler and Sunstein in 2008, choice architecture interventions have seen an immense increase in popularity (Fig. 1). However, little is known about their overall effectiveness and the conditions under which they facilitate behavior change—a gap the present meta-analysis aims to address by analyzing the effects of the most widely used choice architecture techniques across key behavioral domains and contextual study characteristics.

If this were a paper about torture, it would analyze ways to get faster submission of the prisoner. But nudging is gentler and less expensive, and the nudgers don’t have to listen to the prisoners scream. Like the New Teacher in James Clavell’s chilling parable (see 21 December 2005 commentary), the elites can smile as their subjects willingly embrace the regime’s goals through the magical “science” of Choice Architecture. Funny how any remaining non-cooperators quickly and quietly vanish. After cancel culture treatment, they have become non-persons.

This is nothing new. Aldous Huxley had this all figured out in his dystopian novel, Brave New World (1932; see review here). Too bad Stalin went for the Orwellian 1984 method of control. He could have used Choice Architecture and gotten the same results – the quiet disappearance of non-persons and all.

Update 1/11/2022: Two articles on this topic appeared since ours was published, both calling for restraint on nudging. The first, by Magda Osman of Cambridge University posted January 10 on The Conversation, questioned the effectiveness of nudging: “Nudges: Four reasons to doubt popular technique to shape people’s behavior.” She alleges that nudges are limited and fragile, they can be unethical, they can backfire, and they lack theoretical backing. An earlier article by Gabrielle Contessa of Carleton University, posted January 4 on The Conversation, caught our eye because it undercuts elitist justification for altering people’s behavior. In “The reasons for science skepticism can be complex and founded on real concerns,” Contessa tries to help her colleagues realize that those who disagree with the scientific consensus on certain issues (like vaccination) are not always uneducated and ignorant, but sometimes have valid reasons for their skepticism. Indeed, many are well-educated and informed on the issues. They should not be treated with dismissal and disrespect, she advises. Both articles are welcome caveats to the elitist attitude in the Mertens et al. paper, but they do not go far enough in diagnosing the rampant elitism in psychology studies, nor psychologists’ fallibility in producing ‘research’ that turns out to be false.

Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies, calls this “Soft Totalitarianism.” Readers should watch his 5-minute video “Totalitarianism: Can It Happen in America?” about this very subject here, now, on Prager U and then share it widely. The PNAS paper is a perfect example of the elitist mindset leading to the loss of freedom in America and the West.

Read also our 11 June 2017 article, “How to Nudge an Elitist.” What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Also pertinent to this topic: “How to Tell Who’s Lying” (1 Jan 2022).

The nerve of psychologists! They have a “replication crisis” going on in their own field (6 Oct 2019), and a long history of pseudoscience, but they deign to tell everybody else how to “behave” properly. With their Yoda costumes on (see Yoda Complex in the Darwin Dictionary), they think of themselves as inhabiting an exalted plane of wisdom, looking down on the unwashed masses. Here’s what will bring them down to Earth super-fast: laughter. They hate being laughed at. They want to be respected as “scientists.” Well, what are they going to do? Swing a light saber at you? Threaten you with the dork side of the farce? Come on. Shine the house lights on their movie set tricks and watch them run off red-faced to a dark corner. Mertens et al., you are FAKE scientists. You are leftist wackos masquerading as scientists. Go nudge yourself.

Exercise: Try your hand at “Choice Architecture” to combat creationism in society. No debate needed; no intelligence allowed. What would you do to nudge people away from skepticism about Darwinism? Make a list. Then come back to see what already goes on.

How did you do? Here are some of the methods anti-creationists use in their stealth campaign to nudge people away from hearing arguments against Darwinism:

• In bookstores, move ID books from the Science section to the Religion section. Or don’t display them at all.
• In libraries, same tactic.
• Write curricula and teacher instructions that advise keeping out of discussions critical of Darwinism.
• Complain to editors of magazines or newspapers that print anything critical of Darwinism.
• Fire employees who share information critical of Darwinism or favorable to intelligent design.
• When firing Darwin skeptics, don’t reveal the true reason. Attribute the firing to something else.
• Cancel appearances of creation speakers on campus, but widely promote Darwinists and atheists.
• Get the ACLU and special interest groups to sue any school that violates the DODO policy.
• Control who gets funding from government agencies.
• Cancel accounts on social media from Darwin skeptics.
• Influence publishers to deny printing of books by Darwin doubters.
• Water down creationism by promoting theistic evolution and other compromise positions.

• Make showings of “Inherit the Wind” mandatory in classrooms, but forbid any of the ID documentaries.
• Flood the airwaves and TV channels with DODO material. Crowd out the choices
• Elect DODO candidates to school boards.

For more psychopolitical tactics used by DODO forces, see “Subversion” in the Baloney Detector. For documented incidents of underhanded methods Darwinians have used to silence the opposition, read the first view chapters of Bergman’s book, Censoring the Darwin Skeptics.