Unconscious Influence

We seem to like the idea of unconscious influences that make people - mostly other people - do things. The Hidden Persuaders came out in 1957, even before the age of Mad Men, discovering the outlines of naked women in ice cubes. Significant effects have also been ascribed to subliminal advertising, which also burst on the scene in 1957.  Individual movie frames saying "Have a Coke!" beneath the level of conscious detection, were supposed to spike sales of Coke.  Or of some beverage. Or of something. They didn't. The whole concept of priming is still very big in psychology, despite the lack of evidence that it has even negligible effects. Reading the extended discussion of effects that have been discovered, there is some weak evidence that it may cause people to do something they were going to do anyway a few milliseconds quicker. There are other results that look oh-so-tantalizing to researchers, rather like alchemists who believe that the lead was briefly, under certain conditions, turned to gold. 

The whole concept of Implicit Association and bias is entirely dependent on the idea that small differences in automatic responses to photographs are evidence that people are less like to hire a black man or go along with a woman running anything bigger than a bake sale. But such evidence has proved...elusive. Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge promises to change the world with little interventions by the powerful to get the unwashed to do good things for themselves. But the things that actually work are not persuasions, but restrictions imposed on you without your consent that no one bothers to even notice anymore, like withholding your income taxes. 

I get it.  We all get it.  I was thrilled with the idea that opt-out versus opt-in organ donation had large effects, and disappointed when it came up almost empty.  

We are always half-convinced that "unconscious "inputs control our conscious behavior. This seems possible to us because we do sometimes do things and don't know why - and when we think about them, we can see some plausible reason that seems to be related to our past experiences or patterns in the way that we were brought up, or suggestions that happened to us earlier in the day. But these have all proven very hard to pin down with any real evidence, even though we've spent decades at it starting with Freud, if not before. There is just too much noise to isolate things like that, but we like explanations and stories so we pick something out of the noise and say "that's it. That's why I did it." Or that's why you did it or that's why they did it. 

Your default position for any of this should be probably not, but make your case. 

Let me now talk out of the other side of my mouth and say that we do seem to respond to buzzwords in our politics, don't we? Mamdani has said that Defund the Police is a feminist and a queer rights issue. He doesn't say that any more. Defund the Police is still a hot concept if one doesn't use the buzzwords, but it's all about playing notes on the synthesizer that elicit a particular response. I would be stunned if there is evidence that feminists would benefit from decreased enforcement of rape laws, or that trans people will have less difficulty in public if the police go away.  It is just adding on to the general "police do bad stuff to Cool and Marginalised people" sentiment with a "feminist" or "trans" murmur in their ear,s so that they think he really gets it.  He is for your people. The distinction would be that all of these hot buttons are already in place.  The suggestion is not creating them, but just carelessly brushing those nipples on the way by.