Harry Potter and the Eye of the Beholder

People (and wizards) have been vying for centuries for control over some artifact that's greater than the Sorcerer's Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, and the rest of the things that J.K. Rowling found important enough to put in the title of her books (yes I know I fail at life for being unable to list all of them from heart. Yes, of course you can.) And this would be something that would give them the ability to manipulate how people view things. Which they eventually found the first traces of, not in the Ark of the Covenant, some magic cube from Asgard, or hidden in an ancient Incan pyramid, but through the psychological process of framing. Many psychologists died in protecting this secret. Just kidding, that'd be horrible.

Wizards! I must say this post is probably strongly influenced by Movie Knight.

Framing is quite simply the manipulation of context or wording, or even just nearby things, to change how people perceive things. It's almost like a conscious version of classical conditioning, except cognition plays a role in framing where it doesn't in classical conditioning.

Framing's visible in a lot of news. Being the liberal bigotist I am, I'll start off with Fox News.

For example, in this one about the Occupy New York movement, protesters are viewed in an unpleasant light. The first few paragraphs make comparisons between them and circuses to make people visualize them as such. As to whether or not this is an accurate statement isn't the focus here, but rather that they are framed to appear disorderly and generally uncivil. Since the story is about the ruckus they're causing, people will also tend to look for these characteristics in the story, further highlighting those qualities. This makes the rest of the story more convincing, since this framing, along with the audience's probably disparaging inclinations towards the Occupy New York, reinforce each other.

In this one, about Sarah Palin coining the phrase "lamestream media," treats Palin's mistake as though she were a small child. The fourth and fifth paragraphs evidence this most clearly; they examine her logic and assume she put as much thought into it like a small child, and try to make excuses for her mistake, like a small child. This is clearly meant to make the audience think less of Palin, because of both the news article and how they wrote it.

Framing doesn't take much effort, and most people probably at least do some of it without even noticing. It also doesn't mean anything ethically, unless whoever made it made it in such a manner it has strong ethical implications, like in news media, which I've hopefully demonstrated kind of. Framing's in everything, like fairy tales (which would've been a good topic if I wasn't doing that at 1 in the morning), posters (again, good topic), or in advertisements (did I seriously pick the worst possible topic?). It's yet another way people try to influence other people. In fact, I just used it in the previous sentence. In my head I was going through possible verb choices, and some of the other ones I rejected were "manipulate," "control," "command," all of which would have made for a markedly different sentence.

And of course, wizards.

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Classical Conditioning and Ads

Advertisements weren't created by psychologists, but they do tend to exploit the idea of classical conditioning and its bigger cousin vicarious classical conditioning. The ad provides the CS and the US to associate it with, and repetition is the reinforcer.

Many if not all ads try to sell their product using classical conditional in either of its two flavors by associating their product with something else people want so people also want their product. The ingenious thing is that this happen on a level people don't tend to notice, making it almost publicly broadcast mind control. The best way to explain this is to run through a gauntlet of ads, which unfortunately will hopefully, from the advertiser's standpoint, make you rush out of the room and buy a lot of probably unnecessary crap and maybe give you an erection. Freud wasn't too far off when he said sex was everywhere.

Let's start off with a fairly easy one:

The ad is attempting to cause the reader to associate the car with speed, which people associate with thrill. Fairly straightforward, the blur gives the impression of speed that reinforces the text, and the strong contrast between the red of the taillights and the blue of the chassis intensifies the picture overall. In short,
blur->speed->thrill-car => buy car

Here's another one:

This is actually a very common advertising technique, which seems to be a growing trend, although it appears to only occur in TV ads to be effective. Stick a well-proportion lady next to a guy next to a product, people associate getting getting the lady to the product, end of story. In fact, there is a website devoted to finding out who the attractive women in the ads are, to give a sense of its prevalence. Actually, this may be borderline (vicarious) operant conditioning, since it can be interpreted as getting the girl is the consequence of getting the product, but since this (probably, but you can hope) never happens, operant conditioning never actually reinforces this behavior. The classical conditioning route of associative learning still works, though. This also demonstrates that this is obvious to the consumer, but I think even though it's obvious it retains its effectiveness since it runs on a subconscious level. I assume previous generations of advertisements would have used this tactic if the culture had allowed it. Speaking of culture, let's examine ads from an entirely different part of the world to see if they use the same tactics, just altered to fit in the culture of the region, the first ad, as this video seems to be a long string of them.

In a word, yes. More playfully executed, but same concept. Now let's move on to some classier ads, monocles, top hats, and the like.

Anyone after this type of watch is looking not for performance or usability, but they seek status. They're at the higher tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy, seeking on a conscious or unconscious level self-esteem, accomplishment, respect by self, and respect by others. The last three are related to culture, so you can expect to have to interpret it using Western culture as a reference. The crown in the center of the title is conceptually linked to the monarchies that existed as the pinnacle of European society in Western minds, so it should make the consumer associate the watch with respect, and since he's at a stage where he's looking for respect, he wants the watch. Watch-respect=>want watch

[All of this stuff is mine, except for the pictures, basically. Those belong to large corporations who are using me as a puppet to make you buy their stuff.]

THE GUM ON MY SHOE WAS IMPLANTED BY ALIENS WHO SHOT JFK FROM THE MOON HIRED BY THE FBI!!

To start off, I'd like to apologize to anyone who stumbled upon this blog who thought it would have much better material of a more risque manner than it does because of the name. Don't worry, I'm fairly positive the link below this one on Google will have what you're looking for. Now scuttle back to the dark side of the Internet, you.

In any case, people always seem bent on believing strange things. NASA used its multibillion dollar budget to fake the moon landings, JFK was shot with a magic bullet by a midget hidden in the grassy knoll, and Barack Obama is a secret Socialist Muslim anti-Christ who wants to kill old people with death panels.

I think that this, ironically enough, is based on people's attempts at reasoning. I think people start off with this vague sense of fear, distrust or suspicion, and when they see or hear about one of these events, they rationalize this emotion by projecting onto whatever theory they hear. They then get this "gut feeling" that it all makes sense, since now their fear, distrust and suspicion makes sense, and that's enough to get around the fairly obvious nonsensical parts of the theory. The logical explanation doesn't make as much sense as the conspiracy theory because of this element, and good old confirmation bias takes care of the rest.

The fact that many such theories center on some evil government with faceless figures, probably evilly petting their evil cats while thinking derisively about the populace over whom they reign, seems to validate my point. They feel disenfranchised with how the government's working and also suspicious of what the government will do in the near future. For example, the hippies who came up with the moon landing conspiracy were definitely suspicious of the government, and the story helped rationalize and prove that the government was evil or at least lying, so it was believed more than the simpler explanation that they sent a rocket to the Moon, a clear-cut case of confirmation bias.

Of course, there's still the issue of what make that first little spark of suspicion in the first place, and I say it's probably only fair to say that I'm happy to get a chance to rant about the worsening state of society and my pessimistic views about why society sucks, has always sucked, and will continue to suck until we become substantially more intelligent people than we currently are. I believe suspicion/fear is an innate condition of every single human, embedded in our genetics, since being suspicious probably stopped many an ancient cavemen from examining the mouth, or crawling into, the mouth of some form of predator, and also probably stalled the discovery of shrooms for at least a few centuries. Until people learn to trust everyone to a good extent, there will still be violence, gangs, and war. All three of these stem from a lack of trust or the ability to be trusted. Gangs can be seen as an attempt to join a group of people who they can mutually trust, and war is the lack of trust between two separate nations. On a smaller scale the effects of mistrust can be seen in how insecure-anxious babies tend to be more violent when they grow, as was said in the lecture for psych class, which is being taught by an awesome teacher whom I'm totally not pandering to at the moment. This problem needs to be conquered before society can actually make more substantial improvement.

That's my theory about theories. And of course, here's an obligatory video of a crazy person.

[These pictures and videos aren't mine but belong to the websites/authors which you can probably find by looking at the website and/or webpages from where these resources came from. I don't own anything on this page except for the text within these blog entries. And your wallet, that's mine, send me all your money now or I'll sue you for theft.]