How do people change?
I often thinks of Madison Avenue and how they try to change people’s habits. They go for the “bank shot” instead of logic. They sell the sizzle not the steak. They sell the mood not the make. I remember being a young child wanting the sugary cereal because of the commercials. Basically they were selling candy for breakfast. Also it has been an axiom with me that the worse the product the better the commercial. Those products like the lottery sell the win but never the lost.
In politics as in life the facts matter but it is not usually how things are sold. People buy dreams and love “fairy tales”. We never get far away from the child within us. The person with the better narrative wins in the short term.
In the last election, Trump definitely understood this. Scott Adams caught on to his use of persuasion and images. He had “The Wall”. He had “The Hat”. He connected his opponents to a word that once heard could not be forgotten. As Victor Davis Hanson said, “Trump has animal cunning.” Trump understood marketing. The left branded Trump too but they called him too many names for anyone name to stick. One needs to stick to the “ad campaign”.
Substance matters but often times it is not enough. People can’t “buy” what they don’t know about. People want to change for the better. If the image is of something good but outdated who wants “stale old bread” when they can have “New and Improved”.
Yes. Once people accept that all human decisions are driven 95% by emotional need, including their own, then they can develop immunity to persuasion techniques.
Do not hold your breath.
Couple that with 93% of all communication being non verbal.
Emotions, Visuals and Labels to trigger emotions.
The Dems have always played that way.
The GOP has traditionally been clueless.
The Globalists have a real problem when guilt becomes a luxury item the middle class can no longer afford.
We are entering an era where racism no longer provokes guilt,
Where masculinity no longer provokes guilt
Where patriotism no longer provokes guilt.
Storm front coming.
Why has the GOP been so clueless? It is as if good marketing is considered below them.
“Storm front coming.”
See? We really are a bunch of Nazis!
Most human decision-making does not proceed with a cool assessment of the facts and careful deliberation. People rely on heuristics for good reason: there is not enough time to reason out every one of life’s choices. Kahneman and Tversky refer to System 1 (heuristics, intuition) and System 2 (facts and reason). Most decisions use System 1 and it’s usually OK.
While quick decisions by heuristics are helpful in most instances, this tendency can be exploited by advertisers, politicians, and others to advantage. The GOP has been slow to adopt these methods because conservatives generally like to use facts and reason instead of images and stories. Good persuasion has to make use of System 1, though not necessarily in an exploitative way. Scott Adams understands some of this but his approach is less rigorous and systematic.
It’s a mistake to disparage System 1 as merely “emotion.” It’s actually a way of responding to the world using intuition that is formed over a lifetime of experience and also has evolutionary roots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
You are not convincing me, DocLor. (I wonder why.)
Why, were you expecting a pretty picture? ;)
ZZZZZ. Did you say something?
I was thinking along the lines of what DocLor wrote too, though I didn’t know it had been codified so completely – makes sense. Also I think for the most part conservatives use ‘live and let live’ as a credo, because we too wish to be ‘left alone’ to live as we wish; but it seems liberals have more of a taste for power over others, not just themselves.
As for ‘how do people change’ – I am wondering that too after writing my post about my 2 liberal friends. I think it’s very hard to break out of a line of thinking when doing so is seen as ‘defeat’ – I’m trying, when they insist on bringing up politics, to give them an out so they can save face if/when they soften their opinion a bit.
People change A) when they have to, or B) when they want to. I suspect a lot more of A.
Don’t people “want to” when they “have to”? They “want” to avoid bad consequences.
Don’t they have to when they want to? Maslow.
When one has to when one wants to, one needs counseling. Jung? Adler?