By Patrick Fagan
You’re manipulated a dozen times before you’ve even put your shoes on. Your phone, your cereal box, your lover, all conspiring to prod, nudge and shove you into compliance.
Nudging is nothing new. Persuasion and propaganda are as old as democracy. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle said you must consider who your audience are and appeal to emotion as well as reason. What arguably has changed is the scale and the sophistication of the persuasion attempts.
Although this kind of thing is hard to quantify, one attempt estimated that we’re bombarded with the equivalent of 174 newspapers of information a day. Humanity continues to stumble into a screen-based dimension where our data is tracked and analysed by sophisticated algorithms. We are all at risk of being swept away by the machinations of Big Tech, advertisers, and politicians, and we’re perhaps a few short years from neurometrics reading and changing our minds directly at the source.
There has also been an explosion of interest in the behavioural sciences. Nudging – once a fairly fringe theory – is now embedded in governments and supranational organisations around the world. While it’s hard to take issue with the use of the techniques to reduce smoking and get people exercising, nudgers have arguably overstepped the mark, making bolder and bolder decisions about the ‘right’ behaviours and how to manipulate people into enacting them.
This is developing into an inversion of our traditional understanding of democracy. We previously believed that voting was a tool to enact the will of the public from the bottom-up; now, nudging is used as a tool by politicians to change the will of the public from the top-down. An intriguing illustration is edible insects. Nobody particularly wants to eat insects, yet the nudges continue to rain down on us from the state, the media, and celebrities.
Yes, we are bombarded by nudges, the use of which is getting so egregious that even I – formerly the lead psychologist at Cambridge Analytica – have a problem with it. The crucial question is how can you resist being nudged, should you want to?
Get Immunity
I have just co-written a book on this topic with the journalist Laura Dodsworth. It’s called Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it. Reading this book would be one way to resist nudging, since it is possible to get a level of immunity once you can recognise the techniques. As magician and psychology professor Gustav Kuhn told us, “Magic relies on you not knowing how the tricks are done. If you knew how they are done, the magic wouldn’t work anymore.”
There are three ways you can develop immunity. The first is being forewarned. If you know a persuasion attempt is imminent, you are generally better at resisting it. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2010 is a good example: participants given a warning that a charity was about to try and persuade them volunteered around 28 minutes, compared to 99 minutes for those who weren’t warned. The second principle of persuasion protection is something known as pre-bunking. If you know what manipulation attempts look like, and how to refute them, you’ll be better at recognising and resisting them when you encounter them in real life. In a 2022 study, researchers from the University of Cambridge crafted YouTube videos outlining common manipulation tactics found online. Participants who watched the videos were significantly less likely to trust or share tweets that contained the techniques, although not in all cases. The third technique for persuasion protection is debiasing interventions. In this case, someone is given a reality check that they are in fact susceptible to cognitive biases. One game, for example, had people respond to emails where they would lose points if they fell for a phishing scam. Research has shown that these kinds of interventions can have long-lasting effects in real life.
However, it should be noted that this kind of immunity is not perfect, and the impacts can be weak. Even when participants are warned about a bias, they can still be influenced by it. For example, you could rationally understand that the world’s supply of diamonds is artificially restricted to exploit the scarcity bias, and yet you would likely still prize a diamond if you were offered one. It’s a bit like an optical illusion: you might consciously know it’s an illusion, and yet you wouldn’t be able to unsee it.
Fortunately, there are three more tips that could help you to not get nudged.
Beware of the ‘Blip’
The first is to beware of the ‘blip’, as one cult survivor called them – that is, moments when your critical defences are down and you’re more liable to be influenced. These ‘blips’ can happen on a small scale (like being hungry or tired), a large scale (like moving house or getting divorced), or a social scale (like a pandemic or a war, as Naomi Klein explained in The Shock Doctrine).
There are many experimental examples of this principle. In a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper, researchers tested the so-called ‘disrupt-then-reframe’ technique. They made sales to around 40 per cent of customers when a package of eight cards sold for $3.00. However, when customers were told that ‘the price of eight cards is 300 pennies, which is a bargain’, sales doubled to around 80 per cent. The unusual presentation of the price in pennies disrupted people’s normal thinking, so that the bargain message could be implanted in the vacuum.
Elsewhere, students in an experiment who completed a difficult, boring task (crossing out each instance of the letter ‘e’ except when it was next to a different vowel or one letter removed from a vowel in either direction) were subsequently more likely to agree with the unpopular proposition that new mandatory exams should be introduced. They were less able to resist because they had used up their brainpower on the task. This is probably why a Psychology and Marketing study in 2007 found that some people are more persuadable later in the day because they have depleted their energy. Even Hitler wrote that during the day “man’s will power revolts with highest energy… In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will.”
Don’t Go to the Show
The second is to use what one paper called ‘avoidant resistance’. Research on the ‘illusory truth effect’ shows how we are more likely to believe something is true the more often we hear it; as the Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes, if you hang around in a barbers, sooner or later you’re going to get your hair cut.
The classic brainwashing book Battle for the Mind has just a few pages at the end on how to resist brainwashing – but they are powerful. The author, William Sargant, makes the case that the most difficult animals to condition are those that will not engage with the experimenter. “When a dog sullenly refuses to pay any attention to the flashing lights and other food signals intended for his conditioning,” wrote Sargant, “his brain remains unaffected.”
Likewise, we asked magician and psychology professor Gustav Kuhn how people can avoid being tricked by magic. He said, “Don’t go to the show!”
Listen to Your Gut
The third principle is to listen to your gut. Intellectual thought is great, of course, but it can lead us astray. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a genius, but he believed in fairies; some have even coined the term Nobel Disease referring to Nobel Prize winners having unconventional beliefs about things like ghosts and dowsing. At the extreme, the profession most likely to join the Nazi party early was doctors. Intellectualising a decision can be problematic because it simply makes you better at justifying your position (what’s called motivated reasoning), and it gives you more confidence that your beliefs are correct.
On the other hand, there is value in listening to your gut. One study found that a 15-minute mindfulness meditation reduced the incidence of a particular cognitive bias by 34 per cent; another asked doctors to jot down their immediate gut instinct and then consciously interpret it, resulting in diagnostic accuracy increasing by up to 40 per cent.
In summary: get immunity, stay mentally strong, reduce your exposure, and listen to your gut. These tips should help you to free your mind, but it is ultimately impossible to escape The Matrix entirely. Our brains are too tiny, and the universe is too infinitely big, for us to navigate our lives fully consciously. We have to outsource our thinking somewhat to heuristics and institutions. While we can’t not be influenced, we can choose our influencers. We can choose to use Twitter to follow angry commentators, or we can follow experts in health, wealth and happiness who improve our lives; if you want to see the world more poetically, you just need to read more poetry.
You may not be able to step out of Plato’s cave entirely, but you can choose the cave you want, and in doing so, free your mind.
This article was edited by Lachezar Ivanov.
