Gradients of Persuasion
On Methods of Immersion and Captivation
One feature of humanity that is often portrayed as a bug is our propensity to be persuaded by, and to persuading, others. The gradient of persuasion runs from simple suggestion and modest signaling, to sales and seduction, propaganda, hypnosis, and mind control. At each stage are varying levels of immersion and suggestibility. Understanding that persuasion is not simply limited to winning an argument or closing a deal, but encompasses the entire range of mind capture, gives a useful framework for thinking about the nature of attention, coordination, co-option, and domination.
The simplest forms of suggestion are so ubiquitous that they often escape everyday recognition. A flower’s colorful display, a shining apple’s skin, a dimpled cheek—all honed through evolutionary processes to strike an appeal. Markers of health, nutrition, or youthfulness give the intended organism a sign of value. Indicators of value in turn stimulate changes in behavior that may or may not be adaptive for the target, but confer some benefit to the displayer. Take the Venus flytrap, for example. An unwitting Muscoid fly lands on the trap hoping for a tasty meal. Trigger hairs inside are stimulated twice over a brief period of time and gain enough action potential to shift the lobes from convex to concave, trapping the plant’s prey and beginning the process by which the insect is digested alive. From the fly’s perspective, it falls for a false signal. From the plant’s perspective, it succeeds in convincing the fly that it had a fruitful place to explore. The same kind of indicators that might signal a mutualistic potential are employed for predation. Catching a fly is not that unlike attracting a mate or enticing a reader to click the thumbnail for an article: complex stimulus-response loops between agents interact within overlapping frameworks of value, leading to a desirable outcome for one or more parties involved.
A Special Kind of Animal
Humans, of course, retain our simple methods of persuasion, despite having also developed more sophisticated forms. Imitation, flattery, mirroring, gesturing, and subtle facial expressions all function as well as ever to indicate proximity, signal alignment, impress, delight, and intrigue. Our capacity for language and vocalization greatly expands the range of expression, depth, and sophistication of persuasion, enabling novel adaptive repurposing in response to radical environmental change.
The social environment itself changes so rapidly that biological evolution is insufficient for keeping up, so cognition and virtualization supplement wherever there lacks precedent. As social animals it is necessary for us to coordinate effectively for our own survival and survival of kin, often across genetic boundaries. Solving coordination problems requires winning others over to our goals and plans of action, as well as reconciling and compromising on disparate aims amongst each other. Humans who get good at persuading others get what they want, and if unchecked, can become exploitative. This means we are in an eternal Red Queen dynamic where as we get better at persuading others, we likewise improve our capacity to resist persuasion.
There are also cases where we don’t know our own good and it is in our advantage to be susceptible to persuasion, as with children to their parents. An efficacious salesman tells himself he’s engaging in a mutualistic exchange of value and some dark arts might episodically be needed to overcome reluctance. In addition to physicality and facial expressions, he employs a range of linguistic, emotional, and heuristic tools for keeping a customer engaged, interested, and captivated. Tried and true tactics like building rapport, social proof, pacing & leading, compliance hoops, and exploitation of all manner of cognitive biases work to make a deal. Capturing a sale is not that unlike capturing hearts. A potential suitor gunning for the affections of his beloved will use much of what’s above in his pursuit, in addition to a whole toolbox forbidden from the consummate professional. Modularity among methods reveals their unification under the broad category of tools of persuasion.
View From the Broadcast Booth
Persuasion to and among groups further expands the repertoire. Methods of persuasion en masse take on impersonal, detached qualities. Cognitive biases and heuristics play a large role, but so does the appearance of social consensus, markers of institutional authority, and repetition. Propaganda in its most primitive forms uses these tactics, often to reasonable effect. Coinage bearing the embossed face of an emperor, flags, and monuments—all serve as constant reminders of presiding powers, religious or profane. With the desecration of these symbols, comes the sign of a new regime. As stated in The Last Newsman: Tucker Carlson, the End of an Archetype, and the Bridge to New Media, one-to-many broadcast forms enable titanic levels of persuasion by mere hundreds or thousands of individuals. Separation between viewer and broadcaster, the general inability of viewer to give meaningful feedback to broadcasters aside from the presence of (or lack thereof) their attention, means broadcast media functions like a blunt instrument, casting a wide net, dragging in all manner of unsuspecting life and debris. If it feels like broadcast media dumbs life down, distilling it to its most basic, pointed, and mind-numbing tenets, that is because
It aims to have the broadest appeal, and thus must be comprehensible by the vast majority of people; on down to simpletons.
The intended effect is to dull thinking, entrancing the audience into a familiar lull, making them amenable to suggestion.
Stoking of fear and anxiety shuts down activation of the prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for executive functioning and working memory.
States of mind broadcast media seeks to continually return viewers to are either passive compliance or panicked fear. Trauma’s relationship to suggestibility remains unclear, but relaxing into a state of suggestibility is well-understood and has been practiced for well over a century.
Hypnotism was first coined by Scottish surgeon James Braid as an abbreviation of neuro-hypnotism: sleep of the nerves. Contrary to popular belief, he was not part of the Mesmeric school, followers of a one Franz Mesmer, responsible for the term “Animal Magnetism”, used to describe a pseudo-magnetic force flowing through all living beings. Braid found instead that prolonged attention on a bright object could reliably induce the fabled mesmeric trance and speculated that it involved fatiguing certain parts of the brain through protracted ocular fixation. Hypnosis’ practical application as a psychosomatic anesthetic is rumored to have begun on the battlefields of the United States Civil War, and is now well-established within medical literature as a treatment for patients when chemical anesthetics are in short supply or cannot be administered for other reasons. The underlying mechanism of hypnosis is not well-understood, but its efficaciousness for a variety of ailments remains valid. A hypnotic state is characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation, and imagination. FMRI scans of hypnotized patients reveal increased activation in the dorsal singulate cortex, increased connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and insula in the salience network, and reduced connectivity between the executive control network and the default mode network. These results provide a complicated snapshot of what’s going on in brains under hypnotic trance. Some combination of increased connectivity in some areas and decreased connectivity and activation in others leads to a peculiar state of open-mindedness. What is common in both the reported experience of hypnosis and the scientific evidence for the effect is a state of profound relaxation.
Practitioners of the Dark Arts
Knowledge of hypnosis’ power did not escape interested parties in military intelligence in the early 20th century. The CIA’s notorious research program on behavioral control, MKULTRA, employed hypnotism as part of a slew of trials in its investigation of mind control. Supposedly, these efforts were largely fruitless in either inculcating a “truth serum” or creating the famed Manchurian Candidate—an unwitting sleeper agent who can be unconsciously activated to perform tasks in service of their masters against their will.
Conspiratorial subcultures on the internet maintain that these trials were not, in fact, ineffective, and use reports of persons known to be involved in such programs as plausible evidence that such controlled persons exist and have been used to perpetrate numerous historical events. One such victim is Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who participated in Harvard Psychologist Henry Murray’s experiments to alter belief systems while a student. His lawyers have claimed his hostility comes from his participation in what were covert mind control experiments. While scant indicting evidence exists for the success of these programs, there is a psychological disorder that is purported to be the result methods employed in the attempt to totally capture minds: Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is characterized by two or more distinct personalities in the same individual. The diagnosis remains controversial, but is commonly found in victims of prolonged, extreme physical and psychological abuse. Complicating matters more, is the presence of dissociative amnesia, whereby one personality does not have access to the memories of experiences sustained while under the sway of another. Believers in trauma-based mind control claim that the induction of extreme dissociative states can lead to a fracturing of the victim’s psyche, whereby a new sub-personality can be inserted by abusers, which is activated by certain triggers. This processes involves 3 phases:
Unfreezing: Breakdown of the existing identity by deprivation and confusion
Changing: Implanting of a new personality by overloading, and subsequent reconditioning with classical stimulus-pain-pleasure reward regimens.
Refreezing: Reinforcement of the new identity and rejection of the prior one.
Cults and ritual abusers are known to practice variations of this methodology to gain compliant reformed subjects. If the purported levels of compliance and personality changes are achievable, then this dark method seems the most promising for accomplishing a state of total control over a subject that is the aim of shrouded psychological operations programs. It remains to be seen wether this category of persuasion does indeed deliver the goods of a pliant and suggestible candidate for clandestine purposes, but a full review of persuasive techniques must not discount the possibility.
The repertoire of persuasive techniques and states ranges from simply organic interactions and signals, to complicated procedures and methods for inducing profound suggestibility. At the core is a set of tools for varying levels of immersion and mental possession that may be used for good or ill. Understanding the relationship of these tools to the organisms they are enacted upon shows that the human mind is not a locked box that can only trivially be directed one way or another, or subtly changed over a long period of time, but more closely resembles a programmable machine that, with proper inputs, can be made to act in strange, unconscious ways that are unpredictable from the basis of rational assumptions. We are fundamentally irrational creatures, capable of rationality in contingent circumstances, and open to all manner of immersion and captivation.