Based on last week’s journal, my essential question was about how companies and states can utilize various techniques to easily influence our beliefs by tricking our System 1’s. After reading the last few day’s quota of pages, I learned two more tricks that companies/states can add to their arsenal: The Law of Small Numbers and The Anchor Effect.
In the Law of Small Numbers, there are two main ideas: People tend to have an exaggerated faith in small samples and always assume causality, even for purely chance events. For the first idea, companies could easily sift through positive feedback of their product and present it in an overly glamorous, positive ad. “Everyone loves this new toothpaste! Check out these two people who said so!” Though I would (hopefully) assume not ever consumer would believe this ad and buy the toothpaste immediately, some inevitably will, which is often more than enough to rake in profits using these potentially unfounded claims. For the second idea, companies/states could easily isolate 1-2 specific instances, and then propose a specific cause for it, whether it be blaming another party or leading into their proposed solution. (For the former, I am immediately reminded of dark times in MASSIVE human rights violations in WWI and WWII).
For The Anchor Effect, a company/state could easily prime a person, nudging them towards a direction of decision. To illustrate this effect, after participants in a study spun a rigged wheel of numbers (either 10 or 65), they were more likely to guess a number of African nations in the UN closer to their number on the wheel—even though there is absolutely zero correlation! This unconscious influence could easily be exploited.
Both these effects could possibly fall under subliminal advertising, which surprisingly after I did research, is banned in other countries but not the US.
Switching topics a bit here, I don’t think the question I discussed above defines my topic for the year yet; it’s merely an interesting parallel to my EMC topic from last year. As of right now, I’m still unsure where I want to take this project, but I did skim ahead a bit and the ideas of risk aversion, prospect theory, and utility are all very intriguing to me. For my December SDA, I hope to recreate one of the experiments I’ve read about so far, so I can bolster my ethos for whatever narrative I choose to pursue in the January midterm.
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