Somewhat tangential to the OP, but suggested by it, do you know of Edward Bernays? There are many documentaries on him on YouTube, but he was the master of this kind of subversion. A descendant of Sigmund Freud, essential to know about him if you don’t.

On the personal level, it’s important to be self-aware enough to sense when you’re being played by these techniques. It sounds like it ought to be easy, but they’re very sophisticated and we’re constantly bombarded by media.

Yes, I encountered his name in a documentary suggested hereabouts called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. It was eye opening and I figure can serve as a backdrop to this thread.

On the personal level, it’s important to be self-aware enough to sense when you’re being played by these techniques. It sounds like it ought to be easy, but they’re very sophisticated and we’re constantly bombarded by media. — Wayfarer

Fortunately enough I lived abroad for quite some time to have a template against which I can compare these insidious gaslighting or propagandist mind games. Not to sound anti-education but sadly these psychological ideals get reinforced into a person quite often due to the profit motive and such or at least to those who go to college due to the profit motive. Did I mention that it's hard to go to college if one doesn't subscribe to the profit motive, at least here in the great US.

Sure. But you’re speaking to an old hippie. Our whole shtick was seeing through social conditioning. Sure I’ve long since joined the middle class - actually never really left it - but I hope that I at least can see through a lot of that. In fact I would like to think that is why my career has always been somewhat marginal - I can’t really take ‘square’ reality all that seriously. Not nearly as seriously as my poor long-suffering spouse would like, I sometimes think.

But you’re speaking to an old hippie. — Wayfarer

Yeah, we have an over-representation of hippies on this forum. : - ))

I guess I'm berating the fact that hippies conformed after all, I mean how couldn't they? Not all, not the most idealistic driven ones at least.

Our whole shtick was seeing through social conditioning. — Wayfarer

But, it goes a little deeper than that, when you throw in psychology into the mix. I mean, when it comes to psychology, no sane or rather undeluded psychologist want's to assert authority over such matters pertaining the human soul or nature, and that's unfortunate because then you get witch-doctors like Bernays who instead do that.

Sure I’ve long since joined the middle class - actually never really left it - but I hope that I at least can see through a lot of that. — Wayfarer

Yeah, in my more idealistic years, I wanted to live on some commune or something of that sort. I read a little too deeply into Skinner's Walden Two.

In fact I would like to think that is why my career has always been somewhat marginal - I can’t really take ‘square’ reality all that seriously. — Wayfarer

Yeah, I get you. It's just the easier path to go through.

I studied psychology as an undergrad but found it massively disappointing. I hated - absolutely hated - behaviourism. ‘Pulling habits out of rats’. Carl Rodgers and Albert Ellis were OK. Freud’s essays are brilliant but of course he’s the arch materialist. Failed my first assignment, it was about intelligence testing, I wrote an essay to the effect that intelligence was something that couldn’t be measured. Came back - ‘F - Wrong Department’. Fair call, really. But couldn’t get out of psych fast enough.

It is not so much that psychology has been hijacked, as psychology is now being used as a way to create jobs and make money in the free market. It is similar to lawyers in Washington, making new laws, that create the need, for even more lawyers. If you made a new law, that nobody can wear black shoes on odd numbered Tuesdays, you would need more lawyers to prosecute and defend the knowing and unknowing violators.

In the profession of psychology, if the psychologists conclude X is the new norm, and the herd follows this advice, and this causes new problems in culture, there are more psychology jobs. Much of this is done through politics and the psychology of propaganda. PC for example, is a two for one. It created lawyer jobs, as well as psychology jobs to handle the over sensitivity that was induced.

Psychology can heal problems, therefore it can also reverse engineered problems and used this to create problems for fun and profit. Hate Trump will become a new avenue for psychology goods and services. Hate all the time is not healthy so this means future $$$$$. The profession will not speak up, in advance, since they see the future opportunity.

I became interested in psychology in high school. It began as a way to overcome a neurosis and then as a way, many years later after college, to self actualize. Once I was self actualized, it felt anti-climatic. I had enjoyed the journey toward self actualization. Healing has a nice feeling. The journey was like anticipating Christmas. Once it came and went, I wondered what came next, beyond just living life with life's normal ups and downs. This is when I became interested in the psychology of Carl Jung.

Jung's thesis opened the door to developing higher human potential, using self actualization as the starting point. Jung dealt with collective human propensities; archetypes of the collective unconscious. He was not as popular, because he used, among other things, religious symbolism to show collective human parallels in all cultures from ancient times.

This approach upset the atheists, who had invaded science. They were the never religion crowd, like the neverTrump crowd, who could not give any credit to the enemy. Jung was not all negative about religion so he was an outsider. Jung, was the star student of Freud. He was more or less on his own, since he would not deny the connection between religion and natural archetypes.

Much of the herd manipulation makes use of the various archetype firmware. Since the firmware are connected to collective human propensities, you can impact large herds at a time; wholesale inductions. One can also create magic tricks by swapping the firmware for various tasks. If you use a wrench to hammer a nail, illusions can appear; homosexuality. This was a large business boom for the psychology industry.

Advertising makes money because it appeals to already-existing normal, average, etc., tendencies, which are driven in the first place by biology, the way the brain functions (again on average), and then secondarily by culture.

I wouldn't say the use business makes of all this has to do with psychology as a science, so much as with the "dark arts" of rhetoric, persuasion, hypnotism, etc. - i.e. the exploitation of glitches in human psychology, glitches that reveal our rationality to be an imperfect construction (or habit), with some flaws and gaps.

I wouldn't say the use business makes of all this has to do with psychology as a science — gurugeorge

So much to the point, in so few words. Psychology as science: there is such a thing. Psychology as pseudo-science: this too! Unfortunately, psychologists seem to rarely worry about the distinction. This, imo, is a failure of self-policing that has been and is fatal to psychology as a whole. The word itself is corrupt.

And corrupt at every level. Story time - and this is a true story: graduate level theories of personality course for counseling psych: so many theories! In course of time I approached the instructor and asked in the most mild and respectful terms how one might start even to approach the problem of reconciling all the irreconcilable aspects of the differing theories of personality we were covering. I was instructed: it was not for me to question. As to the differences, my part was simply to pick and choose what made sense to me.

There's sense to this. The first job of the student is to be a student first, then a critic. And cherry picking is all right - if you're picking cherries. The problem is that this was all presented as a "science." And it was clear that whatever it was, it was specifically not a science.

The substance is, if we're going to talk about psychology - or anything - it's useful to start with some statement of what that something is, or is taken to be. The statement can change, but without it, we're like a group going we know not where with neither map nor compass. If it is not too late, will someone offer a statement of what they take psychology to be, such that it can be and has been hijacked?

On a formal definition, I might argue that no science can be hi-jacked, although the knowledge gained from a science can certainly be put to ill use.

In my mind the field of psychology has been hijacked to the profit motive of the economy. — Posty McPostface

How could it be otherwise, and why would it be otherwise? What has not been hijacked to economic ends? I don't like it, but short of the revolution...

This is not a recent phenomena ("recent" in terms of decades). Using psychological research for profit has been underway since the 1920s-1930s. Public relations and modern advertising have been using psychological (and sociological) research right along. Just for instance, studies of how the eye moves to take in a printed page were used to locate critical words and images in print advertising. Other studies led to more subliminal methods of getting messages into the heads of consumers.

More recently, psychological studies have been applied to understanding and manipulating how people interact with high-tech gadgets -- smart phones and the myriad apps and games on them. All of them have been designed to hook users' attention and hold on to it. That's why you see smartphone zombies walking around staring at their phones: their attention has pretty much been taken over by these devices. Obvious example: YouTube. When YouTube was new (like, what... the day before yesterday?) a requested video would be served, and then it would stop -- nothing more would happen. Now YouTube automatically serves up more videos to you without being asked.

Why? Because advertising (across the various platforms) is how "free" material is paid for, and the more advertising you see, the better. The more hooked you are on gadgets and apps, the more you are sucked into an economic relationship with the sellers (Apple, Samsung, LG, Huawei, etc.)

Back in the ancient world of print (like up to about 30 years ago) Time Life, Condé Nast, the big publishing houses, et al were the majors. Now its Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Internet media can do something that the old print, radio, and television media couldn't do: they can push content at you, which is again a cause of the smartphone zombies transfixed by the various streams of crap pouring into their phones.

There's a psych lab behind all that.

I took a personality theory class as part of a counseling program too. It was the most interesting course on offer. Clearly we are personalities. Different personalities seem to have predictably different features. BUT, can that be reduced to a science? Personality could perhaps be described scientifically IF, very big if, we could account for all of the biological, social, and psycho-dynamic factors that create personality. We can't. Whether we should even try for such an accounting is another issue altogether.

It is not so much that psychology has been hijacked, as psychology is now being used as a way to create jobs and make money in the free market. — wellwisher

Can you provide a causal link between the two? If what you're saying is just that psychology is being exploited to the demands of the economy, then I rest my case.

This was a large business boom for the psychology industry. — wellwisher

What is the 'psychology industry'?

In course of time I approached the instructor and asked in the most mild and respectful terms how one might start even to approach the problem of reconciling all the irreconcilable aspects of the differing theories of personality we were covering. — tim wood

The problem is that this was all presented as a "science." And it was clear that whatever it was, it was specifically not a science. — tim wood

So, what does that make psychology? It seems to me that the differences are only made apparent if psychology is used as some means to and end (the profit motive), which is quite troublesome. I would find more utility if I studied psychology to address the latter issue (for sake of the future patient you might encounter) and then proceed with the earlier.

On a formal definition, I might argue that no science can be hi-jacked, although the knowledge gained from a science can certainly be put to ill use. — tim wood

This isn't particular to psychology, yes. But, I would assume that psychologists would be more aware of this at least, than a physicist having his ideas misappropriated to build a new bomb or device that can be weaponized. Isn't this a sort of moral dilemma?

How could it be otherwise, and why would it be otherwise? What has not been hijacked to economic ends? I don't like it, but short of the revolution... — Bitter Crank

I'm just unhappy with how we go about educating people about psychology. It seems on face value to treat psychology as a science (to be exploited for some unknown motive by advertisers or others) is/as fundamentally unethical.

So, what does that make psychology? — Posty McPostface

Why do you want to talk about something when it's clear that no one on this thread knows what the topic is. Is it psychology? Great, what is psychology? In some aspects it's unquestionably a science; in others, not so much, and where the penumbral light of science tapers to darkness, no science at all. If all of those are psychology without further qualification, that makes psychology nonsense.

I suspect respectable scientist-psychologists would take issue, but it's their house that's out of order. I also suspect that many of them are perfectly aware of the problem and don't care. And then there's "hi-jacked." Are cows hi-jacked by farmers so their milk can be sold to make money? Does "hi-jack" imply something wrong? If it does, what is the wrong thing it implies?

I buy the notion that techniques and knowledge developed by psychologists are used and misused willy-nilly almost everywhere - it's not news. Is it a problem sufficiently understood to allow a statement of it that might lead to either a solution (of the problem) or some improvement? Hard to say until the dialogue gets near there. Clarity can help that happen.

Why do you want to talk about something when it's clear that no one on this thread knows what the topic is. — tim wood

I digress. Just was my sentiment about what I think has happened to psychology.

I'm just unhappy with how we go about educating people about psychology. It seems on face value to treat psychology as a science (to be exploited for some unknown motive by advertisers or others) is/as fundamentally unethical. — Posty McPostface

There is good reason to be unhappy with how we teach people about our psychology. Exploiting psychological insights for commercial purposes is de rigueur; exploiting any academic field for commercial benefit is pretty common. Unethical? That may very well be the case outside of market place thinking.

It's one thing to exploit psychology to do a better job teaching arithmetic or French. It's something else to exploit psychology to hook a generation of people on walking around as smartphone zombies, unable to live without a minute-by-minute update of... whatever.

Learning about psychology should give us insight into why we behave as we do. I don't see that happening often enough.

There is good reason to be unhappy with how we teach people about our psychology. Exploiting psychological insights for commercial purposes is de rigueur; exploiting any academic field for commercial benefit is pretty common. Unethical? That may very well be the case outside of market place thinking. — Bitter Crank

I think you highlighted my point here. Since, psychology is about people and their inner workings, isnt the case of exploitation of psychology for whatever means, all the more vivid and apparent. It should be in my mind, at least.

Learning about psychology should give us insight into why we behave as we do. I don't see that happening often enough. — Bitter Crank

What do you mean by that if I may humbly ask?

Thanks.

Psychology can be used to heal many conditions of the mind and soul. But it is also a good way to make a respectable living and support a family. Any good psychologist can see how certain social conventions and trends can cause potential mental health problems.

If psychology was altruistic, these problems would be pointed out; socially, to help more people be on alert so they can stay healthy. On the other hand, if you stay silent, and the anticipated problems appear, this is good for business. Why give free advice, that reduces potential clients?

For example, there is an unusually high rate of drug/alcohol addiction and suicide among gays. This is a bumper crop of potential clients. In therapy, the psychologist will not point the finger of blame, but will try to figure out how the individual is massaging their beliefs and drawing a wrong conclusion so they are not able to cope. We create our own reality. We cannot control outside us, but we can control how we respond to it.

In culture, nobody from psychology speaks up in advance and nobody in psychology tries to take on those who like to point the finger of blame, even though this path will never heal. This is also true of finger pointing for racism and sexism. It could be due to political threats that will keep good people silent. They may only be able to do the right thing, in private, out of the social eye of big brother, who is running a scam for unhealthy.

If you were a psychologist in a university and said anything that was interpreted as anti-gay, you will become a target. Even of you are trying to avoid the future couch. The political groups have their own psychology mercenaries who will sell their talents to the highest bidder and reverse engineer, to control the good shepherds; stick and carrot. The carrot is a good living, that soon becomes the leash.

The hate Trump path is good for politics, but it is not good for psychological health. It is causing a departure from rational reality; everything is not bad and worthy of hate. That is irrational and an accident waiting to happen. Nobody is speaking out from the psychology community, since they fear threats or they see opportunity in the future.

There is a whole generation of snowflakes who cannot longer cope with basic reality; $$ching $$ching! This should be nipped in the bud, but left wing colleges prefer the pathology of anarchy. While psychology turns and looks away out of fear of threat.

Look at the number of people in the mental health fields, as a function of time. If they do a good job for the collective, the number of jobs should go down and not follow an exponential function of increase. This is a sign that they are part of the problem. This shows there is no proactivity in the field, except by those whose goal is to create problems.

It's almost as if a psychologist would be needed to support another psychologist in their analysis. A sort of infinite regress that can only be resolved by assuming authority over the matter. However, assuming authority on the matter discredits what you have to say by default. So, now you have a catch-22.

Dunno.

Learning about psychology should give us insight into why we behave as we do. I don't see that happening often enough. — Bitter Crank

What do you mean by that if I may humbly ask? — Posty McPostface

What I mean by that, in my humble opinion, is that people are taught lots of things in school -- reading, writing, arithmetic, but not much about what mental health looks like, how to achieve it, and how to maintain it. I'm not talking about how to avoid becoming psychotic; more like: we have strong emotions that sway our thinking; how can we best deal with our feelings? What happens to people as they go through their teen years into adulthood; why is it so often very stressful? What's the best way to safely manage sexual urges? (Jocylen Elders, a US Surgeon General, wanted to encourage teenagers to masturbate as an alternative to having sex too soon; that went over like a loud fart in church.)

There are all kinds of situations in which people have problems--and knowing a little more about how we operate mentally (personality, memory, distraction... all that) would be helpful. A lot of people who have "high standards for themselves" don't quite get how normal disruptive feelings are.

There were a couple of classes I had in high school (don't remember what the names of therm were) taught by kind of lazy teachers, who rather than preparing lessons encouraged discussions about 'stuff'. Sometimes these discussions were actually productive (and would have been better if the teacher had actually thought about how to make better use of the situation).

"Socially intelligent", "emotionally intelligent" and more sophisticated students (maybe 20% of the students) learn this stuff on their own. The rest of us may remain ignorant of some of this stuff into late adulthood. I'm talking about "practical psychology" -- how to deal with the psychopathology of everyday life--it's various shit piles, occasional bed of roses (all those thorns!), frustrated wishes, fears, worries, etc.

Here's an example: I knew I was attracted to other boys from an early age on -- but I couldn't find out much about "homosexuality" let alone how to be a gay man. Of course this was in the dark ages of the 50s and 60s. Another example: I was nearly blind until I had corrective surgery at 14. This visual defect had a significantly distorting effect on my self image. At the time, I didn't know there was such a thing as a self image that could be distorted. It would have been helpful to learn how to deal with it.

Does this all make sense now?

It's almost as if a psychologist would be needed to support another psychologist in their analysis — Posty McPostface

At least in formal psychoanalysis, the analyst often is an occasional "patient" of another analyst. Psychoanalysts undergo psychoanalysis as part of their training. (like the psychoanalyst who was treating Tony Soprano needed to review her ethical situation with another psychoanalyst--who recommended she drop the patient immediately.) Ordinary counselors would do well to receive occasional counseling too from a more advanced professional. Dealing with people's problems all day is actually not an entirely healthy activity. One needs to reflect on one's own situation periodically. Infinite regress? Well lots of professionals are supervised, are engaged in on-going education, and so on.

I mean, when it comes to psychology, no sane or rather undeluded psychologist want's to assert authority over such matters pertaining the human soul or nature, and that's unfortunate... — Posty McPostface

I wonder if you really intend to target psychology in this thread? You seem to be aiming at propagandists? :chin: :wink:

I wonder if you really intend to target psychology in this thread? You seem to be aiming at propagandists? — Pattern-chaser

Yes, I think that was the intent, but got carried away with targeting a harmless sheep that psychology is.

...targeting a harmless sheep that psychology is — Posty McPostface

I have always felt sorry for psychology and psychologists. Their discipline is significant and important (IMO), but it is disabled by those who would force it into the mould of 'a science'. You cannot treat people as 'impartial observers' when you are investigating their mental/emotional condition. In such a case, the subjects are active participants. They are not impartial, not unbiased and not distanced from what is going on. They're right there doing it. We need the right tool for the job, as the philosopher Bob the Builder sings. :up: And science is not it.

Psychology is a tool for investigating human mental and emotional issues. Whatever makes it more relevant, more useful and more effective is what it needs. Imposing a foreign and incorrect view of its test subjects is not what it needs.

Rant over. [For now...]

People are bombarded with advertisements to buy this, do that, or respond this way and not another way. — Posty McPostface

I don't really see this as the fault of psychology. What's annoying you is the manipulation of people for commercial purposes, and I agree with your outrage. But psychology is not to blame. Capitalism is. Psychology may be the gun, but guns don't kill people, people kill people. Ask the NRA. :joke: If the manipulators - let's call them "thieves", for the purposes of this thread :wink: - make use of psychology to commit their atrocities, is it really different from a bank-robbing gang making use of a car to make their getaway? Ford bear no responsibility for the bank having been robbed. :wink: