The 4 Reactions Health Care Propaganda Relies On
Angry Health Care Town Hall Aug 2009
Part 2 of a Series: How Angry Citizens Become Tools of Republican Propaganda. (See Part 1 here.)
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The national health care debate is a great example of propaganda influencing how people think about an issue. How is it that so many people can have their passions whipped into a frenzy about something, and not realize that they have been intentionally led into that state of being?
To understand such broad-scale manipulation of feelings and opinion, we have to first understand how we interact with information presented to us. This harkens back to Walter Lippmann’s quote in my last post: that we react not to the world around us, but to a representation of the world. To pictures, in Lippmann-speak. The way we imagine the world based on those pictures determines how we will react to it.
We react to the world as we perceive it through our senses, out of which we form our impressions and thoughts: our mental picture of what we are dealing with. And we react not merely to the stimulus as such, but to what it evokes within us, and the pictures we associate with that. Who has not felt an upwelling of emotion when a song played, and reminded them of a certain someone? Or been disturbed – pausing, tensely alert – when hearing an unexpected noise outside? We feel things before we respond to them rationally, whether that feeling is simply registering a sensation, or a full-blown emotion.
What comes in to the space between our ears – whatever path it takes to get there – affects us in many ways. It is often unnoticed, because this manner of intake is pretty much the only way we humans can interface with the world around us. We are like fish who do not notice the water we swim in. So pervasive is this sea of input that we become oblivious to just how much we take in every day and how it affects us and our moods, thoughts, and mental state. We are generally blind to the nuances of that input unless we are paying special attention to it at a given moment.
So where does that leave us as social, political animals? It leaves us subject to the emotional resonance of what we take in in our world of affairs. How things come to us, how they are presented, has a profound impact on our perceptions and thoughts. That impact can evoke powerful emotions or subtle associations that color our thinking. We are thinking creatures, but we are also feeling creatures. Not surprisingly, emotions usually underlie whatever rational conclusions we come to.
Our Enlightenment Heritage
The Thinker, by Rodin (Nicolas Perez, Wikimedia Commons)
Rational thought has been an ideal for the mature American adult in public discourse since the Enlightenment Age era of our Founding Fathers. The ideal for the rational thinker is to ask the right questions about a topic, research it with facts from sources as unbiased as possible, then on the basis of that information (and, if appropriate, some ethical or moral values as underpinning), form an opinion that is supported by the facts as we know them.
In perverse reality, people almost always feel an emotional reaction to a subject first, then cobble together a rationale that justifies that feeling. That is, they do the Rational Thinker process in reverse: first the emotion-based opinion, then reasoning backwards to a premise and cherry-picked facts that can plausibly support that stance.
This is a very human response and a very common one – but it is intellectually sloppy. It results in muddy thinking about issues on the basis of partial knowledge and misinformation presented (or invented) by whatever sources bolster the emotion-based stance. This is the perfect recipe for flawed conclusions stemming from faulty logic and missing facts.
Such a result is ideal for ideologues and partisans who want to “activate the base.” But it is a disaster for reality-based policy work and anyone who hopes to evolve real solutions to problems that confront our nation.
The Emotional Process Propaganda Relies On
People who want to sway how others think, and propagandists in particular (who do this with a vengeance), intentionally exploit our emotional reactions. They count on the fact that when an emotional resonance has been hooked, at least four critical things happen[1]:
- We will probably not notice this with our conscious, logical (critical) mind. People are more inclined to react first, and think later.
- We go by default into a reaction mode that, properly prodded, lets one emotion cascade into another: a worrisome assertion evokes fear which stirs anger or outrage. Once we are in the grip of this cycle, our critical brain effectively checks out of the argument.
- If we have been whipped up enough emotionally, we will want to relieve our emotional tension by taking physical action. Propagandists know how to direct that urgency for action into channels beneficial for the propagandists’ purpose.
- We will rationalize how we feel. In a process called “motivated reasoning,” we will pick and chose factoids from what we know that support how we feel, and ignore evidence to the contrary or rationalize its significance away.
The process of hooking an emotional reaction can be very subtle. Indeed, in the beginning it generally must be subtle, because we are not yet emotionally reactive, and many (though not all) of us will logically question overtly outrageous claims or exhortations. But subtle opening volleys can easily get in under our radar even if we are on guard against this sort of thing. A simple example is how we respond to survey questions, which, not coincidentally, can also be used to influence how people think about a topic (see discussion of “push polls” here.[2])
A Single Word Can Influence Our Reaction
Pollsters and social scientists know that how a question is worded has a huge impact on how it is answered. Ethical pollsters take great pains to ask neutral questions. Changing just one word or phrase in a question can yield substantially different results in the responses to it. For instance, asking “Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq?” gets one set of responses; asking “Do you favor or oppose the war in Iraq as a means of fighting terrorism?” garners another. Terrorism evokes emotional reactions, and when the war is framed that way, more respondents say they favor the war.
Obviously, then, questions and statements that resonate with emotional responses can be used to bypass our more critical thought processes. This is not to say people don’t weigh a question in their minds. It is to say that what they weigh and how they assess it can be influenced by how the subject is presented. Ask someone to comment on a skewed picture of a fact, and they will focus on the skewed picture, not the underlying fact (and probably not even notice the skew, depending on their personal biases.)
In this way, discussions are subtly (and not so subtly) controlled by the person who establishes the framing: that is, how an issue is defined, how it is presented, and what words (hence, emotional reactions) describe it.
In part 3 of this series, I’ll look at the work of Frank Luntz, and how his strategy memo created for Republicans framed the language – and, intentionally, the emotional reactions – which define our present discussion of health care reform.
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NOTES
1. See generally Propaganda and Persuasion (Jowett and O’Donnell 1999) and Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion (Pratkanis and Aronson 2001) in Sources.
2. For a recent and very overt example of a push poll question (one intended to lead public thought in a certain direction), the Republican National Committee has provided us with this example from their fundraising survey distributed earlier this year. Although masquerading as a legitimate survey, and producing results that might (and probably will) be quoted as poll results, this instrument is actually what is called an “involvement device.” (See comments here for discussion.) Its purpose is to engage readers’ concerns enough that they are roused to action (see bullet points above about creating a need for action) and contribute to the cause, in this case the RNC. Most of the questions in the survey are slanted, but this is the most outrageous:
“It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person’s political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?”
(The complete survey is here.)
This particular piece of chicanery was so egregious that when questioned, the RNC felt it necessary to actually apologize for it, calling it “inartfully worded.” One wonders what the artful way is to word such questions as that.
SOURCES
Bardes, Barbara A., Mack C. Shelley, and Steffen W. Schmidt. “American Government and Politics Today 2008: The Essentials.” Google Books, 2008.
Begley, Sharon. “Lies of Mass Destruction: Why We Believe Lies, Even When We Learn the Truth.” Newsweek, August 25, 2009.
Cawiser, Sheldon R., and G. Evans Witt. “20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results.” National Council on Public Polls, 2009.
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O’Donnell. “Propaganda and Persuasion.” Google Books, 1999.
Pratkanis, Anthony, and Eliot Aronson. “Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of persuasion.” Google Books, 2001.
Weigel, David. “RNC: Our Survey Was ‘Inartfully Worded’.” The Washington Independent, August 27, 2009.
———. “RNC’s Health Care Survey.” The Washington Independent, August 27, 2009.