51 Propaganda Strategies Defined in 11 Minutes: From Cognitive Dissonance to Enchantment to Concern

The con­cept of professional­pa­gan­da has quite a lot of pow­er to fas­ci­nate. So does the very phrase professional­pa­gan­da, which to most of us at present sounds faint­ly exot­ic, as if it referred principal­ly to phe­nom­e­na from dis­tant locations and occasions. However in fact, can any one in every of us right here within the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry go a day with­out being sub­ject­ed to the factor itself? Watch the video above, during which The Paint Clarify­er lays out 51 dif­fer­ent professional­pa­gan­da tech­niques in 11 min­utes, and also you’ll greater than like­ly rec­og­nize lots of the insid­i­ous­ly effec­tive rhetor­i­cal tips labeled there­in out of your current each­day life.

You gained’t be sur­prised to listen to that these man­i­fest most clear­ly within the media, each offline and on. The record begins with “agen­da set­ting,” the “abil­i­ty of the information to influ­ence the impor­tance positioned on cer­tain prime­ics by pub­lic opin­ion, simply by cov­er­ing them fre­quent­ly and promi­nent­ly.”

Scat­tered by way of­out the information, or by way of­out your social-media feed, adver­tise­ments convey out the “beau­ti­ful peo­ple,” which “sug­gests that if peo­ple purchase a prod­uct or fol­low a cer­tain ide­ol­o­gy, they, too might be hap­py or suc­cess­ful” – or, in its basest kinds, oper­ates by way of “clas­si­cal con­di­tion­ing,” during which “a nat­ur­al stim­u­lus is asso­ci­at­ed with a neu­tral stim­u­lus sufficient occasions to cre­ate the identical response through the use of simply the neu­tral one.”

Within the much more disgrace­much less realm of pol­i­tics, the com­mon “plain folks” strat­e­gy “makes an attempt to con­vince the audi­ence that the professional­pa­gan­dis­t’s posi­tions replicate the com­mon sense of the peo­ple.” When “an indi­vid­ual makes use of mass media to cre­ate an ide­al­ized and hero­ic pub­lic picture, usually by way of unques­tion­ing flat­tery and reward,” a pow­er­ful “cult of per­son­al­i­ty” can come up. And in professional­pa­gan­da for each­factor from pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates to fast-food chains, you’ll hear and browse no finish of “glit­ter­ing gen­er­al­i­ties,” or “emo­tion­al­ly enchantment­ing phrases which can be utilized to a prod­uct thought, however current no con­crete argu­ment or analy­sis.” You will discover many of those strate­gies defined at Wikipedi­a’s record of professional­pa­gan­da tech­niques, or this record from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia of “professional­pa­gan­da tech­niques to rec­og­nize” — and never simply when the “oth­er aspect” makes use of them.

through Giggle­ing Squid

Relat­ed con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Professional­pa­gan­da Makes use of Lies to Erode All Fact & Ethical­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Complete­i­tar­i­an­ism

A Discipline Information to Faux Information and Oth­er Infor­ma­tion Dis­or­ders: A Free Man­u­al to Down­load, Share & Re-Use

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Professional­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Form Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Professional­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et House Race (1958–1963)

The Pink Males­ace: A Strik­ing Gallery of Anti-Com­mu­nist Posters, Advertisements, Com­ic Books, Magazine­a­zines & Movies

Promote & Spin: The His­to­ry of Adver­tis­ing, Nar­rat­ed by Dick Cavett (1999)

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­guide.