When James Brown returned to George Orwell’s dystopia in an age of pervasive social media intrusion and a global pandemic, it felt a very different novel to the one he had read as a teenager.
On re-reading 1984
Tag: Critiques of Hidden Persuasion
Stanley Milgram’s Forgotten Experiment
Marcia Holmes and Daniel Pick’s new article ‘Voices Off: Stanley Milgram’s cyranoids in historical context’ is available to read and download.
On Racial Judgment
David Theo Goldberg, director of the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute, on hidden assumptions about race in the policing and judgment of crime.
Rosser Reeves and the Death of Motivational Research
Advertising executive Paul Feldwick reflects on the history of his profession’s entanglement with psychology and hidden persuasion.
Manipulation Out of Control: J.A.M. Meerloo’s ‘Menticide’
Maarten Derksen uncovers the history of ‘menticide’, an alternative way to understand brainwashing made popular in Meerloo’s 1956 The Rape of the Mind.
Questions of Authority, Persuasion, and Belief: An Interview with Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett talks to Hidden Persuaders’ Daniel Pick about his ideas on ‘thought reform’, truth, narrative and belief.
Agents of Pacification, Agents of Change: Radical Psychiatry in 1969
How did mental health professionals respond to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s? Lucas Richert explores the radical psychiatry movement.
Persuasion in the Air: Background music and the authenticity of happiness
Alexandra Hui describes an early example of our cultural ambivalence about background music. In 1958 a journalist asked: does it make us happy, even when we would prefer not to be?
Reflections on ‘Interrogations: Psy Sciences, Coercion and Confession in a Time of Cold War’
To what extent did the events of the Cold War alter the methods, aims and spaces of interrogation? How might this history intersect with developments in the ‘psy’ sciences? In July 2016, the Hidden Persuaders project hosted a workshop on these questions.
Motivated or Manipulated? Ernest Dichter and David McClelland at Work
Kira Lussier, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, discusses a recent New York Times article on Amazon employees, placing its critique within the history of how motivational psychology has been used in the workplace.
