Behavioral psychologist, Chase Hughes, explains how demagogues and liars trick our minds into accepting and adopting false beliefs and manipulated self-identity. The mind manipulators employ psyops (psychological operations) or "engineered reality" or to deceive and convince.
- FATE, focus, authority, tribe and emotion, triggers the human brain. It is innate and automatic in human decision-making. The deceiver starts by hijacking our focus using tactics like repetition of trigger words, like unprecedented, urgent, stunning, etc., and shocking visuals. Authority figures are trotted out to create an aura of credibility. Messaging and narratives are created to polarize and create stark tribal in-groups (our good guy tribe, patriots) and out-groups (evil people, traitors). The deceiver's messaging also includes unsubstantiated emotional triggers backed up by little to no solid evidence. The goal is to incite emotions such an fear, anger, hope or outrage with no solid empirical basis for an emotional response. The deceiver replaces facts and sound reasoning with appeals to emotion. Emotional responses suppress critical thinking.
- Be suspicious of novelty because the human brain is wired to focus on new or sudden changes, which can present new threats or new opportunities. Deceivers stage and create events that break normal expectations. Assertions of a dramatic crisis or revelation attracts attention. It is an automatic evolutionary pro-survival response that is innate in humans. Ask why is there novelty and why is the message timed as it is. Consider whether a trending viral video or hashtag conveying bad behavior is coincidental with a simultaneous revelation of something else bad going on elsewhere that those bad actors want to divert attention from.
The video goes on to discuss other major traits that identity psyops, (i) uniform talking points by multiple sources, (ii) exploiting the hell out of cognitive dissonance by creating micro-agreements, (iii) follow the money to identify who benefits and what their motive is, e.g., look for funding sources or political connections with the deceiver, (iv) analyze the context boundary, e.g. manipulators shift the context to help normalize extreme behavior and disproportionate behavior, and (v) etc.
Micro-agreements are seemingly harmless concessions that shapes a person's self-identity over time and brings the person into better alignment with what the mind manipulator wants you to believe and value. For example, a politician can create an illusory group or tribe of good, moral or intelligent people by saying that "only good people do this", "we are the true Americans", "we and our values are under great threat", or "if you’re not with us, you’re against us." Ask yourself, am I being nudged to identify with some other group or belief? Claims of good vs evil usually signal a psyop.
In the case of an alleged national security emergency, e.g., a huge cyber attack, the manipulator can claim that extraordinary surveillance is needed despite privacy laws. Here, context boundary analysis asks how likely is the sacrifice of privacy rights to be truly necessary to deal with the alleged emergency. Is the emergency mostly real or mostly fabricated?
By weaponizing cognitive dissonance and shifting the context, Hughes says that a manipulator can get almost anyone to do almost anything.
