“ I’ve been wondering for years why so many people believe things that are obviously false so I decided to do some research on how propaganda actually works on the human brain because there is a pattern here. The people who fall for propaganda are not randomly distributed across the population they share very specific psychological vulnerability that propaganda is deliberately designed to exploit.
Propaganda has been a science for almost almost 100 years and the people using propaganda against you right now know exactly what they’re doing. Here are the ways propaganda actually works on your brain:
The repetition trap. Repeat the same lies so many times you’ve stopped noticing that they are lies. That is not by accident ! In 1977 psychologists Lin Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Topino at Villanova and Temple universities conducted a study where they showed volunteers a series of statements. Some of those statements were true and some of those statements were false. They showed these statements across multiple sessions weeks apart from each other. What they found destroyed the assumption that people can simply recognise false information. Statements that were repeated over multiple sessions were rated as significantly more truthful than statements they had only seen once. Itdidn’t matter whether that statement was actually true. It didn’t matter whether the person knew the statement was false before going into the study. Repetition overrode prior knowledge almost almost every time.
Psychologists call it the “illusionary truth effect” when the brain mistakes familiarity with truth – more times you hear something the more times your brain processes that thing is credible not because the evidence changed but because repetition makes information easier to process and your brain interprets at ease as reliability. That is why the stolen election lie did not die after sixty one courts rejected it. That is why the claim that immigrants caused more crime persists after every study shows the opposite. That is why vaccines and autism remain linked in many peoples minds despite the original study being retracted and its author losing his medical license for fraud. These people were not persuaded by evidence. They were worn down by volume – say it enough times and the brain starts to believe it. That is a default setting for most human brains – the only way to defeat that is with education.
The engineering of consent propaganda does not work by changing your mind it works by bypassing your mind entirely. In 1928 Edward Bernas, the man widely regarded as the father of modern public relations, published a book called “Propaganda ”. In the book he described with remarkable truth exactly how public opinion is manufactured and controlled. He believed that manipulating the public is not just acceptable in a democracy it’s necessary! He considered himself one of the people doing it. It is called the “engineering of consent” – the deliberate manipulation of public opinion not through argument or evidence but through the strategic control of symbols, emotions and associations that bypass rational thought entirely.
You do not convince people you make them feel something and then you attach that feeling to whatever you want them to believe. This is the entire operating model of right wing media. Fox News does not deliver information, it delivers outrage contempt – the warm satisfaction of having an enemy to blame – the facts are not important.
The feeling is the product you do not come away more informed you come away more afraid more angry and more certain that the people on the other side of your enemies. Bernas named this method in 1928 and it has been running at an industrial scale in American right wing media for 30 years.
If the fire hose of falsehood repetition is not enough enough on its own if repetition creates belief and emotion bypasses reason the most powerful propaganda strategy is not to tell just one convincing lie it’s the hundreds of unconnected lies simultaneously at maximum volume across every available channel faster than anyone can fact check them
in 2016 researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews at the Ryan corporation published the study on how certain political movements use lies as deliberate weapon weapons. research researchers called this the “fire hose of falsehood”. It’s when a political movement deliberately floods every information channel with so many lies so fast that the population loses its ability to identify what’s true or not anymore. The goal is not to convince anyone of any specific thing – the goal is to destroy the shared factual foundation that makes coherent public debate possible. That is when nobody agrees on what is true.
Watch any of the Trump press conferences from the last 10 years – researchers at the Washington Post counted over 30,000 false or misleading statements during his first term alone. The volume of lies is not incompetence it’s a strategy no fact checking operation on earth can keep up with. So it does not need to win any argument, it just needs to make argument itself.
There is another mechanism that makes propaganda almost impossible to reverse once it has taken hold. In 1957 psychologist Leon Feser at Stanford University published his landmark research on cognitive dissonance. He found that when people hold a belief that is contradicted by evidence, they do not update their beliefs but experience psychological pain and then construct whatever justification is necessary to protect that belief from the evidence. Psychologists call this this “ protective cognition” when a belief becomes so fused with a person’s sense of who they are that someone challenging that belief stops processing incoming information at all – it processes that information as a threat responds to such threats the way it always does with aggression. This is why Trump supporters who lost their jobs because of tariffs still defend tariffs. This is why every piece of evidence that Trump committed crimes is processed not as evidence but as proof of the conspiracy against Trump
Propaganda is not designed to convince everyone it’s designed to find the most vulnerable people in the room and exploit them. the people with fragile identities, the people who lost community, the people who need belonging badly enough to accept any story that provides it.
If you can see the mechanism behind propaganda you were never the target but the people who cannot see it are everywhere – and there were enough of these people to change the outcome of an election. The people running this operation are not trying to convince you they’re counting on you doing nothing while they convince everyone else.
Some people will wake up when the lies finally cost them something they cannot ignore. But most people won’t. The answer is not to argue louder it’s to understand exactly what we’re up against. Propaganda is a science and so is the resistance. The propaganda machine is running on the most vulnerable people in your life right now and it won’t stop until it costs them something they cannot explain away.”
(I have slightly edited Mr Bean’s arguments)
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 