Survey Shows How Easy it is to Get People to Reverse Their Moral Compassselfnews Post How does this under-the-radar trick work, and is it possibly implemented on the people, but on a bigger scale? Last week, PLoS ONE reported the results of the research led by Lars Hall; cognitive scientist at Swedens Lund University. A two-page survey with 12 definitive statements about moral issues micro to macro to which 160 participants had to decide which level they either agreed or disagreed. What was the magic trick that slipped in the belief reversal? The survey statements they responded to were on what was only a square top-layer slip of paper. The back of the clipboard had a spot of glue to correlate with the slip. Since the survey was two pages, survey takers would flip the first page and the slip of their statements stuck to the back of the clipboard revealing the bottom layer. The new questions dealt with the same moral issues but some of the statements were completely opposite. Only two statements in each set were reworded and all the answers were left unchanged. One example was: Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism but forbidden was changed to permitted in the hidden questions. The participants were asked to read three of them aloud (including the two swapped ones) and talk about their answers. Interestingly, nearly half did not detect the statement reversal and almost 70% of participants accepted at least one of the changed statements. Hall thought it wasnt a way to fool people or unearth real feelings but showed how flexible people can be. But what if it really shows how easy it could be to manipulate cognitive behavior? Or, it could show an inefficiency of self-report questionnaires maybe simple statements cant convey peoples vast ideas and attitudes. And how extreme would the questions need to be to flag the attention of a would-be duped participant? The scope of this article cant cover all the forms of mass deception prevailing against our current culture: Bernays-like propaganda, the dark side of marketing, slight-of-mouth, psy-ops, the power of suggestion just to name a few forms. But a real chilling statement comes from a Boston College psychologist who found this technique as a means of moral persuasionintriguing.' Liane Young says: These findings suggest that if Im fooled into thinking that I endorse a view, Ill do the work myself to come up with my own reasons [for endorsing it]. That means these techniques could be (or already are) implemented en masse, maybe through public schools, the media, entertainment and more and the people would do the real work in endorsing their new program! Does that type of public mind control sound familiar? Orwells Ministry of Truth revising events within hours were at war with Eurasia, no Eastasia no! Actually, in 1984, the swap occurs much like the technique above. During Hate Week, an orator simply switches the enemys name from Eurasia to Eastasia mid-sentence and the people take on the new doublethink: Weve always been at war with Eastasia. Winston Smiths re-education produces in him false memories whichparallelsthe way he had to create false history for Minitrue and burn the truth down the memory hole. The people could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. George Orwell Source: linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 