An example of behavioural 'nudging'
Having studied
MindSpace findings on "automatic motivations," the top-ranked message comes as no surprise: if someone is faced with the choice of "protecting loved ones" from an existential threat — whether real or perceived — the decision is
automatic. From the standpoint of "defaults" (losses looms larger than gains), most empathetic human beings will not want to risk losing loved ones — a major loss — for the sake of (say) attending some social function — a minor gain. Moreover, they will be willing to make great sacrifices in order to avoid even larger losses, whether potentially real or perceived.
Another particularly nefarious and vicious example of these coercive "framing" techniques would be the example of a
speech given by current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a recent campaign stop for the 2021 Canadian Federal Elections. Referring to the "anti-vaxxers" outside the campaign event, Trudeau made the following remarks: "They are putting at risk their own kids, and they're putting at risk our kids as well." Emphasizing the nature of the commitments made by the population, Trudeau added, "Canadians made incredible sacrifices over the past year and a half. "
These seemingly simple statements frame reality in very specific terms. They target the natural "automatic motivations" found in all healthy human beings in a very precise manner, namely, the desire to protect one's offspring. The narrative suggests there exists two fundamentally opposed groups — arbitrarily defined as the vaccinated and unvaccinated — and suggests one group is actually threatening the other group's children.
This is perhaps one of the most aggressive, inflammatory, and divisive remarks any government official could make because it directly targets one of the most primal instincts in human beings: the desire to protect one's offspring. However, all the scientific evidence absolutely demonstrates how little at risk children are, the chance of death from covid-19 among those below 18 being far below 1%. Despite these facts, the narrative frames the threat of danger against the in-group's children as an existential threat from the out-group i.e. "the unvaxxed."
Moreover, in respect to "two weeks to flatten the curve," we can observe the use of NLP "timelines." NLP practitioners might give the example of time serving as a powerful frame of reference for shaping someone's motivation and mental state. If someone is told they have one hour to write an essay vs. two weeks to write the same essay, the emotional response and mental state will be markedly different. In this respect, virtually no one would have accepted two months or two years to flatten the curve, but "two weeks" was an initial commitment that most reasonable good-intentioned people were willing to commit to. In NLP terms, the emotional response to lockdowns and the "timelines" for flattening the curve were then simply "calibrated," with new "timelines" used to reframe future scenarios and responses.
While some of these techniques may be considered intuitive, and definitely not new, consider the use of "timelines" for shaping behavior more generally. While warnings of climate doomsday scenarios with biblical floods and fires have been around for a while, the MSM and related climate "experts" have recently given humanity "
12 years." 12 years suddenly became the number defining timelines for creating global legally-binding climate responses dictated by supranational institutions.
We are given a 12 year timeline before it's too late to prevent the biblical floods, fires, and tornados. But is this "the science," or is it an NLP "timeline" meant to nudge people into a given direction
without any actual science or alternatives?
What if we don't have only 12 years to stop the world from boiling over? What if we have 20 or 50 years? What if the 12 year conclusion is fundamentally wrong because its assumptions and methods are fundamentally flawed and have led to previous wrong conclusions? What if we have time to introduce a fusion economy before we transition away from fossil fuels?
So, today the many public messaging incantations by governments across the Five Eyes make use of NLP frames and NLP devices like cues, anchors, unconscious priming, and the targeting of natural "defaults" in our decision-making process. With these various techniques,
MindSpace authors created a framework by which policy-makers could begin to use the "context model" in order to effectively harness the power to influence and guide people's unconscious minds into making decisions which they otherwise would not make, were they approached with the "traditional" model of behaviour change.
Unfortunately, since the initial release of
MindSpace, two other spell books were released:
EAST, and
Behavioural Government. Both build on the initial insights of
MindSpace. Today, the leaders of these new behaviour modification programs speak of going even "beyond nudging" in such a way that the behaviours and makeup of society can be transformed on previously unimagined scales across all spheres of life, including the economy, the environment, healthcare, and even the reorganization of the financial system. UN agencies and other
supranational bodies have now all become busy introducing these insights to fundamentally alter the shape of humanity.
This takes us to our next example, found in the
EAST manual.
EAST
Following the 2010
MindSpace document was the mnemonic device
EAST. It continued to build on the initial insights laid out in
MindSpace, elaborating additional insights like the idea of "make it social," which we can now see put into practice everywhere.
As the
EAST introduction explains:
"In the early years, we often used the MINDSPACE framework, and indeed some of the team were centrally involved in developing it. We still use this framework. But we found in seminars that its nine elements were hard for busy policy makers to keep in mind (itself reflecting 'cognitive chunking'). At the same time, we found in our day-to-day trials and policy work that some of the most reliable effects came from changes that weren't easily captured by MINDSPACE, or indeed by much of the academic literature. For example, we have often found that simplifying messages, or removing even the tiniest amount of 'friction' in a process, can have a large impact. For these reasons, we wanted to develop a shorter, simple mnemonic — the EAST framework.[3]EAST lays out four basic strategies for increasing the population's compliance with government policy:
- Make it easy
- Make it attractive
- Make it social
- Make it timely
The description of "Make it social" found in the Executive Summary on page 5 serves as a useful example of the overall approach and its power.
© EAST
Consider the sudden rise of "Zoom calls" ritualizing the collective sacrifice of the population by "making it social." The sudden rise of feel-good moments premised on compliance with government-mandated policies were turned into ritual social events, framing the government's enactment of emergency measures as a means for people to embrace collective sacrifice for the sake of "protecting loved ones" and humanity as a whole. Zoom calls among atomized individuals became a way of honoring their "commitments" to flattening the curve. A significant portion of all covid-19 messaging was framed as a question of personal and collective sacrifice for the greater good — ritualizing it — essentially exploiting people's innate goodwill and good nature.
At this point, we should point out that these efforts are not new. They represent the culmination of a century-long effort to perfect psychological warfare by the top echelons of the Anglo-American oligarchy. In his 1931
The Scientific Outlook, Lord Bertrand Russell, a descendent of one of the oldest imperial lines of Britain, outlined this outlook:
"The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play... all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called "cooperative" i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.
Bertrand Russell —
The Scientific Outlook (1931)Whether personal sacrifice, a commitment to "protecting loved ones," or the suggestion that "most healthcare workers" are getting vaccinated, almost all public messaging policies are framed to target these "automatic motivations" and trigger the unconscious and effortless parts of our minds in order to create a "cooperative" population.
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