Part 5 of our Emotional Engineering series explores how guilt and shame shape collective behavior. We examine how institutions – from governments and media to corporations – leverage these powerful emotions to manufacture consent and encourage conformity, drawing on psychology and philosophy to illuminate this subtle form of influence. Emotional Engineering: Understanding Guilt and Shame…
Introduction Modern institutions and systems have become adept at using carrots instead of sticks. From workplaces to social media, we are nudged, enticed, and rewarded into desired behaviors every day. Rather than overt threats or punishments, subtle incentive structures do much of the heavy lifting in securing our cooperation. Indeed, how incentives shape compliance is…
Modern society is often compared to an invisible prison without bars – a place where we constantly feel the panoptic gaze of cameras, authorities, peers, and even ourselves. Panopticism, a concept born of an 18th-century prison design and later expanded by philosophers, describes how people under surveillance begin to police their own behavior. In today’s…
In this installment of The Psychology of Control, we examine a powerful principle: a statement repeated often enough can start to feel true. The old adage “repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is widely attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and disturbingly, decades of research suggest there’s something to it. From…
Introduction: Obedience, Authority, and Mass Compliance Why do people obey even when it conflicts with their personal morals or interests? This question lies at the heart of the psychology of obedience. Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from an authority figure, often doing something…
