Advertising: How Psychology Can Be Used Against Us

What happens when your own people(psychologists) turn on you?

I’ve always been fascinated by the advertising industry, firstly, because so much money is invested in it, and secondly, because of the overwhelming effect it has on our society as a whole.

If you’re a psychology student, you are now well aware of the fact that our perception is greatly flawed, and you also probably know that we possess many cognitive biases. In turn, advertising agencies use this against us by preying on these particular flaws. How, you may ask, do they accomplish this? Well, it all comes down to psychologists, their experiments, and the questionnaires they administer.

In 1895, Harlow Gale was the first psychologist to incorporate theory and scientific methods in advertising and the process of persuasion. He was responsible for developing some of the first advertising surveys and experiments. Gale’s main intention was to uncover the effects of advertising on attention and memory. What was of particular interest to him was how people processed ads. He concluded that an individual’s attitude toward the ad depended on a myriad of psychological phenomena: affective and cognitive aspects, central and peripheral cues, issue involvement, personal influence and unconscious attitude formation.

One of the first psychologists to work with the enemy (the advertising agency) was the father of behaviourism himself: John B. Watson. After getting fired from his academic post at John Hopkins University, he started working at one of New York City’s largest advertising agencies. He proposed that an advertisement’s effectiveness will depend on its’ appeal to 3 innate emotions: love, fear and rage.

Since the 1950s, psychologists have been working closely with advertising agencies and other behavioural scientists to create the most effective advertising campaigns. They conduct experiments, administer personality and other psychological tests, all in hopes of discovering our predispositions and susceptibilities to certain kinds of advertisement stimuli.

We often think of psychological tests within a clinical setting, being administered with the honourable intention of assessing a potentially distressed individual. However, it’s important that, we, as a society, acknowledge that tests can be used instead to coerce and persuade us into behaving in a particular manner.

I don’t suggest for the average consumer to become cynical, but rather critical. As consumers, we must simply become more wary of the fact that advertisements can penetrate beneath the surface of our consciousness.

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