There are people in the world whose sole mission is to consciously engineer, direct and influence every decision our kids make, from the time they get up each morning, to whom they associate with, to what they manipulate us to buy for them, to what college they go to, or if they go to college at all. These “missionaries” operate as society’s “Choice Architects.”
The best of them are considered by University of Chicago Economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein as paternalistic libertarians who only wish to Nudge us and our kids in directions they deem good for our mental and physical health. The worst of them are Ponzi-cons like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford who deliberately design choices that optimally benefit them and theirs and severely damage you and me and our kids.
Short of living in a cave on bread made from wheat we’ve grown ourselves and water collected from condensation on the walls, we are all subject to the manipulative efforts of society’s Choice Architects. And the Choice Architects are avidly at work learning precisely how the brain works, all in the hopes of designing earlier and more powerful brand obsessions, while increasing the number of Americans who buy things we don’t need and become dysfunctional hoarders (currently 6 million), and positioning candidates to win political elections by a landslide. Since we can’t beat the Choice Architects, one option is to learn a bit about how they work and pass that learning on to our kids.
The Most Interesting Man in the World
Martin Lindstrom is such an architect. The author of Buy-Ology, and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, he travels the globe 300 days a year on the corporate dole designing experiments to look precisely inside the consumer’s brain. His goal is to become the Choice Architect who ultimately succeeds in turning consumerism into a religion, which won’t be such a tough challenge – our brains already display the same activity when viewing familiar brands as when we view religious images! Jesus on the Cross and a Dos Equis Beer – to brain neurons they both represent “the most interesting man in the world.”
The Ten Pillars of Spirit
To strengthen that brain brand response even further, Lindstrom has identified The Ten Pillars Common to All Religions. He is busily at work trying to get corporations to design them into their ad campaigns. Briefly, those Ten Pillars are: a sense of belonging; a clear vision; power over enemies; sensory appeal; storytelling; grandeur; evangelism; symbols; mystery and rituals. More and more you can expect to see Choice Architects incorporating these elements into their pitches. All those along with one more … fear.
Seeing is Disbelieving
Why fear? Because the amygdala in the brain is prewired and on constant Red Alert to pay attention to threats in the environment, real and imagined. And Choice Architects know that one of the greatest threats we fear is social ostracism, to which we are especially vulnerable as teenagers. But adults are vulnerable as well. Take this experiment performed in the 1950s by Solomon Asch: which of the lines A, B, or C on the right is the same length as X? Anybody in their right mind can see it’s B. But suppose a group of experimenter confederates working with the Chief Choice Architect all said line C was the closest match? You’d still say line B, right? Except for one thing: Gregory Berns and his colleagues at Emory University replicated this famous Asch experiment and scanned people’s brains while they performed it. The result: for many people social pressure actually caused the visual and parietal cortex in the brain to change the information that the eyes took in. The stress of social pressure literally changed how the brain processed what was seen. Under even minor stress – which many police detectives know from long experience – seeing is not always believing.
Turning Beautiful Ugly
These and other limitations of the brain are something that the Choice Architects over at the website Beautiful People apparently have little clue about, since they are now offering sperm and eggs for in vitro fertilization to people who don’t qualify to be listed on their beauteous website. Isn’t that special? What these architects fail to realize, of course, is that true beauty is in the brain and heart of the beholder, and only superficially in the eye.
So, we need to teach our children that the decisions and choices we are tempted to make in response to fear in our lives, really needs to be respected – respected in the sense of the original meaning of the word: to look once again. Kids need to learn to trust in fear as a signal calling them to pay closer attention, and that it’s probably best to delay fear-based decisions and get other people’s perspectives to help us manage our own limbic system and beat the Choice Architects at their own game.
Hi Mark,
Fascinating topic! Thank you for this.You got me to thinkin’…..Diane
Mark,
Thank you for dedicating a blog to this topic. I also feel that it is central to how we are shaped and shape our young ones.
I always tell my kids that the most fun thing about advertisements is making them, though I cannot not see myself in the business because it feels like making trivial stuff important.
I like the idea of noticing fear as a signal that I experience a state of emergency–a false emergency in the case of buying into commercials.
Best,
Dorit
As I read your post, I found myself grateful to my mother who decades ago sat with me as we watched television, and picked apart the commercials. “If gentlemen prefer Hanes,” she once said, “let THEM wear them.” We made a game of it, spotting the manipulations. Her healthy skepticism and bemused refusal to be bullied by those (m)admen stuck. I’m now delighted and tickled to hear my seven-year old making similar insightful fun of the fear-based “debt reduction” commercials constantly aired when we watch his beloved baseball team on television. Wish me luck when we enter the teen years, with its limbic surge…
This is fabulous – in the olde and new senses of the word. Something right out of science fiction. If it weren’t long over, I’d be writing a script for the original Star Trek right now. We might have to blame it on a mist or atmosphere on the planet “Stress”. Breathing a bit of the Stress air and your brain would actually change to see things as beautiful that aren’t …. Hey, I think that was a Star Trek episode!
This feels like that slippery slope you discover in adolescence, the one where you realize there is no capital “T” Truth. There are many things that are true – or so we thought at that time, but now that one of our primary measuring devices (our vision) is in question at the level of neurological change we are back to asking, “What do we really know?” “What can be known?”
For me, as a school teacher, working in a stressful environment with stressed kids, the implications are frightening, indeed.
Hi Mark,
Boy I second Gary’s remark. I really liked this column. You have named and supported observations I have made for 23 years as a parent of four, helping me understand some of the impotence I have often felt, as if I am battling something SO much bigger than myself in this work. Indeed, we as parents are. We need each other and good information such as this to begin to wrestle with this dragon, understand our own power and take back the streets for the real needs of children and parents.
Thank you
This research might be well applied to peri-divorce decision-making.
Mark!
I’m a body-centered therapist in Santa Monica and I always read (and disseminate) your essays. But this week’s just thrilled me. I can’t wait to share it with my friends and clients. Thank you very very much. What a gift your blog is!
Gary Glickman