(225)S11E1/3: Pareidolia, Priming, and Propaganda
Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast.
Derek:In this episode, we are continuing to lay the groundwork for understanding propaganda. While we dove deep into the inner workings of propaganda in our last episode, Today, we're gonna look more at the periphery of propaganda. To put it into a metaphor, we've already discussed the planting, the tending, and the growing of propaganda. But today, we're gonna talk about the preparation for propaganda, the tilling of the soil to make ready for the planting. Now to understand this preparation or this priming for propaganda, I wanna talk to you a bit about a word called pareidolia.
Derek:Now, pareidolia is a really fascinating feature of human perception. But rather than try to explain exactly what pareidolia is, I want you to experience it for yourself. Okay. So, I'm gonna play a sound and I want you to think about what you're hearing.
Derek:It was a sunny day and the children were going to the park.
Derek:What did you hear? Okay. Now, I'm gonna play the sound again, but this time, I want you to think of the phrase, it was a sunny day and the children were going to the park.
Derek:It was a sunny day and the children were going to the park.
Derek:And what did you hear this time? Okay. Let's try another one.
Derek:The camel was kept in a cage at the zoo.
Derek:Did you hear anything this time? Okay. Now, think of the phrase, the camel was kept in a cage at the zoo.
Derek:The camel was kept in a cage at the zoo.
Derek:Did you hear it this time? This is an example of paranoia. Now, can have visual paranoia too, but audio paranoia lends itself better for a podcast. I'll I'll link a few resources in the show notes for you to check out more paradolia, both visual and audio. Anyway, paradolia is basically the perception of specified order where none is present.
Derek:The sign waves that you heard were not speech, but rather just noise. Yet, we can perceive an ordered message as emanating from those unordered waves. Visually, we can do the same thing when we see shapes in clouds, a man in the moon, a face on Mars, or letters in everyday objects that you can frame and hang in your house to spell out your last name after you get buried. That's all pareidolia. Now there are a number of theories as to why we have this perceived order where none is present.
Derek:One explanation is that it's better for our survival if we see order even where none is present. It's better for me to imagine seeing a tiger silhouette in a tall grass where no tiger exists than to not see a real camouflaged tiger present just because I didn't see a fully formed invisible tiger. If I had to see the whole tiger clearly to perceive it, if I was unable to extrapolate tiger from limited visual cues or an incomplete broken image of a tiger, that could be pretty dangerous to my health. Now we can see something similar in a seemingly more benign example. Did you ever wonder how it is that we can recognize a font we've never seen before other than perhaps say Wingdings which is not recognizable?
Derek:Well, we can recognize the letter A in a completely new font because of the way that our brains work in perceiving similarities in objects. Our brains extrapolate from known images and if it finds sufficient similarity, then we can recognize new images that we haven't seen before. We can do the same thing with faces. Many of us can recognize people that we haven't seen for twenty years because even though their body shape and facial features have changed, sometimes even very substantially, our brains can find sufficient patterns to extrapolate identity. It's actually a pretty big deal if you can't extrapolate identity from one moment to the next.
Derek:There's a disorder in which people can't recognize faces, a disorder known as, and I'm gonna butcher this pronunciation, but prosopagnosia. Now some individuals with this disorder have extreme difficulty recognizing even their family members or their closest friends. Recognizing patterns and seeing or inferring meaning is is extremely important to life for continuity and understanding and just for getting along. While our brains are amazing machines with fascinating survival mechanisms, these mechanisms are not only able to make mistakes like we saw with pareidolia, they're also able to be purposefully exploited. Let me give you two of my favorite examples of what I would consider taking advantage of this tendency for our brains to perceive a reality which isn't really present.
Derek:The first example comes from a book that I read a long time ago. So I don't really remember tons of specific details, but I know that I loved the book when I read it, and it was called Secret Soldiers. The book is about an experimental group of soldiers which consisted largely of artists, like all kinds of artists, from sculptors to painters to audio artists or technicians. Like you name it, they had that type of artist in in this company division, whatever it was. Their job was to divert German attention away from the real threat.
Derek:The group would do all kinds of things to cause the Germans to perceive some some false threat. So they would like create dummy tanks, dummy soldiers, they would camouflage those things well enough to be believable like, hey, it really looks like they tried to camouflage it here, but poorly enough so that it could be seen by the air or other units looking on. So they would they would create custom insignia and patches for the unit that they were impersonating, you know, the unit that they wanted the Germans to think was somewhere. And then they would drive through towns over and over and over again to make it look like there was a large force of of this unit from, you know, a particular division in the area or whatnot. The audio guys even like as they were as, you know, they were trying to mimic a big group coming in in the night when you couldn't see them, the audio guys would actually create sounds of tanks rolling in to accompany the deployment of their dummies that would be set up and visible in the morning.
Derek:And the sound was a part of making the whole scene look believable. It was absolutely fascinating, and not just fascinating but astounding, like in the bravery of these guys because a lot of them weren't really fighters. I mean, were they kinda went through basic training and, okay, they had they had some understanding of it, but like they were artists. So the goal of this small group of artists was basically to draw the full force of the German army to their position so that the real unit that they represented could, you know, take the bridge without the bridge being blown up or could flank the Germans. You know, the Germans were like, wait a second, I thought you guys were like 50 miles south and now all of a sudden, we've got this huge division, you know, attacking us from the north.
Derek:Like, where did they come from? How can they be in two places at once? It was amazing. So a lot of thought and effort went into the presentation of this unit. But why?
Derek:Why couldn't they just create some false memos or communications that the Germans could intercept because they did that kind of stuff sometimes, you know? Why not just say over the radio, such and such a unit is moving to location x? Well, the reason is because the Germans were aware that false information was often given with the intent that it be intercepted and believed. In order to prepare the Germans to believe the information, the the seeds of information being planted to be grown in their minds, the Allies first tilled and prepared the soil by appealing to the German senses. When the senses of the Germans perceived with their ears that tanks were rolling in, and they saw with their eyes that there appeared to be tanks and men, they began to look for information that confirmed what their senses were telling them.
Derek:They began to see something that wasn't really there. They began to believe information that wasn't really true because they expected it to be true. The expectation created by what the Germans experienced with their senses was integral to the Germans buying into faulty information. There are a number of stories in the book where something went wrong in the setup. You know, maybe a dummy tank blew over, or an insignia didn't correctly match the unit that they attempted to impersonate.
Derek:I don't remember exactly what all went wrong, but there were definitely some some moments where where things went wrong. There were plenty of times that if the Germans had looked closely or been critical, if they had been skeptical, they could have easily recognized the Allied ploy. But they didn't recognize it, in part because expectations often create our reality, our perception. The Germans thought that there was order present, like the massing of a division on their southern flank, when in reality, that perception was faulty. A bunch of artists took advantage of human psychology and perception.
Derek:Another example of this kind of thing, is far from the battlefield, yet no less artistic, is in regard to the culinary arts. I recently listened to a book entitled Off Menu, which I think quite nicely uncovers how our perceptions create our realities. Now I wasn't anticipating that I'd like the book all that much, it was just kind of a filler from the free Audible Plus catalog. But I actually ended up liking it a lot, and it it ended up corresponding to, to the season that we're doing. The author goes through a plethora of examples of how our perception of food is influenced by senses other than taste.
Derek:So serving beans from a decorated glass bowl makes them taste better to people than serving them from the pot or heated up in the can. The noisy, noisy crinkling of a chip bag, that causes people to perceive their chips as crunchier and fresher than if they're served in a quieter bag. Buying a more expensive wine or being told that a particular wine is more expensive causes one to perceive it as being of higher quality. And the list goes on. The book really gives you tons and tons of of these types of things.
Derek:Now I used to think my wife was crazy for making extra bowls dirtier so she could serve food in style rather than straight from the pots. Why would I want to do more dishes? But you know, maybe there really is something to presentation. The way that food is presented to us actually alters our beliefs and therefore our experiences of food. It tastes different, the texture's different, its freshness is different, and its quality is different even though nothing about the product is different other than its presentation.
Derek:Amazing. Okay. So we're now like twelve ish minutes into this episode and we still haven't talked about propaganda. So let's cut to the chase here. Why am I talking about pareidolia in a season about propaganda?
Derek:Well, this season is going to mostly be focused on the manipulation of information. Information in the form of ideas and propositions. Nevertheless, I think it's vitally important to illuminate this idea of preparing the soil, tilling the ground, and making straight the path that leads us down to propaganda. It is extremely important that we recognize the fact that the manipulation of our perception through our senses is often a necessary preliminary to the presentation of ideological propaganda. Just like the Germans saw the fake division with their own eyes before believing the proposition that they were actually being flanked, or just as you hear the freshness of the chips in the crinkle of the bag before you experience their extra fresh crunchy taste.
Derek:So, we are often primed in various ways before we are ready to fully embrace the propositions that propaganda seeks to sell us. Priming is pre propaganda. It's the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. As just one great example of priming, I'd refer you to Neil Postman's book, How to Watch TV News. Now Postman provides a number of great insights, but just one will suffice to give you an example of priming in action.
Derek:Postman talks about the general layout of a news crew and explains how they're often set up to mimic a family. You often have two main hosts, a male and a female, who are parental, you know, a little bit older sometimes. Then you have your goofy uncle, the sportscaster. Rather than merely convey the news to you, there is often humor, banter, and sometimes a familial sort of interaction. Your local news isn't just a source of information, it's a family.
Derek:When I was growing up, the news outlet in our area did what they called backyard weather. And the the weather guy and the crew would actually come out to your house, you'd invite them, and they'd have like a picnic with you, and then do the weather from your backyard with your family in the background. That news channel was our family. Now, are a lot of other priming actions that we could look at like the placement of a segment in a news program, or its placement and framing on the front page or in the middle of a newspaper. Lots of different subtle things, subtle cues that kind of influence how we perceive things.
Derek:There's also things like the selection of a picture to portray a suspect or a victim or a world leader, all kinds of stuff. The list could go on and on and on. There's a lot that goes into framing information and propaganda. There's a lot that goes into priming you before that information is ever actually delivered and sifted through in your mind. Now, even after preparing this episode, this is still one of those areas where I have a hard time believing this stuff.
Derek:I either think that scientists are very wrong about priming, or I think that I must be superhuman because I just don't believe that this kind of stuff impacts me. How can I really be duped by the crinkling of a chip bag or the composition of a news crew? I judge information relatively unbiasedly, don't I? Now, Ameritrade made these fantastic commercials a while back about not judging too quickly, which I'll link in the show notes. But I think these commercials help us to see how all of us, even and probably especially those of us who think that we're superhuman, all of us are susceptible.
Derek:I'll briefly describe one of my favorites here because just in case you don't get to see it, it's pretty funny. So there's this guy walking his dog in the park while he's eating a brownie in his other hand and, you know, holding the leash in the one hand. The dog yanks the leash and causes the man to drop his brownie on the ground. Now you can tell that the guy really wants to eat the brownie because he debates, like you can see him debating in his mind whether he can still eat it or not. He decides it's good, bends down, picks it up with his napkin, and then he eats it.
Derek:Now at that exact moment, you see a kid and her grandma on this bench, and they make a disgusted face at the man because to them, it looked like he just picked up poop from his dog and ate it. It's hilarious. And probably one of the best ones is when there's this doctor and they're standing over this guy in a bed and, you know, the guy's asleep or whatever after surgery. And he takes these like these electrical pads and there's a fly buzzing around his head and he zaps the fly with the electrical pads. The fly lands on this guy's chest and he looks down at the fly and he says, well, that killed him.
Derek:And right as he's saying that, this the mom and the daughter walk into the room and of course they think that their dad husband is dead. It's terrible, but it's also hilarious at the same time. I think what these videos help us to see is that there are that we're always viewing the world through some kind of lens, through some kind of framing. When the guy was eating his brownie, his frame was his own. He was hungry.
Derek:And maybe this was his favorite brownie from his favorite shop, or maybe he just got off of a diet and didn't want any sweets to go to waste, like he missed eating sweet stuff. Maybe it was the last batch of his birthday brownies that he only gets once a year. I don't know. He really wanted to eat that brownie though, and a few germs weren't that big of a deal to him. Just landed in the grass for a few seconds, no big deal.
Derek:But to the grandma and the kids sitting on the bench, they see people all around them walking dogs and picking up poop. They're not even thinking about the possibility of brownies here. There's just no context for that. It's not that they think it would be impossible for somebody to have a brownie, it's just that they have no reason to be thinking about brownies and every reason to be thinking of dog poop because in the context of the park, that's their frame. Now framing determines what thoughts are most readily available to us in the forefront of our minds and which explanations we'll accept.
Derek:Context is extremely powerful in the formation of our ideas and our conclusions. While it's not the scope of this season to focus on priming or framing, it is vital to know about, not only because there will be some of this that we do touch on throughout the season, but also because it's an aspect that you might want to dig further into. My rationale for not digging deep into priming in this season is because it's not really an aspect that we have a whole lot of control over. It happens largely in the subconscious. If I'm gonna eat a bag of chips, I can't help but hear the crinkle, and I can't help how my brain perceives that.
Derek:I don't have control over those things, like whether a product is crunchy or whether I perceive someone who hands me a warm cup of coffee is more friendly than someone who hands me a cold cup of water. I can't help whether I read a story on the front page of the newspaper or in the middle. I don't get to place that information. What I do have control over is evaluating propositions and ideas for truthfulness in light of the knowledge that information is always viewed through some frame. Unfortunately, it's rarely possible to fully parse out the frame through which we're viewing information.
Derek:Now does that mean arriving at a true conclusion is impossible? I don't think so. I don't think that the answer is to focus too heavily on framing and priming or on psychoanalyzing every purveyor of information. Rather, I think the answer is twofold. First, we must always be open to an alternative conclusion.
Derek:Be open to the idea that we might be wrong. That's what all those don't judge too quickly commercials were about, showing us that our conclusions can be wrong when viewing information through the wrong frame. So be open to being wrong. The second solution is to try on many frames, just like you try on many lenses when you have your eyes checked at the eye doctor. As you view information through various lenses, you often find that you see more or less clearly through different frames, and that no one lens is going to provide you with perfect clarity.
Derek:To correct my myopia to become twentytwenty vision, two different prescriptions lens powers are often required, a different strength for each eye. And I think that's true when talking about truth here as well, and it helps to explain why polarization is one of the key results of being propagandized. Propaganda hates alternative frames. A propagandized position seeks to be your exclusive savior and dispenser of so called truth. It seeks to be the only lens.
Derek:Any one group's propaganda wants to be the only frame through which you process information. And whether that's propaganda of your church denomination, your political party, or your economic system, each one wants to be your one and only when it comes to intellectual intercourse. Now, I'm a strong advocate of monogamy when it comes to human coupling and I think intellectual monogamy is vital as well. However, that monogamy must be not to an intellectual position that strikes our fancy, but rather it ought to be monogamy with truth. Unfortunately, most of us are having an affair with some anti intellectual fling, some group that makes us feel good about ourselves, that gives us a feeling of power and control, or that whispers sweet nothings into our ear.
Derek:You can continue if you choose to be seduced by propaganda. She is a fantastic lover, so long as you're willing to leave your first love, the truth. Just know that like all affairs, this one too will eventually lead to divorce. In the case of propaganda, that means living a life divorced from truth. Ironically, in thinking yourself free, you will find yourself enslaved as there's nothing more enslaving than lies and delusion.
Derek:Only the truth can set you free. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.
Derek:This podcast is a part of the
Derek:Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.
