On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
::On Oct 20, 2006, at 9:40 AM, Renee Turner wrote:
::
::> > But in today's societies, dominated by applied behavioral
research
::
::What does that means? Is the President of France a behavioral
researcher.
No.
::Does premiere of China use behavioral research to dictate how
people act in
::China?
Yes.
::In my opinion today's societies are dominated by manufacturing,
trade,
::war and religion.
Of course they are. But why would people willingly allow
themselves to be
dominated by such things? The point of the line you plucked out of
context,
quite rightly, I believe, is that people can so easily be dominated
by these
machinations because the people employing and running them
understand how to
sell them to people. They understand how people will respond
(behave ->
"behavioral") to being told one thing versus another. Why would,
say, the
President of the United States proclaim a false reason for going to
war? And
what does it mean that that was, and -still is-, successful? As an
example, there are a shocking number of people in the US who still
believe that
Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were tied together, in spite of
overwhelming factual
evidence indicating that Saddam Hussein didn't trust or have
anything to do
with that organization.
That is not an accident. It wasn't a lucky guess on the
President's part that
people would hear that connection, make it, or keep it, even after
all credible
reason to do so had faded away.
The only point I would disagree on from the previous article is the
use of the
word "today's." Societies have always been dominated from the top
level by a
very profound understanding of human behavior, and it is by no
means a new
phenomena - religion, which you have cited, is one of the oldest
forms of social
control known to man. It couldn't possibly work, or resonante, if
it didn't
understand how people behave.
-Alexis
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