“Pass me the orange juice, please.” “Here you go. By the way, why did you buy orange juice?” “Excuse me? Why wouldn’t I buy orange juice?” “There are all kinds of juices. I’ve noticed you’ve been buying only orange juice lately.” “So? I didn’t know you wanted something else.” “Hm… Could it be related to […]

In reality, we see through our brains. Without visual information being “decoded” by it, what we see would be nothing more than a collection of colored spots. The brain is responsible for recognizing images and connecting them into things that make sense to us. It draws the images for us by choosing which of the […]

This very short film is not made to disgust us, but to make us think about how someone who knows us better than we know ourselves can “push our buttons.” This is the kind of thing we should be disgusted by. And be prepared for. YouTube:

More than once I have warned about manipulation by IT monopolies through the personal data they collect about us. Anyone who uses the internet has left behind massive amounts of information, from which a fairly precise psychological profile can be constructed—and, based on that, even future behavior can be predicted. This is done by digital […]

We’ve all heard that words can be bullets. What is less obvious is that these bullets can be selective. This is possible because every piece of information is perceived through the prism of an individual context—the mental state or psychological setup of the person receiving it. If the information comes in the form of text, […]

Identification is one of the core techniques of suggestion used in the internet and the media. As we have seen, almost anything can be the object of suggestion: a particular attitude toward ourselves, a certain interpretation of a situation, a deceptive idea about what someone thinks of us, a specific point of view, fears about […]

It is clear that moods and emotions are contagious. Cheerful people around us lift our own spirits, while depressed ones seem to pull us into their emotional swamp. Mental states can also be transmitted through novels, films, texts, poems, messages, paintings, photographs, colors, sounds, movements, and probably other things I am omitting at the moment. […]

Priming the conscious and subconscious mind with concepts, attitudes, and mental “settings” through targeted exposure to specific kinds of information is one of the most widely used influence techniques. A striking illustration of its power is an experiment associated with John Bargh at New York University. Because it is highly demonstrative of how subliminal suggestions […]