Being hit with anchors can be painful. Even more so when we are talking about psychological anchors, or so-called classical conditioning. Everyone has heard the expression “Pavlov’s dog.” It is used when describing the training of humans. A certain stimulus is presented to you; it activates an idea, an image, a memory, and you begin to feel in a particular way, depending on what has been evoked in your mind. Of course, beforehand, the stimulus must somehow be associated with what it is meant to trigger in you. This process of association is called conditioning. Most often, it consists of presenting the stimulus simultaneously with inducing (or reminding of) the state it is later supposed to activate. This does not happen the first time—it must be repeated in order to be “hammered” into the mind.

Up to this point, I am probably not saying anything new, at least not for most readers. Today, many people are familiar with what anchors are, with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and with the experiment known as “Ivan Pavlov’s dog.” What is interesting, however, is how all of this is used today.

In NLP courses, mostly positive examples are given—how to “anchor” oneself to pleasant memories in order to improve one’s mood. But anchoring is a neutral technique and can be used for both positive and negative influence. It is employed in behaviorist strategies aimed at training a person toward a certain behavior, or untraining them from another. Or at planting an idea.

So, as should already be clear, someone else can anchor us. If this someone knows us well, and is even familiar with our psychological profile, they can anticipate what associations we might make when presented with certain symbols, for example. Let us assume that a person has fears or complexes. These can be activated through symbols connected to them and thus intensified. Symbols can be anything—objects, images, keywords, gestures, photographs, texts, melodies, and so on.

For instance, if a person is anxious about aging and about no longer being in the “prime of youth,” someone could burden them psychologically by exposing them to symbols associated with old age. These symbols may be obvious and unambiguous—images of elderly people or their photographs, characteristic words and expressions, objects (canes, crutches, etc.). But they can also be more veiled, with their associative link to old age being deeper and less direct. For example, an old, worn-out car—an outdated model. Naturally, if a person simply sees such a car parked in front of their building, they would pay no attention to it. But if the car has something that draws attention—a sticker, an unusual paint color—and at the same time its owner begins parking it constantly next to the person’s own car, this will certainly attract notice. To reinforce the connection between the car and old age, one might show an elderly man standing inside or next to the vehicle.

The persistent intrusion into consciousness through emphasis and repetition creates a connection between the object and the symbol (in this case, the car). Once this connection is established, the person will always notice the car and its details. Over time, this can provoke certain emotions and states arising from the association of the car with the person’s own age. In short, the person will feel older and, accordingly, more uncomfortable. The effect may not be dramatic, but it will be constant—at least as long as the symbol continues to intrude. Perhaps even longer.

The details of the displayed object can also function as symbols carrying associative messages. In the negative example given, these could be used for psychological harassment—if the individual has already associated themselves with the old car, then one morning seeing its windshield cracked by a brick, for instance, could be interpreted as a threat and cause distress.

Symbols can be changed over time, depending on the context of the situation, the behavior of the target, and the strategy and intentions of the manipulator. On this basis, an entire staging—or even a serialized narrative of interlinked presentations—can be orchestrated.

To conclude, I will give one example of the power of associative suggestion. This concerns the following experiment conducted at New York University by the psychologist John Bargh.

Two groups of students were asked to form four-word sentences out of five given words. In one group, the provided words included terms associated with old age—“gray,” “forgetful,” “bald,” “wrinkle,” and so on. In the other group, such age-related words were absent.

After completing the task, the students had to walk down a long corridor to reach another room where the test was supposedly to continue. The real test, however, was the walk down the corridor itself. The researchers measured the time it took each student from both groups to pass through the corridor. It turned out that the students from the group whose word sets contained terms associated with old age walked significantly more slowly than those in the other group…