Day-to-Day Manipulation Without Awareness

In Osman’s study (2020), people were first asked to volunteer examples of how they thought psychological tactics were used to unconsciously manipulate them in their day-to-day lives. This study was run in 2018. These examples were presented to different sets of people in two further experiments that were run in 2018 and 2019 (Osman, 2020). They were then presented again, in three other experiments, run in 2020, to see if the findings could be replicated and extended (Osman & Bechlivanidis, 2021).

Of the many illuminating aspects of these two studies (Osman, 2020; Osman & Bechlivanidis, 2021), two are worth highlighting.

Common beliefs about manipulation

1. Age, gender, religion, political affiliation, and educational level don’t really separate us when it comes to what we believe about where and by how much we expect to be manipulated without our awareness. For example, research (e.g., psychological studies, medical studies using placebos) and therapy (using hypnotic methods) are generally where manipulation without awareness is judged to happen the most. When it comes to thinking about direct, personal experiences of manipulations without awareness, the most common by far occur on social media, and the next most common include marketing/advertising and political campaigning.

2. There is no reliable relationship between the amount of manipulation without awareness that we believe we are experiencing and the amount of free will we still think we have. The reason being that even if we believe we are being manipulated without awareness, we often choose the setting we enter where that happens; in which case, the roads lead back to a choice we made.

Taken together, these findings are the first of their kind to reveal what people think about real-life examples of being manipulated without their awareness that they have volunteered themselves and that, in many cases, have indicated direct experience with.

Over the span of three and a half years, a lot has happened to the world, but we seem to have remarkably stable views that we all share about where we expect psychological tactics to be used to manipulate our behavior.

How can we know to know?

The whole project raises an obvious question, how is possible to get any important insights? It is of course seemingly paradoxical to ask where one might expect to be manipulated without one’s awareness and expect an accurate answer if the methods used to do this are happening without us knowing.

So, how are we able to answer this question, and how is it we are so consistent in our beliefs?

One explanation is that we are basing our answers on common societal understandings (e.g., via entertainment, news) about the use of psychological tactics to manipulate us. For instance, we have built up views on how methods are devised to encourage us to interact with social media in a certain way, vote in a particular direction, or buy a certain product.

In addition, the psychological tactics might simply be a lot less potent or effective at actually working in the way they are generally claimed. In which case, they are more likely to be operating over, than under, the conscious radar. Of course, there is still the issue as to how well any method claiming to work covertly can actually change our behavior without us knowing, and this requires a different set of experiments to test this, which the work discussed here didn’t do. But there are plenty of areas of psychology that explore this, and the jury appears to be out on how successful manipulation without awareness is.