Pamela Meyer
Pamela Meyer thinks we’re facing a pandemic of deception, but she’s arming people with tools that can help take back the truth. On any given day we're lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows the manners and "hotspots" used by those trained to recognize deception -- and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving.
Google Tech Talks. May, 6 2008
ABSTRACT
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind." -- Edward Bernays, founder of the public relations industry.
Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States alone on public relations, a little-understood profession that has become a modern propaganda-for-hire industry. "Publicity" was once the work of carnival hawkers and penny-ante hustlers smoking cigars and wearing cheap suits. Today's PR professionals are recruited from the ranks of former journalists, retired politicians and eager-beaver college graduates eager to rise in the corporate world. They hobnob internationally with corporate CEOs, senators and U.S. presidents. PR wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony "grassroots" front groups, spy on citizens, and conspire with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy. In today's electronic age, they use 800-numbers and telemarketing, advanced databases, and "video news releases" -- entire news stories written, filmed and produced by PR firms and transmitted electronically to thousands of TV stations around the world. Canned news from PR firms is designed to be indistinguishable from real news and is increasingly taking its place, used as "story segments" on TV news shows without any attribution or disclaimer indicating that what viewers are seeing is in fact subtle paid advertisements. On the internet as well, PR firms have created slick websites that promise to inform the public while pushing hidden agendas. Example include:
the Greening Earth Society (funded by the coal industry), which claims that global warming is actually good for the environment the Foundation for Clean Air Progress (which opposes regulations to control air pollution)the African American Republican Leadership Council (a conservative organization headed by white Republicans)
Working Families for Wal-Mart (secretly funded, of course, by the Wal-Mart itself)
Project Learning Tree (sponsored by the logging industry)
PR firms create front groups as part of what they call the "third party technique." The basic idea, as described by one PR executive, is to "Put your words in someone else's mouth." They realize that their messages are more likely to persuade the public if they come from seemingly independent "third parties" such as a professor or a pediatrician or someone representing a nonprofit citizens' group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their opinions.
Speaker: Sheldon Rampton
Sheldon Rampton researches deceptive PR firms for the Center for Media and Democracy and is the co-author, with John Stauber, of books including "Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damned Lies and the Public Relations Industry"; "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With your Future": and "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq." He will discuss the Center's work including its website, Sourcewatch.org, a wiki-powered collaborative research project to document the "names behind the news."
As one of the nation's most respected communications strategists, John Davies takes on a unique role as a CEO by investing his experience daily through hands-on analysis, strategy, and messaging. He applies his lifelong study of human behavior and effective communications strategies to influence how to earn attention and gain influence in the complex information-saturated decision-making process today. As a political consultant, John Davies enjoyed a nearly 90% win ratio with more than 150 campaigns.
Author Noah Goldstein visits Google's Santa Monica, CA office to discuss his book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. This event took place on February 2, 2009, as a part of the Authors@Google series.
"Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World"
How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.
Professor Alex ("Sandy") Pentland, is a leading figure at the MIT Media Lab and is a pioneer in the fields of organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. He co-directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets. In 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
This event took place on November 19, 2008
BBC Horizon 2008
How to Make Better Decisions
48:47
We are bad at making decisions. According to science, our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that's assuming that we haven't already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious! Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation and even manipulated by the future, Horizon presents a guide to better decision making, and introduces you to Mathematician Garth Sundem, who is convinced that conclusions can best be reached using simple maths and a pencil!
Recent psychological research has revealed widely held unconscious thought patterns that most people would rather not possess. Dr. Anthony Greenwald, psychology professor at the University of Washington, describes his research developing the method (described in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) that reveals this unconscious mental content, demonstrates the method and describes how the unconscious mental content that it reveals affects our behavior.
About this talk
Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness -- sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself. Watch through to the end for a sparkling Q&A with some familiar TED faces.
About Dan Gilbert
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong -- a premise he supports with intriguing research
Summary
Naomi Tickle, author of You Can Read a Face Like a Book, explains that by studying a person's facial structure, you can achieve an immediate and accurate understanding of their personality.Naomi Tickle - Naomi Tickle is a personology expert and founder of the International Centre for Personology.
About this talk
First, Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic.
About Keith Barry
Magician Keith Barry's talents range from sleight of hand to "mind control" -- metal bending, hypnotism and clairvoyance. But his casual style belies a deeper purpose: demonstrating the powers of manipulation.
Keith Barry does brain magic | Video on TED.com
"Psychologist Paul Ekman joins Harry Kreisler to talk about his scientific work on the human face. They discuss what is now known about the role of the face in human emotions and the implications of these insights for human communication, self understanding and national security. Series: 'Conversations with History'"
YouTube - Conversations with History: Paul Ekman:
New York Public Library
New York, NY
Nov 7th, 2007
On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.
Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse - and journalism's response to it - on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign - NYPL
FORA.tv - Deceiving Image: The Science of Manipulation
Dangerous Knowledge
1 hr 29 min 1 sec - Sep 3, 2007
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, ... all » Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity. Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.
Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.
The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.
Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.
Dangerous Knowledge
NewScientist.com
Danny Penman
Psychologists in Canada have finally proved what women have long suspected - men really are irrational enough to risk entire kingdoms to catch sight of a beautiful face.
Biologists have long known that animals prefer immediate rewards to greater ones in the future. This process, known as "discounting the future", is found in humans too and is fundamental to many economic models.
Resources have a value to individuals that changes through time. For example, immediately available cash is generally worth more than the same amount would be in the future. But greater amounts of money in the future would be worth waiting for under so-called 'rational' discounting.
But some people, such as drug addicts, show 'irrational' discounting. For example, preferring a small amount of heroin today rather than a greater amount in the future.
Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada decided to investigate discounting behaviour and see if it varied with sexual mood.
Male students, when shown pictures of pretty women, were more likely to opt for short-term economic gain than wait for a better reward in the future.
Sexual opportunity
Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website 'Hot or Not'. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward. They could either accept a cheque for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50-$75 at a variable point in the future.
Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. This indicated that they had made a rational decision. When male students were shown pictures of pretty women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an "irrational" way - they would opt for the smaller amount of money available the next day rather than wait for a much bigger reward.
Women, by contrast, made equally rational decisions whether they had been shown pictures of handsome men or those of average attractiveness.
"We have not elucidated the psychological mechanisms mediating our results," says Margo Wilson. "But we hypothesise that viewing pictures of pretty women was mildly arousing, activating neural mechanisms associated with cues of sexual opportunity."
Tommaso Pizzari, an evolutionary biologist at Leeds University, offers another possible explanation: "If there's the prospect of getting a very attractive partner it may pay a man to take more risks than if an average partner was available."
He told New Scientist: "If this is a response to sexual selection then you would expect men who are less attractive to take more risks. If you have many attractive potential partners then it does not pay to take risks. If you are less attractive, with few potential partners, then it pays to take risks."
Pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future - 10 December 2003 - Print Article - New Scientist
