Psychologist at the ucla school of management, where he studies cognitive bias and how people and mentioned their future selves. He also contributes opeds to the New York Times and wall street journal. A historian of american political rhetoric at texas a m university and a editor. She is also the author of the rhetoric of her rogue expectations, establishing the obama presidency. And currently at work on her next book titled, demagogue for president , the rhetorical genius of donald trump. [laughter] she will be talking about that later. Emerituss a professor of social psychology at uc santa tripand the coauthor of a propaganda can the everyday use and abuse of persuasion. , age of propaganda, the use and abuse of persuasion. [laughter] so, thank you for being here. , istheme of this panel is contemporary propaganda damaging our Attention Spans, relationships, our ability to ponder bigger questions . Four does it offer some benefits , like nudging us to eat healthier, save the earth, or even vote . Is it hold those things . Hal . Thank you for moderating. So much depends on how we define propaganda. Defined a certain way, we could save it is all bad. Defined another way that we could say there are uses where this could help people do the things they say they want to do. Where my research comes in is to say there is often this cap between how people want to live their life sports say they want to live their lives in the way they actually do. I want to wake up earlier and exercised, i dont. So how do we get people to do those things . I think we will touch on some of these topics, but there are messages that we can use and that marketers do use that do try to help people. And it is ok to believe that. The definition when i looked up really shadyunds and skanky. Especially of a biased or misleading nature used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. That sounds awful. But, is it always that awful . It is not. Anthony . I have a specific definition. First of all, it is defined in a lot of different ways. It could be just promoting aside , for a more nefarious definition. Plays on message that your emotions and prejudices. It is typically short, like a soundbite, photo, vivid image, and it is designed to speak to fear,ut, arousal, and he can also speak to your prejudices. It is against that kind of person that i dont like. If you think about it from a history standpoint, how do you do propaganda . There was a great interview by bill moyers that i person who was the propaganda minister for joseph goebbels, and he said his role was to simplify, make it agreeable and entertaining, then repeat, repeat, repeat, so that is the formula. The question is can it ever be done for good. Obviously it can. Fear about tooth decay raise fear about tooth to gate and that will get somebody to go to the dentist. And so it can be used in those kinds of ways, but the problem is when people feel like they have been manipulated, it can come back to bite them. Second of all, you are not getting a discussion of the issues. The democracy is founded on deliberate persuasion, discussion, negotiation, understanding the core issues the country faces, and if i am constantly appealing to your emotions one after the other, that debate is not happening. It also creates a situation where the next propagandist who can appeal to your emotions even again and mislead you undo everything the previous propagandist had done. You said that americas public fear is broken, because we communicate as propagandists, t know the rules of productive discussion and debate, so what are the rules . Thatrt of the problem is we spend so much time in our own media bubbles and private sphere that we fail to join organizations, and we have done this over generations, that used to teach Us Democratic skills, democratic decisionmaking. Those are skills we have to learn. I am in a communications department, and there are Communications Departments around the country that have labs for civil discourse, where students learn how to organize and process these four fair, delivered a discussion, so we can join organizations that teach this. The Kettering Foundation is a great one where they have a civil issues forum, and they teach the skills of how to design a process that is fair to all sides, that allows people to feel like and actually contribute to decisionmaking, that allows people a fair amount of time to talk and reach consensus and decide how we should value what objects come in how we should make decisions. Onecant say there is anyect way of organizing i conversation, but we know what works. So what has happened is weve failed to do what we know we should do, and that is because largely we are taught to communicate as propagandists. And there are the propagandists like you were talking about who are powerful and run nations or have the ear of the people that run nations, and then there are the rest of us. We are all talking to each other and at each other, and facebook, and we are using propaganda and we are terrible, i think i hear you saying, at knowing how to really talk to each other. Of it is that we are terrible at it, but it is in waste ways not our fault. The algorithms that control, maybe not her nextdoor app, but what you see on facebook or twitter, those algorithms are designed to promote the most emotive, most outrageous content, right . And the notifications that you areon your app, those designed to appeal to the dopamine receptors in your brain commit to get you addicted to having notifications. Sometimes you will go back over and over again, looking for more positive feedback, right, because you are addicted to it. So it trains you. It literally trains you to speak as set propagandist on social media, right . It will only show your content if you are outrageous. It will only show you that other people have enjoyed your content if you go back enough times and say enough outrageous things, right . They call it the outreach industry for a reason. It is designed not to facilitate democratic deliberation, but to keep you engaged. I guess in some ways my business, the media, is kind of place with this too. Evily asy not as you are talking about. When we put something online, and we get dingdong google if we say, woman caught without her turns outbar, and it to be a story about sanitation. We cant do that. But we do look for something provocative that relates to what , anding on in the story then we are rewarded on google. And sensationalism is nothing you haveedia, but when a finite number of producers of sensational content, that is one thing, but we have an infinite, right, and infinite number of sensational content producers today, right . Every single one of us produces sensationalist content. So i so i want to go back to the idea that sometimes propaganda like in marketing can be for good. Storyhinking about the out about how the 10,000 steps, we are all supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day for her health, it turns out that was never scientifically back. That was promoted by backed. That was promoted by a company that wanted you to use, to walk 10,000 steps. It turns out you only need to work 4400 steps. So maybe that was ok. They did that to make more money or to get you to think, oh my god, i have got to get this good,ter, but isnt that that the byproduct was that we all walked more steps . Things. Ghlights two we have to ask what is the thention behind disbursement of information, right . That there are millions of Plastic Straws thrown away every day. Where does this come from . Somebody figured out this was a fourth grade science project that originally put out the number four or five years ago, so there wasnt an intention to be nefarious. It just happened to be that information spread. I dont know where the 10,000 steps came from exactly. We have to ask if it was intentionally misleading or it would somehow miss read over time within sort of ask the well, if that is moving people in the right direction healthwise, is that a problem . You know, this becomes a real philosophical debate, because we can ask, well, what do people want to do . Is there some sort of agency taken away when messaging is put out like this and it is people somehow feel like they are doing something against their free will, or they dont even realize it, and that opens up a can of worms that is hard to grapple with. I think for the most part that a err onmessaging that may the side of getting people to do something good come when done right, allows people the power to do this sort of thing or not. It is just that it is not just them in the right direction, in the direction they say they want to go in. Can you think of an example of something where it is marketing, but also making us do the right thing . I think about a lot of the work in the behavioral economics or social psychology space in the retirement world. So some of this is messaging, and summit this structuring choices for people so that they end up doing something that can help them. You look at 401 k participation , if you default someone can to contribute into their account, they are much more likely to do so. They have to make a decision not to contribute rather than contribute. Or if you default them into automatically escalating their contributions year after year, that feature has been adding about 7 billion annually to American Retirement accounts. That is amazing. That worked on me, actually. That is actually a really gd example. Know, anthony,i you feel this is a messagedense environment, and im sure you all feel that way. We all feel that way. Thousands of commercials, things mail. Internet, junk how do we pick our way through that environment . Senders are the c propagandist. That is the rub. It is impossible to think about every one of them. That is the issue we face as citizens. One social psychologist tried to keep track of the number of persuasive messages he got in a day, and he gave up around 9 30 the topause he was over of his clicker. So how do you think about each one of those . Reasonsone of the key why propaganda can be effective. So then what you do, what we all do, we start to use heuristics, simple rules to decide whether that is a good thing or bad thing, true or false. It came from my Political Party committed must be good. It came from their Political Party, it must be bad. You start to use those simple heuristics. It agrees with me. It is something i want to be true, and that is the rub. The interesting side of it is that we also have at our fingertips all the information we need to be able to sort out these issues. The problem is we dont have the time, and we dont often times have the skills. On facebook, somebody will post something, and i will google it. There are things like fact check that will tell you, so there are tools, but not enough of them. Reasons whyof the propaganda is so effective. We get all this stuff, all this information. , has it made our Attention Span shorter, or are ageust, we are just in an where this is all we want to look at . It certainly has cut the amount of time given to a specific topic. So if you look back at the amount of time a president ial candidate would have had in 1968. On the evening news, they would get two to three minutes were all they did was talk. Are luckye 1990s you to get about seven or eight seconds of the candidate saying something. W we just get tweets soundbites. And that has no effect. Imagine if i was a political candidate and i wanted to convince you of any kind of issue. I only have seven seconds to do it. How do i do that . Leftlso half if you have i Say Somethingor sev seconds and half if you leave, and another half come in. It is impossible for me to outline the tradeoffs you would have on health care or any of these, why we should go to war or why we should go to war. So that is the obstacle we face. And yet it also feels to me has started town halls with president ial candidates come the democratic candidates, so i feel like i am seeing them constantly. In cnn, again, is covering all the rallies, the front runners, so i feel like i am seeing them a lot and hearing them a lot, although i am not sure this early on that really is making much of an impact on me, you know . Because even though it is longer, there is too much of it. It is always like it is not organized, it seems like, but let me ask you about your books. You wrote one book on obama, and now you artwork on your next book about trump. President s,k of two politics aside, who are different people. Obama, the ticketless the ,easured thinker meticulous measured thinker. Has dinner, then he goes to his office for five hours and works through briefing papers, whereas trump finishes dinner and retreats to his bedroom and watches fox news in each french fries. And yet, i think, both of these men are masterful politicians. They got people to elect him president. How would you compare them as propagandists or persuaders . It is an interesting question. I think obama and the seven almonds was a joke. It speaks to this essential thing about him, which is he is very measured and controlled, so of course he would have just lmonds, or whatever it was. So two very different speakers in terms of style. Obama always is focused on the facts, policy. He uses what we can think of as soaring, high style, transcendent rhetoric, what we all have in common, rather than what divides us, very optimistic and hopeful, yes we can, that kind of thing. , as all president s do, as the nations he wrote into 2000 ro has the nations he into 2008, and that he was the right hero for the moment. That is what i wrote about obama , and edited collection of people explaining why they thought that obama was going to be the right hero to save america during this national crisis. Trump also ran as a hero. You might not think that. My book is about trump running as a demagogue. If you look up the word demagogue in the oxford in this dictionary come the first definition says a political leader that defends the peoples interest against the other part of the state, a hero. The second definition says a political leader uses polarizing propaganda for their own gains against the other parts of the state, a villain, right . Figure, ran as a heroic just like obama did. Some people who followed him to his fans come to see him still that way. They see him defending their interests against the corrupt other part of the state. Other people dont see him that way, as a heroic figure. They see him as the billing figure. Either way, trump is this main character who has been occupying all this space in our heads since 2015. So now, with the next campaign, the next election coming up, how do we navigate our way through all of this . What advice would you give us to be smart, i dont know, consumers . Of propaganda or trumps rhetoric . What advice would you give us to be smart consumers of all the propaganda, all the democratic contenders, and about trump, and then how do we take that to a dinnertable conversation . [laughter] in order to convince people. It is hard because the propaganda is so good at this point, right . ,t is all designed to have us as you said, to not reflect critically upon the information we are sharing and amplifying. It is designed to push buttons, outrage, and then react. It is difficult to have the presence of the information you are being provided and the information you are sharing. I have to check myself and sometimes i delete tweets. I say i should not have said that. I am very careful about how i communicate. If a video makes me cry or makes me laugh, i will let them know. I was a watch it if you want to left. This is sad. Watch this if you need to cry. I know those videos go viral because of the way they feed off our emotions. Therefore, they persuade us in ways that we may not be cognizant of. My best advice is to be super vigilant. That is hard. The platform and the technology us fromgned to keep thinking critically. That youso wrote should be aware of anything that plays on your emotions or makes you feel guilty. Shouldnt those things be good . Like what you said about saving for retirement. When you are receiving messages, Pay Attention to your emotions and how your thinking. All of a sudden i was not thinking or feeling moral outrage three seconds ago. Sk yourself why if you go to a sales situation and someone says you will be able to buy that two days from now, you start a feel panicky. That could be a clue that somebody is trying to use propaganda against you. Same as when youre watching the news. Feel designed to make you anxious. It keeps you tuned into that news channel through the commercials to find out what happens next. Bono. Used to say cui it means to profit. If youre noticing that you are or manipulated, you probably are being. Think about who is manipulating you. One other thing. Maybe feeling guilty is the right emotion. Somebody might have been suffering that needs your help. Back andto take a step ask why you are feeling that. Is it a legitimate emotion or it . Body playing on i have to defend newspapers because much of the news may be we believeducing but it is what is really happening. About newsthinking channels where the music is intense and you feel anxious listening to the music and the chirons going. There is music that is designed to keep you there and have you kept there. I cant watch careful news. Heart race. That youreay i cant watch cable news. It makes my heart race. You say that we dont join clubs anymore but it is also this forum where people wish each other happy birthday and express sympathy when family members die and pets die and congratulate you when you graduate from something. Community . A good cant that be good propaganda . Maybe it was. The developing question is is it still. We know so little about the way the algorithms work in terms of what gets displayed and when. To run a Research Study on facebook where we displayed we thought we were running a wellcontrolled scientific experiment. It turns out that facebook took over and optimized the messages. It turns out our one message worked really well for middleage women and the midwest and we had no idea that would be the case. But is not what we wanted to be the case. Those are like ads. Yes but the same of rhythms are at work for the messages posts andost and jen anthony posts. Given the story that we are reposting that we had nothing to do with. Facebook and other social media platforms know what is going to get the clicks and the views and the outrage. Ishink part of this question not only how can we change the way that we react to these things . The people in this room, this is not enough to make an impact. We need social media platforms to figure out ways to change the algorithm so that people are more mindful consumers of messages. How do we do that . I dont have an answer. There is research right now that is by looking into how we can do this. M. I. T. Has done some fascinating we hat is it mean when work about this. Mean when we share things . We rationalize and say that it sounds really antitrump. It is not that we rationalize things, the