Angeles. Thank you and ill introduce the panelists. Hal studies cognitive bias and how people imagine their future selves, opeds for the New York Times and the wall street journal. Jennifer is a historian at texas and am university and a contributing editor. And expectations, establishing the obama presidency. And the next book, demagogue for president , the rhetorical genius of donald trump. [laughter] she is shell be talking about that later. Anthony is a Professor Emeritus of social psychology at uc santa cruz and the coauthor of age of propaganda, the everyday use and abuse of persuasion. He previously taught courses in advertising and Consumer Behavior at Carnegie Mellon university and he is a magician. [applaus [applause]. So thank you for being here. So the theme of this panel is, is contemporary propaganda damaging our Attention Spans, our relationships, our ability to ponder bigger questions . Or does it suffer offer some benefits like nudging us to eat healthier, save the earth or maybe even vote . So is it all those things . Hal . Thanks. Thank you for moderating, too. So i think so much of this depends on how we define propaganda and defined a certain way, we could say its all bad. Defined like you did, we could say there are many uses where you could actually help people do the things that they say they want to do. Where my research comes in on this, theres often a gap tw between people, how they want to live their lives. I dont want to eat as much as i do, i want to wake up earlier and exercise, but i dont. How do we get people to do those things . I think we will probably touch on some of these topics, but there are messages and framings that we can use and that marketers do use that do try to help people do these things. And its okay to believe that. So the definition when i looked up propaganda sounds to me of the definition of propaganda sounds shady and skanky. Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature used to promote or public size the particular political cause or point of view. Well, that sounds awful. But is it always that awful . Its not. Is it, anthony . Well, i have a very specific definition of propaganda. First of all, its defined in a lot of different ways and can just mean promoting aside or take a more nefarious definition. Mine is a message that plays on your emotions and prejudices. Its typically short like a sound bite, a photo, a vivid image and its designed to speak to your gut, that you have the arousal, fear, guilt, a negative emotion like that and it can also speak to your prejudices. I dont like its against that kind of people, person i dont like. If you think from historys standpoint. How do you do prop granada . Propaganda. Fritz, who was the propaganda minister for josee gherbles. And he says it was to simplify and make it entertainment and repeat, repeat, repeat. Thats the formula. Can that ever be done for good . Obviously, it can. You can raise fear about tooth decay and get someone to go to the dentist, probably will if you couple it with a doable response. The problem is, people feel like theyre manipulated and it can come back to bite them. Second of all, youre not getting a discussion of the issues. Democracy is founded on deliberatie persuasion. If im couldens stanley appealing to your emotions, one after another, that debate is not happening and it also creates a situation where the next prop began tis who can appeal to your emotions even better can mislead you again and undo everything the previous propagandist. You say were broken we dont know the rules of discussion and debate, what are the rules . Where do we learn them . Part of problem is that we spend so much time in our own media bubbles and our own private sphere that we fail to join. 0s that used to teach us and weve done this over generations, but that used to teach us democrat skills, democratic decision making, democratic skills and democratic decision making. Nos are stills that we have to learn. Ill in a Communication Department and there are Communication Departments around the country that have loud discourse where students learn how to organize processes for fair, deliberative discussion. So we can join organizations that teach this. The Kettering Foundation they have the civil issues forum and they teach these skills how to design a process thats fair to all sides, that allows people to feel like and to actually contribute to decision making, at that allows people a fair amount of time to talk, and to reach concensus and decide how we should value what objects, and how we should make decisions, what the decision rules are. You cant say that theres one perfect way, you know, of organizing any conversation because thats going to need to be decided on a case by case basis. But we know what works, right . So whats happened is that weve failed to do the things that communication experts know we should do. And thats because largely were taught to communicate as pr propgandists. There are those who run the nations and those who run next door, email things, all talking to each other and talking at each other and facebook and were using propaganda and were terrible, i think i hear you saying, at knowing how to really talk to each other. Well, part of it is is that we are terrible at it, but its also, in some ways, not our fault. So, the algorithms that control maybe not your next door app, but what you see on facebook or what you see on twitter, those algorithm ofs are designed to promote the most emotive, most outrageous content, right . And the notifications that you get on your apps, those are designed to ping the dopamine in your brain and youll go back looking for more and more positive feedback because youre addicted to it. So it trains, you it literally trains you to speak as a propagandaist on social media and only show your content if youre outrageous. It will only show you that people have enjoyed your content if you go back enough times and say enough outrageous things, right . They call it the outrage industry for a reason. Its designed not to facilitate democrat democratic, but to keep you engaged. I guess in some ways, my business, the media is kind of plays with this, too, hopefully not as evilly as youre talking about it, but when we put a headline on something online. Yes. Its supposed to, and we get dinged on google if we say woman caught without her head in a bar and it turns out to be a story just about sanitation in bars. I mean, we cant do that. [laughter] but we do look for something provocative that has that relates to whats going on in the story and then we are rewarded on google by being moved up. And sensationalism is nothing new, right, from the media, but when you have a finite number of producers of sensational content thats one thing. But we have an infinite, right . We have an infinite number of sensational content producers today, right . Every single one of us produces sensationalist content. So i wanted to go back to the idea, sometimes propaganda in marketing can be good and i was thinking about, theres this story out about how the 10,000 steps, were all supposed to walk 10,000 steps a day for our health. It turns out that was never scientifically backed, that was promoted by a company that made pedomete pedometers, and they wanted you to use them to walk 10,000 steps. It turns out you actually only need to walk 4400 steps. You shouldnt tell them that. Well, yeah, okay. Maybe that was okay, they did it for, to make more money or to get you to think, oh, my god, ive got to get this pedometer. But isnt that good that they that the byproduct was we all walked more steps . We have to ask two things, thats the intention behind the, you know, the dispersement of information, right . So that statistic that millions of Plastic Straws are thrown away. And eventually someone figured out a fourth grade science project and put that out, four, five, six years ago. There wasnt an intention to be nefarious. I dont know what the 10,000 steps came from. Was it intentionally misleading or somehow misread over time. And then we ask, if thats moving people in the right direction healthwise, is that a problem . You know, this becomes a real sort of philosophical debate, we can ask, what do people want to do . Is there some sort of agency taken away when messaging is put out like this and its against people somehow feel theyre doing something thats against their free will or dont even realize that theyre doing this sort of behavior and that opens up a whole sort of can of worms thats hard to grapple with. I think for the most part, a lot of messaging that may sort of err on the side of getting people to do something good, when done right, allows people to the decision power to do this sort of thing or not. Its just that it nudges them essentially in the right direction, in the direction that they say they want to go in, at least. Can you speak of an example of something where its marketing, but its also making us do the right things . So, i mean, i think about a lot of the i think about a lot of the work and in the behavioral economics or psychology space in the retirement world. So, some of this is messaging and some of this is structuring choices to are people so that they end up doing something that can help them. So you look at 401 k participation, if you default someone into contributing to their account, theyre much more likely to do so. That is they have to make a decision to not contribute than to contribute. Or fault them into adding every year, thats thats a good example. But do you i know, anthony, you feel that this is a message dense environment. In fact, im sure you all feel that way. We all feel that way. Thousands of commercials, things on the internet, junk mail. How do we pick power way through that environment . Because all of those senders of those message are propaganda. Thats the rub, its impossible to think about each one of them and thats the real issue that we face as citizens. One social psychologist tried to keep track of the number of persuasive messages that he got in a day and he gave up around 9 30. [laughter] because he was already over top of his clicker, yeah, 9 30 in the morning. How do you think about each one of those . And thats one of those the key reasons why propaganda can be effective, you cant think about them. And so then what you do, we all do, we start to use horrifics, simple rule, is that a good thing or a bad thing. True or false . It came from my Political Party must be good. Came from their Political Party, must be bad. Or an older white guy or that person, or a millennial. And you start to use those kind of simple things, it agrees with me, its something that i want to be true and thats the rub. And the interesting side of it is, 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 also dont often times have the skills to go through them. You know, id say on facebook and somebody will post something, ill google it and you know, there are things like fact check that will tell you whether this statement was made or not. Yeah, yeah. So, there are tools like that, but theres not enough of them and thats one of the reasons why propaganda is so effective. And also, we get all of this stuff. All of this information. Has it made us has it made our Attention Spans shorter and or are we just were just in an age where this is all we want to look at . Well, it certainly has cut the amount of time given to a specific topic. As you look back at now, the typical president ial candidate would have had in 1968 on the evening news they would get two to three minutes. All they did was talk. Wow. By the 90s, late 9 90s, youre lucky to get seven, eight seconds of a candidate saying something and its still then. And now we just get tweets and simple sound bites and that has an effect. Now, 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 . And also, half of you have left, that i said something for seven seconds, half of you leave and another half come in and i now have another seven seconds. Thats impossible for me to outline the tradeoffs that you would have on health care or any of these sorts of or why we should go to war. Why we shouldnt go to war. And that, i mean, thats the obstacle that we face. And yet, it also feels to me like cnn has already started these town halls with the president ial candidates, the democratic candidates, so, i feel like i see them constantly and then cnn again is covering all of their rallies and stuff or the rallies of frontrunners. So i feel like im seeing them a lot and hearing them a lot although, im not sure this early on that really is making much of an impact on me, you know . Because theres just even though its longer, theres still too much of it, kind of. You know, its almost like its not organized, it seems like. But, jim, let me ask you about your books. So you wrote one book on obama and now youre at work on your next book is about trump. You cant think of two president s, politics aside, who are different people and obama was the meticulous measured thinker, at least this is what i think he was. And a famous story about him finishing dinner in the oval offi office and for hours and continues to work with the peanuts and then that trump eats dinner and then goes to his room and watches fox news. How would you compare them as pr propgandist. I think that the obama thing was. So obama always is focused on the facts, the policy. He uses what we can think of as soaring or high style, transcended rhetoric. So what we all have in common rather than what divides us. Very optimistic and hopeful, yes, we can, that kind of thing. He ran as all president s do as the nation zero in 2008 and convinced the nation, a good percentage of the nation, not just the Democratic Party, that he was the right hero for the moment. So thats what the book i wrote about obama is, an 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. So my book is about trump running as a demagogue. If you look at the word demagogue in the Oxford English dictionary first definition says a political leader who defends the peoples interest against the other part of the state, i hero. The second definition says a political leader who uses polarizing propaganda for their own gains against the other parts of the state. A villain, right . So trump right as as a public figure, just like obama did. Some people who followed him, his fans, seeing still that way. They see him defending their interests against the corrupt of the parts of the state, of the people dont seem that way. They dont seem as the heroic figure. They seem as the villain this figure. Either way trump is this main character, who has been occupying all the space in our heads since 2013. So now with the new, next campaign, next election coming up, how do we navigate our way through all this . What advice would you give us to be smart i dont know consumers . Of propaganda or of trumps rhetoric . Well, what advice would you give us to be smart consumers of all the propaganda about all the democratic contenders, and about trump . And then how do we take that to a dinner table conversation . In order to convince people. Its hard because the propaganda is so good at this point back, right . Its all designed to have us as he said, do not reflect critically on what we are spreading information that wishing and amplified. Its designed to push the buttons to make us outraged and then react. Its very difficult of the presence of mind to calmly reflect on the information youre being provided and the information youre sharing. I have to check myself and sometimes i delete tweets because, i shouldnt have done that. I shouldnt have said that. And im very careful about how i communicate. If i share a video and it had made me cry or make me laugh, ill let people know. Ill be like this is hilarious. Watch it if you want to laugh. This is sad. Watch this if you need to cry. I know those videos go viral because its the way they evoke emotions, and those emotional responses then, therefore, persuade us in maybe ways were not cognizant of. My best advice is to be super vigilant, but thats hard. Because again the platform and the technology are designed to prevent us from being super vigilant. They dont want us to think critically. Or take time like you said. You could look up everything. You also wrote that, i think you wrote this, that the way of anything that plays on your emotions are makes you feel guilty. But couldnt those things be good . With what you said about saving for retirement, we feel guilty and then we start saving. What i said i think was when youre receiving messages, Pay Attention to your emotions. Pay attention to how your thinking. All of a sudden youre changing. I wasnt feeling guilty, i wasnt feeling moral outrage three seconds ago. Ask yourself why. If you go on a sales situation and somebody all of a sudden says youre not going to be able to buy that todays net and you start to feel panicky. Ask yourself why all of a sudden do i feel panicky. That could be a clue that somebody is trying to use propaganda against you. The same with when you watch the news. If youre feeling anxious while youre watching the news, that news is making you feel anxious which doesnt a big favor. It keeps you tuned in to that news channel through the commercials, right . Find out what happens next. Cicerone used to say who profits. If youre starting to notice that you feel anxious about things or you feel like youre being manipulate, you probably are. Try to think about who is profiting from that, who was manipulating you for what reason ill ask one more thing. Maybe feeling guilty is the right emotion. Because things mightve done something wrong. You know, somebody who is suffering that needs your help so you want to take a step back and ask why am i feeling that. Is it a legitimate emotion, or somebody playing on it rapidly one after another. I have to defend newspapers. Because much of the news may be anxiety producing, but we believe its whats really happening and you need to know that speed is im not thinking of newspapers. Thinking about cable news channels where the music is intense and you feel overwhelmed just listening to the music and multiple windows and its all designed to look you in and keep you there and have you on the edge of your seat. I cant watch cable news. Makes my heart race. Is there a way, you were saying like we dont join things anymore. We dont join clubs and stuff like that, but we do join facebook and twitter, instagram. Facebook, i know facebook is such a bad rap for mining our private information, bombarding us with ads. Its also this forum where people wished each other happy birthday and express