Nowadays you don’t hear much about Sigmund Freud.
Even a few decades ago, his thoughts about human behavior still commanded a lot of attention. In the 21st century, though, they’re rarely discussed.
And yet the legacy of Freud’s thought plays a key role in Annalee Newitz’s recent book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, in which she probes—and sheds some light on—the discomforting times that Americans now find themselves in.
Freud, who made seminal contributions to the field of psychology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to heal his clients’ neuroses by using a “talking cure” that would guide them to confront forces in their unconscious and, over time, lead more rewarding lives.
But some of those who studied Freud’s theories had other goals in mind.
A psychological procedure that arose from laudable intentions, it seems, can be readily subverted to promote ends that are anything but.
Or, as Newitz puts it, “many enthusiastic Freudians used his work in contexts that the doctor never intended, like advertising and wartime propaganda.”
Prominent among such enthusiasts was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew. His book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, explored how the mass media could be harnessed to appeal to people’s unconscious biases—and, by extension, to substantially influence their behavior.
One example is Bernays’ advertising campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes in the late 1920s. The campaign, which targeted young women, drew on Freud’s model of the unconscious and deftly linked his target audience’s yearning for freedom with smoking cigarettes.
Unlike his uncle’s beneficent intentions, Bernays had developed “a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally.”
It turns out that similar techniques have since found a place in other areas—including politics.
During World War II, three researchers at UC Berkeley put together a new sort of personality test and administered it to thousands of Americans. They named it the F-scale test.
The test’s purpose: to assess the chances that an individual might develop fascist leanings.
The trio determined “that certain people do have a measurable disposition that primes them to follow strongman leaders with racist and antisemitic tendencies,” and they suggested that certain educational reforms could hinder the growth of such tendencies.
But, as in the case of Bernays, psychological insights can be appropriated not to promote mental well-being, but for completely different agendas.
Flash forward to the 21st century and a British company called Cambridge Analytica.
Like their Berkeley predecessors, the Cambridge Analytica team sought to identify people with (often unconscious) authoritarian impulses.
Unlike their Berkeley predecessors, however, they wanted to nurture those impulses with the right sorts of input.
By examining people’s “likes” on Facebook, they theorized, you could gain deep insights into their personalities—and devise ways to influence their attitudes and behaviors.
And so they constructed a personality-test app that could be used on Facebook—a social media Trojan horse of sorts that would gather data for their research.
Their game plan worked out quite well.
Once the aapp was available, they collected information about those who took their so-called Big Five test—including those people’s “likes.” In addition, they could access comparable information about all of those people’s friends.
In this way, although only roughly 270,000 actually took the app’s personality test, they were able to hoover up intel about a whopping 87 million Facebook users.
As Newitz puts it, “Knowing people’s likes and dislikes would make them ripe for manipulation, as long as the right political messages were crafted to trigger them.”
The researchers began to test out messages—stories, as Newitz calls them—that could increase support for right-wing candidates.
According to Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower, some of Trump’s 2016 slogans, among them “Make America Great Again” and “Drain the Swamp,” were the result of this research.
Someone who was closely involved with Cambridge Analytica’s project: Steve Bannon.
Two people who supported the company with millions of dollars: the right-wing plutocrats Robert and Rebekah Mercer.
Rebekah Mercer and Bannon even served on the company’s board.
In other chapters of Stories Are Weapons, Newitz traces how related methods have been used in military conflicts—to demoralize the enemy, for example, or to spread misinformation.
To learn more about such “psyops,” or psychological operations, she consulted someone who had taught this subject for the U.S. Army for several years.
To preserve his anonymity, she gives him the moniker Han Solo.
One key point that Han Solo stressed to her: “We do not conduct PSYOPS (psychological operations) against U.S. citizens. We cannot do that. That’s a bright red line you cannot cross.”
Why aren’t such actions allowed?
The military, Solo explained, was concerned about possible “second- and third-order effects.” For example, those targeted by such psyops might become so confused “that they’d no longer know what should count as true, and they come to mistrust everything and everyone and believe nothing.”
Such a legitimation crisis could produce a climate in which “social consensus and even simple communication become impossible because people disagree about the legitimacy of basic scientific and historical truths.”
Stories Are Weapons suggests that the threat of such a legitimation crisis is very much with us, given the psyops activities of actors both foreign and domestic.
The research that Newitz assembles in the book is impressive. Far less impressive, however, are the proposals she makes in later chapters for combatting such psychological operations. At one point, she celebrates the role that public libraries play in fostering a deep sense of community and the opportunity for personal growth, for example, but one could argue that even first-rate libraries can do little to stem the onslaught of manipulation that she’s depicted.
More immediately useful is something she writes early on. All of us should reconsider the role that stories take in our lives, and all of us need to be mindful of how we respond to the stories that we encounter.
Stories often aren’t neutral. Far from being mere entertainment, opportunities for diversion, or occasionally, for reflection, they sometimes harbor a dark side.
“If a story can make you feel better or smarter, it can also make you feel worse and more confused,” she notes. “And if that story can change your behavior, whether in the voting booth or on the street—it becomes a weapon.”
