How the news media brainwashes society…

There are a number of ways news media outlets brainwash society, one of the more insidious tactics is their relentless mental priming.

Mental priming is the use of stimulus to influence our thoughts and behavior. For example studies have shown subjects who have been introduced to a specific set of words relating to old age, will begin to exhibit the behavior of an elderly person.

In another study conducted back in 1975 by Psychologist Albert Bandura, a newer version of the famous Milgram Shock Experiment was performed testing the effects that a single word could have on test subjects.

In this experiment three groups of students were recruited and told they were going to administer electric shocks to another group attempting to complete a complex task.

Everytime this group would error, the test subjects would administer a correctional shock. The test subjects weren't told however the proctors running the experiment were instructed to reference the students receiving the shocks as either animals, good people, or to show indifference, just once and in front of the students delivering the punishing shocks.

As the experiment went on, the strength of the shocks administered in the beginning stages were equal across all three groups, however as time went on the intensity of the shocks began to diverge based on how the task groups were referenced by the proctors at the beginning of the experiment.

This meant the test subjects that heard the task group referenced as animals, administered more intense shocks compared to the other two groups, while the second group whose proctors referenced their task group as "good people" gave the less intense shocks. Just hearing one of the task groups referenced as "animals" one time, was enough to reduce the compassion generated by the test subjects.

So whenever we observe current news media, that routinely references our political opponents as, radical leftist, a basket of deplorables, socialists, or liberal elites, we are essentially becoming brainwashed by these outlets. Allowing our perceptions to be altered in ways that diminishes our compassion, tolerance and understanding.

By,

Jesse

@TheMadPhilosophersSociety ig