RSSAge of Propaganda
March 17th, 2006 | View Comments
Author: Anthony Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson
Publisher: W. H. Freeman and Company
Rating: 
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If you read this book cover to cover, you will have gotten the equivalent of an introductory social psychology course presented in terms that are personally relevant to you. Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson are both professors at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Aronson’s work on jigsaw classrooms is widely cited in the education research literature and I can confirm that he is a widely respected social psychologist.
I found this book to be easy reading, however you should keep in mind that I was doing a Bachelor’s in Psychology at the time I first read the book and had already taken a few courses on social psychology. Thus concepts like the elaboration-likelihood model and cognitive dissonance and many of the classic studies in social psychology that they present–the phone call attractiveness study, the copier request study, etc.–were already familiar to me. For the social psychology novice, this book might prove to be a more difficult read.
My favorite chapter of this book is chapter 32, titled “How to be a Cult Leader.” It clearly lays out the tactics that cults use to get their members to walk away from their lives, with the scary note that these tactics are also used by everyday groups and organizations, except in moderation. I drew heavily from this chapter and from other parts of the book when I gave a lecture on social influence and cult behavior to students in an introduction to social psychology course in Fall 2005.
If you read the Amazon.com reviews of this book, you find that several readers found this book to be biased. I didn’t find that to be the case at all. As I said before, the scientific findings that the authors cite are all from classic peer-reviewed studies in social psychology. The examples they choose tend to come from the political right, and I can see how people might read “Republicans are evil” into that.
Personally I see it as “Republicans are smarter, ” as my perception is that in the last decade or so, the American right has been much more adept at persuasion the American public than the political left–you need to look no further than the political makeup of the federal government to see the fruits of that.
This is one of those books that I believe should be required reading for every American–I can safely say that this book changed the way I looked at advertising of all sorts, not just commercials. All of a sudden, I was seeing social influence techniques in everything from direct mail marketing to religious rituals. Let’s just say that this book made me a lot more skeptical about the true motives behind a lot of major societal institutions.
Buy Age of Propaganda on Amazon.com
Yvonne posted this on March 17th, 2006 @ 10:28pm in Book Reviews, News/Politics, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "Age of Propaganda"
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