Brainwashing Techniques You Encounter Every Day (and How to Avoid Them)

Brainwashing Techniques You Encounter Every Day (and How to Avoid Them)

...yet the techniques used in brainwashing are frequently leveraged by advertisers, news networks, politicians, and others. Alex Long, writing for hacking blog Null Byte, provides an outline of some of the most common brainwashing techniques. Here are the most notable:

• The manipulator offers you a number of choices, but the choices all lead to the same conclusion.
• The same idea or phrase is frequently repeated to make sure it sticks in your brain.
• Intense intelligence-dampening is performed by providing you with constant short snippets of information on various subjects. This trains you to have a short memory, makes the amount of information feel overwhelming, and the answers provided by the manipulator to be highly desired due to how overwhelmed you feel.
• Emotional manipulation is used to put you in a heightened state, as this makes it harder for you to employ logic. Inducing fear and anger are among the most popular manipulated emotions.

How to Avoid Brainwashing Techniques

1. Identify the manipulative message you've received.
2. Find an opposing message, whether it's manipulative or not. Also attempt to find the most neutral and unbiased account of that same message.
3. Compare your different sources and decide how you feel.

Brainwashing, whether mild or extreme, is possible in a large part due to isolation. If you only hear the brainwashed message on a regular basis, and rarely (or never) expose yourself to alternatives, you're going to be far more likely to accept what you hear without thinking. If you want to avoid the brainwashing techniques discussed in this post, your best bet is to surround yourself with a spectrum of information rather than simply settling for the message that makes you feel comfortable. After all, that's often what the message is aiming to do.