by Morton Hunt
Some psychologists attacked race norming as a travesty of testing and a distortion of the test’s measure of job fitness,50 and political conservatives attacked it as an illegal “quota” system, unfair to whites. A 1989 study by a committee of the National Research Council backed race norming but recommended that the Employment Service base job referrals not only on the GATB but on the applicant’s experience, skills, and education. The committee saw the merit of both sides in the dispute:
The question of the fair use of the GATB is not one that can be settled by psychometric considerations alone—but neither can referral policy be decided on the basis of equity concerns alone. If there is a strong federal commitment to helping blacks, women, and certain other minority groups moving into the economic mainstream, there is also a compelling interest in improving productivity and strengthening the competitive position of the country in the world market.51
The race-norming question was a hot potato in the congressional debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1991. In the struggle to pass an act that President George H. W. Bush would not veto, congressmen who favored race norming had to yield to those who opposed it. The act as finally passed prohibited “test score adjustment” on the basis of race, and the practice has since been banned at all eighteen hundred state and local offices of the Employment Service.
How one views this matter—whether one considers referring job applicants on the basis of race norming a proper use or a misuse of testing—depends on one’s political philosophy.
We will spare ourselves a thorough review of the many other ways in which testing of one kind or another is, or can be, misused by opportunistic, misguided, inept, or extremist individuals. But three particularly suspect uses are worth noting:
Dumbing down: In the 1980s, when minority groups were militantly fighting against testing, one “solution” to the alleged unfairness of pre-employment tests was to revise them or modify their scoring so as to upgrade the scores of minority test takers. An example: In 1984 the Golden Rule Insurance Company of Indianapolis agreed not to use any tests in which the average scores of blacks were more than 10 percent lower than those of whites. In 1985 the state of Alabama reached a settlement under which it would not use teacher certification tests that produced differences greater than 5 to 10 percent between whites and blacks. In other cases, the solution has been to make the tests so easy that everyone can pass: In the early 1990s Texas gave a teacher examination that nearly 97 percent of candidates passed.52
For years, many states have deliberately made the tests schoolchildren take easy in order to create a fraudulent appearance of progress. This was so before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, and although that law sought to achieve quality schooling in exchange for federal dollars, the dumbing-down tradition has continued. A recent study conducted by Policy Analysis for California Education, a research institute run by Stanford University and the University of California, found that many states were continuing to make their students look better than they were in reality. The study, as cited in a New York Times editorial, showed that “students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Education Progress, the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.”53 The New York Times reported in July 25, 2006, that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings had rejected as inadequate the testing systems of Maine and Nebraska; federal money will be withheld from both. Other states may be in jeopardy.
Honesty testing: “Integrity tests” have been marketed for several decades and their use by employers has recently grown substantially, and for two good reasons. One is that employee theft has been rising, year by year; various recent estimates range from $30 billion to $60 billion.54 The other is that in 1988 Congress passed the Employment Polygraph Protection Act, which prohibited the use of lie-detection equipment in most employment settings; as a result, the use of paper-and-pencil and computerized integrity tests soared. Some integrity tests probe attitudes toward dishonest behavior by means of direct questions such as “Do you think it is stealing to take small items home from work?” or by inquiries about the applicant’s views on tardiness and absenteeism. Others use an indirect approach, measuring personality traits from which psychologists infer the applicant’s attitude toward honesty. Such tests ask questions like “How often do you blush?”, “How often are you embarrassed?”, and “Do you make your bed?”55
Not surprisingly, there has been considerable opposition to integrity tests by labor groups on several grounds: that they are neither valid nor reliable and therefore falsely rate some honest people as dishonest, damaging their reputations and opportunities; that they are an invasion of privacy; and that they have an “adverse impact” on minority groups, eliminating higher percentages of them than of whites from job opportunities. Nonetheless, the integrity testing business has grown and thrived in recent years.
In 1991 a task force of the American Psychological Association, after making an exhaustive two-year study of honesty tests, concluded that the publishers of many tests offer no substantiation of their validity and utility. The association therefore strongly urged employers not to use such tests. But for the few tests for which information was available, the task force found:
The preponderance of the evidence is supportive of their predictive validity…To the extent that evidence is available, it is consistent with the idea that these tests reflect aspects of personal integrity and dependability, or trustworthiness.56
Later studies by the APA and other sources again found that some integrity tests have respectable levels of validity and that others do not. The would-be employee who is asked to take an integrity test is at risk of being incorrectly rated dishonest.
Emotional stability testing: In November 1989 a man named Sibi Soroka, who had applied for the job of security officer at a Target Store in California and been required to take two tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the California Psychological Inventory, filed suit against Target’s owner, the Dayton Hudson Corporation, charging invasion of privacy. The tests (discussed in an earlier chapter), have many purposes, among them to screen out emotionally unstable applicants for “safety sensitive” positions such as police officer, airline pilot, and nuclear plant operator. They include hundreds of items, some touching on religion (“My soul sometimes leaves my body,” “I feel sure there is only one true religion”) and some on sex (“I wish I were not bothered by thoughts about sex,” “I am very strongly attracted by members of my own sex”).
Soroka complained that he had been upset by the tests, which had invaded his privacy. He asked for a preliminary injunction preventing Target from using the results or continuing such testing. His lawsuit made headlines; there had been many privacy-invasion suits over drug testing in employment settings, but the claim that standard personality tests used in employment screening were an invasion of privacy broke new ground. The court denied Soroka’s request for a preliminary injunction but an appeals court granted it. That court did not rule out all such testing but only whatever contained unjustifiably invasive items, like those pertaining to sex and religion. In 1993 Target Stores reached a $1.3 million settlement with Soroka and other plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed in Alameda Superior Court, though Target admitted no legal wrongdoing.57
Soroka’s case established a beachhead in the attack against personnel testing. Other recent suits have attacked it on the grounds of defamation and the inflicting of emotional distress. The borderline between the justifiable use of testing and its misuse is being redrawn; where it will finally lie, one cannot now be sure.
Covert Persuasion: Advertising and Propaganda
“Nothing in life is more pervasive than persuasion,” wrote psychologist Eleanor Siegel in the APS Observer some years ago, adding:
Nearly every social interaction between humans—and between members of many nonhuman primate species—has a strong element of persuasion. Knowledge about the psychological processes that aff
ect people’s decision making therefore carries tremendous positive potential.58
And tremendous negative potential. Until the modern era, human beings who sought to persuade others to believe in their gods, make love, or sell them goods for less than the announced price did so by generally known and customary means, of which the others were presumably aware. The Roman senators listening to Cicero deliver his attacks on Catiline, the near-mutinous crewmen hearing Columbus’s firm assurances, the Puritan worshippers dutifully attending to the Reverend Cotton Mather’s fulminations against sin and portrayals of damnation, surely recognized that their minds and hearts were being played upon in culturally prescribed fashion, and made their judgments within that context.
But with the advent of scientific psychology, it became possible for informed people to use certain findings of the new science to influence the minds and feelings of others by methods not generally recognized as persuasive techniques.
This can be well-intended. The sophisticated techniques used by teachers in motivating children to learn and by psychotherapists to inspire patients to change are examples of the many ways in which covert psychological persuasion is employed for the benefit of others.
But the techniques can also be used to induce behavior that is harmful to the subjects, not merely in terms of concrete costs but at the price of freedom of choice. Those who are persuaded may be deprived of their rationality and become little better than Skinner’s Ping-Pong-playing pigeons, mindless creatures blindly obeying the will of others, heedless of their own best interests.
The use or abuse of psychology to persuade had become so pervasive by the early 1990s that social psychologists Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson called their 1992 study of the subject The Age of Propaganda. They meant not just political or religious propaganda but any “communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to ‘voluntarily’ accept this position as if it were his or her own.”59
Since we are interested in the misuse of covert persuasion, we will bypass overt forms of persuasion, like honest advertising; techniques of propaganda that rely not on covert use of psychological principles but on “disinformation” (the [George W.] Bush administration’s fraudulent assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction); deceptive labeling (the administration’s switch, when no WMD were found, to the claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq to liberate the Iraqis from oppression); unconcealed appeals to easily aroused emotions (a picture of an adorable baby sitting in a Michelin tire, or of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima); and, finally, certain military uses of psychology, including nontorture POW interrogation techniques and brainwashing, which are hardly covert and, in any case, are considered ethically justifiable during warfare.
But the use of psychological knowledge to persuade covertly is very common in advertising. Much advertising, to be sure, forthrightly portrays the product in an attractive light, praises its virtues, and states its price. However, a considerable part of the $400 billion spent each year in America on advertising of all types pays for messages conveyed by covertly persuasive techniques derived from psychological principles. As the journalist Vance Packard revealed long ago in The Hidden Persuaders, a muckraking 1957 exposé of these methods, psychoanalytic principles were then being used on a large scale—and, he later said in 1980, still were—to “channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes… Many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.”60
The early applications of psychological principles to advertising by Walter Dill Scott, John B. Watson, and others were relatively aboveboard, but in the late 1940s devious, cunning, and more potent applications were introduced by several people acquainted with Freudian theory. The best-known of them was the late Ernest Dichter. Born in Vienna, he earned a doctorate in psychology at the University of Vienna and briefly practiced psychoanalysis but, being Jewish, fled the Nazis in 1938 and came to the United States. Unlike most other refugee psychoanalysts, who resumed the practice of their profession in their new surroundings, he recognized that American advertisers were bigger game than neurotics, and began peddling his services as an expert who could identify unconscious desires in consumers by which they could be motivated to buy the client’s products.
Dichter was not the only one with this idea; others aware of the psychology of the unconscious were beginning to do similar work. But he was the key figure in what was known as “motivational research.” He used psychoanalytic theory to formulate hypotheses that he then tested by means of interviews, questionnaires, and sample ads on several hundred families in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he had his headquarters. Ebullient and dynamic, Dichter unabashedly proclaimed that a successful advertising agency “manipulates human motivations and desires and develops a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar—perhaps even undesirous of purchasing.”61
A good example of his work is the first study in which he used motivational research. His client was Compton, the agency that had the Ivory Soap account. As Dichter recalled years later, he told agency executives, “Bathing is a psychologically liberating ritual. You cleanse yourself not only of dirt but of guilt.” The evidence he produced by means of interviews and questionnaires convinced them; with his help they adopted as their ad copy “Be smart and get a fresh start with Ivory Soap…and wash all your troubles away.”62
He also radically changed the thrust of cigarette advertising. In the early 1950s, cigarette ads either stressed enjoyment or reassured readers about the effects of smoking on health. Dichter considered both approaches feeble. The typical American, in his analysis, was basically puritanical and tended to feel guilty when using any self-indulgent product. Accordingly, Dichter told agency people handling a cigarette account, “Every time you sell a self-indulgent product, you have to assuage guilt feelings and offer absolution.” To identify such guilt-reducing rationalizations for smoking, he made an in-depth study of 350 smokers and discovered a dozen “functional” reasons why one should smoke: to relieve tension, to be sociable, to convey a sense of virility, and more. As a result, his client’s ads, and soon many others’, showed people smoking under pressure, in company, and out on the range.63
For some years, motivational research was the hot idea in advertising and still is used to some extent. But by the 1970s advertisers had become less enamored of psychoanalytic trickery—it had not paid off as dramatically as they expected—and began turning to later psychological research for techniques of covert persuasion.
One useful finding, first made in the late 1960s and reaffirmed repeatedly in more recent years, was Robert Zajonc’s discovery of the “mere exposure” effect. As we saw earlier, Zajonc found that repeated exposure to even a meaningless symbol creates in the viewer a sense of familiarity and a favorable response. Psychological consultants to advertising agencies advised their clients that frequent brief repetition of the brand name and logo, even without reasoned and time-consuming argument, would sway the viewer. Many advertising agencies tested the method and found that it worked. The endless reiteration of a product name during a long football game or tennis match (along with, of course, macho or sexy imagery, scenes of fun in the sun, and the like) has its effect. When fans shop for beer or tennis shoes and come on the name they have seen so often, they have an automatic and unthinking favorable response.64
Over the past several decades, the method has also become endemic in TV commercials for political candidates, to the detriment of the democratic process. In place of reasoned argument about issues, the prevalent practice is to subject viewers to a barrage of thirty-second or even shorter commercials hammering home the candidate’s name and simplistic “sound bites” that change many people’s preferences through sheer repetition. One could call this propaganda, but there is little difference between such propaganda and covert advertising; in both cases something is being sold to the viewer by
devious means. Similarly, in many small towns and city neighborhoods the current campaign tactic of sticking little signs along roadsides or on front lawns bearing only the candidate’s name—no message and not even a party affiliation—is intended to make the name so familiar that it will incline the wavering voter to choose it without knowing quite why.
Some other laboratory findings that have recently been put to use in product advertising and propaganda:
—In an experiment based on classical conditioning theory, subjects saw pens of one color while hearing pleasant background music, and pens of another color while hearing unpleasant background music. Later, when offered a choice of pens, they tended to pick the color that had been paired with pleasant music. The principle, widely used in TV commercials, sounds innocuous, but it induces people to make a choice without an awareness of why they choose as they do.65
—In contrast to this short-term conditioning effect, a long-term “sleeper effect” has been experimentally demonstrated. Over a period of time, the emotional response created by an ad is dissociated from the product name, even though the emotion causes the name to be remembered. Thus, an ad that commands attention by creating unpleasant emotions—a recent TV commercial for a laxative shows a man grimacing while a deep male voice groans in discomfort—can be productive rather than counterproductive.66 Viewers may think it stupid of the advertiser to use an irritating or annoying commercial, but in the long run they remember the product, not the disagreeable reaction. —More generally, if the message is presented in ways that arouse fear, it is more likely to work than would factual or rational argument. The method is often used in public service messages that portray the dire consequences of certain kinds of behavior, and in commercials for fire or flood insurance, pest control, air bags, and the like.67
—Various characteristics of the person delivering the message can have a significant covert persuasive influence. Fast speakers are generally more persuasive than slow speakers.68 Handsome, beautiful, sexy presenters, and celebrities in general, are believed by advertisers to exert important covert influence. Clothing can have a similar effect; for years, though less often now, advice about medications or diet was usually delivered by an actor wearing a white lab coat.