Oh, Baby, Push my
psychological hot buttons:
Today, we take a look at the buttons you can push to get people to do what you want. I’ve extracted this information from a book written by Richard Brodie entitled Viruses of the Mind.
We’re not taking this information because Richard Brodie is a recognized psychology or marketing expert because he’s not. But he has had big-life experience. According to several biographies, here’s some info about him:
- He dropped out of Harvard to join Bill Gates in the personal-computer revolution at Microsoft. There he wrote the first version of Microsoft Word before becoming Gates’s technical assistant, and was employee number 77 at Microsoft
- An American computer programmer, motivational speaker, writer, and professional poker player
- His books Getting Past OK and Virus of the Mind are international bestsellers, published in many languages across the globe
Viruses of the Mind is chock full of lists of hot buttons along with deep psychological reasons why these buttons work at fundamental psychological depths.
His premise is that our genes are the deep drivers of our behaviors and actions with the sole purpose to make sure they are replicated through offspring. And using genes as a model, ideas can be viewed as replicating units with those going viral and taking over society as the most successful, regardless of whether they help us personally in meeting our own loftier goals for our lives.
He states he wrote Virus of the Mind to help people protect themselves from propaganda and how ideas evolve: “People who understand [this] have an advantage in protecting themselves against increasingly subtle manipulation.”
With that in mind, here are some buttons I extracted for you from Richard Brodie’s book Virus of the Mind:
The “4 F” Primary Buttons:
Fight, Flight, Food, and er … Reproducing:
Initially, the brain’s only purpose was to help DNA replicate. In other words, the four Fs:
Fighting, fleeing, feeding, and er … reproducing.
Because of their importance in surviving and continuing the human species, information involving danger, food, and sex gets our attention and spreads faster because we are wired to pay more attention to them — we have buttons around those subjects.
How do you communicate these primary buttons?
You can do it in two ways:
FIRST: Use words similar to those above in literal, physical terms:
- Fight: Fight this battle to take away your rights!
- Flight: Gold on the rise: Signs everywhere to abandon the dollar NOW!
- Food: The coming American Food Shortage — and what you can do about it!
- Reproduction: 30 days to a healthier, sexier YOU! Here’s how:
SECOND: If using these in their naked form seems too obvious, you can mask them, as I show you below (along with notes from the Virus of the Mind book on why they’re useful communication for physical survival):
Crisis: Quickly spreading fear along with specific details saved many lives.
Mission: Communicating fighting an enemy, building a shelter, or finding food helped people survive during adversity or scarcity. Those people evolved to be good at sending and receiving the mission idea had fitter DNA because they could work together for a common goal.
Problem: Identifying a situation – no food, competition for mates, etc – as a problem equipped individuals better to survive and mate.
Danger: Knowledge about potential dangers, even if not immediate crises, was valuable: knowing where predators hunted or where water was poisoned enhanced survival and mating.
Opportunity: Acting quickly to avoid missing out on a reward – food, prey, potential mate – was a benefit.
The “4 Fs” are used everywhere:
Do these occupy a disproportionate amount of communication today? Take a look at news and other items online, on TV, and in newspapers and magazines.
For example, in best-selling books:
National fiction bestsellers are populated with thrillers and love stories.
Nonfiction bestsellers are filled with: deadly diseases, improving your sex life, eating better food, political crises … but only occasional self-improvement (probably read only because people are scared of dangers encountered if they don’t).
You see ads like: The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet: Opportunity to have someone you trust address the problem of your sex-appeal crisis over food.
And I find some of my most effective headlines for building subscriber lists start with one word:
W A R N I N G !
Using his own book as an example, Richard Brodie writes two summaries to show the effectiveness of these, one a rational presentation and the other a button-pushing version:
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Rational: Introduction to Memetics is a compilation of ideas on the science of memetics. Each chapter summarizes a different topic in this field. Included are examples of how memetics impacts people’s lives, illustrates historical data, and offers choices for the future. Button-Pushing: Virus of the Mind exposes the imminent crisis of the dangerous new technology known as memetics. What is it, and how can we guard against its harmful effects? Our only chance is to have everyone read Virus of the Mind before it is too late! |
Some skepticism kicks in with the second version, doesn’t it? The skepticism kicks in to protect your existing set of ideas. Unfortunately, it resists beneficial and harmful ideas equally.
Beyond Primal Instinct:
The second order of buttons:
Pass the word:
The first-order buttons are the four basic first-order drives. We also evolved countless secondary strategies to make us better at survival and reproduction AND to satisfy the four first-order drives. These focus on our relationship with others and their power lies in the fact they tend to be easily passed along to others like a virus.
Some second-order buttons are:
Belonging: Humans are gregarious. Reasons include: safety in numbers, economies of scale, concentration of mates. Ideas giving people a feeling of belonging to a group have an advantage.
Distinguishing yourself: The drive to do something new, innovative, significant makes an individual more likely to find food, shelter, or stand out from the crowd as a potential mate
Caring: Caring for others has a survival advantage
Approval: A drive to do what others or you approve of. As humans evolved into societies, individuals fulfilling their roles increased perpetuating their genes. This hooks into people’s drive to get approval and play on the guilt, shame, and hurt that result if they don’t get it.
Obeying Authority: It’s in an individual’s interest to recognize and follow authority – those more powerful or wiser than them. Going along increases DNA’s chances to replicate, while fighting might get him killed or left out in the cold to starve and die.
The ways these work is similar to first-order drives: you get some kind of good feeling when you’re doing the things that the drive drives you to do, and you get a bad feeling when you’re not. These feelings often aren’t crystal clear.
People have many secondary drives connected to various strong feelings, and ideas that activate these feelings have the evolutionary advantage. It’s in our nature to simply pay more attention to those that push our buttons. That button-pushing attention tends to get passed along. Ideas that annoy, seduce, enrage, or scare us tend to become widespread.
More second-order buttons
rising out of culture
with the imbedded message:
“Pass this along:”
The buttons below evolved through cultural “organisms” in the environment of the society of human minds. They don’t enhance your survival. They enhance the survival of the culture or institution such as religion:
Tradition: A strategy to continue what was done or believed in the past is automatically self-perpetuating. It doesn’t matter if the tradition is good or bad. Once a tradition gets started, it automatically continues until something more powerful stops it. People infected with traditions are programmed to “repeat this idea of tradition in the future and spread this meme to future generations.”
Compare these two:
Slug Club stresses tradition: conducting meetings on Saturday mornings, employing a little ritual of emptying the saltshakers before lunch.
Kangaroo Club stresses novelty and variety.
In 20 years, the Slug’s traditions are likely to be around: Meeting Saturday Morning and Empty the Saltshakers. The Kangaroo original ideas of novelty and variety will have died in the name of variety.
Evangelism: This idea explicitly involves spreading itself to other people, thus having an added advantage. Evangelism is often combined with Mission.
Faith: This entails believing in the idea blindly. Why? It can never be dislodged from your belief system by any attack or argument. Combined with Evangelism, Faith makes for a powerful mind-virus envelope that can be stuffed with just about any content.
Skepticism: Questioning new ideas is a defense against them overtaking your existing ones. It’s the opposite of faith, and works in a similar manner: skeptics are resistant to new ideas just as the faithful are.
Familiarity: Unusual words or phrases quickly change into familiar ones (The french word “beaucoup” and pronounced “bowe-koo” becomes pronounced “boo-koo”). The familiar spreads more quickly than the unfamiliar because people already distinguish, label, and categorize familiar things and thus notice them more.
Making Sense: Ideas that make sense spread much rapidly (remember: it’s not a matter of if it’s true but if it sounds reasonable). People are quick to accept flawed explanations that make sense over more accurate ones that are hard to understand.
The unstoppable plan to enslave you
in the coming one-world collectivist government
controlled by the Fed and Big Banks:
US replaced by North American Union …
US Dollar replaced by the Amero …
Your freedom replaced by
(read more now before it’s too late):
You can see these powerfully at work in all the theories and entertainment concerning ghosts and psychics and conspiracies about UFOs, Illuminati, shadow governments, and similar ideas that sound reasonable but are actually riddled with holes once you understand them. But they sound reasonable.
The only way to understand them is to step outside the arguments made by any of them.
For example, in ghosting hunting TV programs, you’re presented with evidence that ranges from:
The non-existent: “Me and FreddieMac and SallyMae and FannieMae were in there and all of a sudden I thought I saw/felt/heard/smelled/emotionally sensed something. I can’t be sure and may be it was just my eyes adjusting to the dark, SallyMae’s perfume, or my poison ivy rash. I hope we caught it on video.”)
To rigging events like moving chairs and person-like ghost shadows: “Hey. I would never lie to you, even though my rising salary and continued ballooned ego and flow of sexual partners depend on our technical team tossing rocks into camera view and rigging stuff to move without apparent human involvement.”
And backing them with outside, objective third-party expert sources like the American Petroleum Institute speaking on behalf of Big Oil about the global warming myth: We’re here at Ghost Video Analysis Associates with our footage. For our fee and national exposure, they’re delighted to say anything we tell them. Let’s listen in on their impartial expert feedback: “From my expert opinion, this cannot be explained by human intervention, and it must be paranormal. And thanks for the huge check, GhostGuys!”
But step outside the program and you can see clearly:
The game is to present solid and credible scientifically backed evidence of a large viewing audience in order to sell them to advertisers who actually pay for everything. You wouldn’t take a Pixar animated movie as real, would you? It’s entertainment, right? Same goes for ghost shows and even the six o’clock news. They’re entertainment and misleading, and have simple-to-understand profit or power agendas behind them.
DEEP MARKETING: PART 3:
Psychological Hot Buttons
. . . as a downloadable PDF for you:
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WHAT’S NEXT? We focus on how Freudian psychology came to dominate American culture through massive long-term public relations begun by Freud’s American nephew who was driven by a cynical view of people as dangerous bundles of irrational emotions who must be controlled by changing them from active citizens to passive consumers. President Herbert Hoover referred to the masses as consuming Happiness Machines.
Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.
In DEEP MARKETING.
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