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Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook
Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Emotion Primary driver of political decisions
Political psychology
Rationalization Brain resolves data-desire conflicts
Neural activity studies
The Primacy of the Gut: Why Reason Buckles The prevailing vision of democracy—a dispassionate electorate weighing evidence and rationally calculating costs and benefits—bears almost no relation to how the mind actually works during a campaign. When the American public votes, the decisions are invariably driven by emotion and deeply rooted psychological networks, not by dispassionate reasoning. This is true not only for the politically unengaged but also for the most informed partisans. Political persuasion, therefore, operates not in the marketplace of ideas, but primarily in the far more potent marketplace of emotions.
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Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy
Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Attention merchant Harvesting awareness for advertisers
Wu
Consumer as product Sold to advertisers
Penny press model
The Ubiquity of Attention Capture In the history of commerce, few moments equal the significance of the invention of the attention merchant—a business dedicated to harvesting human awareness for resale to advertisers. This model, pioneered by the penny press, successfully separated the consumer from the product: while the reader believed themselves the customer, they were in fact the product being sold to advertisers. This breakthrough paved the way for commerce to breach the private sphere, colonizing time and space previously thought sacred—including the home, schools, and personal relationships—in an inexorable pursuit of growth.
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Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves
Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Experiencing self Transient sensations and emotions
Kahneman
Narrating self Coherent fictions and plans
Behavioral psychology
Peak-end rule Prioritizing dramatic moments
Memory bias
Consistency Shield against admitting error
Psychological defense
The Tyranny of the Narrating Self The human experience is characterized by radical discontinuity—a constant flux of transient sensations and fleeting emotions perceived by the “experiencing self”. To impose order on this chaos, the mind constructs the “narrating self,” a psychological entity perpetually spinning coherent, simplified fictions about the past and making plans for the future. This narrator is inherently duration-blind and often unreliable, prioritizing dramatic moments (peak-end rule) and internal coherence over factual accuracy.
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