The Independent Analytical Center for Geopolitical Studies “Borysfen Intel” affords ground to the analysts generation for expressing their point of view regarding the political, economic, security, information situation in Ukraine and in the world in general, according to their personal geopolitical studies and analyses.
Note that an authors’ point of view
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Radchenko Olena
А student of the Faculty of International Educational Programs of the Ukrainian Engineering Pedagogics Academy (UEPA), member of the Academic Council of the Academy.
The world is alarmed with what is happening in Ukraine. Every day, there is a sort of an explosion of various news. How to navigate in this flow of information even with great technical capabilities? It is logical to assume that all the information available to an ordinary citizen makes him/her form his/her own personal opinion. But what is it like, this opinion? And is it not manipulated in the name of some goal? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is yes, because today we can see how actively they use a variety of psychological techniques of manipulation in order, for example, to win over the citizens for their further use. This method cannot be right, because it is actually imposes on individuals certain ideas without their awareness. If there are several such parties, it serves as a pretext for unleashing of information warfare. When information is used and controlled in order to gain an advantage over the other side, psychological manipulations act as the necessary means.
What do we mean by manipulation today? Iryna Tkachenko, the author of “Stop! Manipulations. How to Recognize and Stop a Manipulator”, gives the following definition: “Manipulation is a hidden psychological technique, aimed at making a person do something against his/her interests, which someone wants (needs) him/her to do”. One of the main factors of manipulation is to make the object feel like doing something wanted by someone else. That is, the manipulator's aim is to directly deprive the object of a possibility to have freedom of choice, an ability to think critically and make a rational choice, to bring him/her to the given from the outside choice as the only possible, allegedly zero option for the object. This choice is involuntary and unconscious, that is, the person does not understand the principle of action, which makes it possible to control his/her behavior from the outside against his/her will.
So, in the information war, we can see emergence of new methods of manipulation through media. Thus, the information security of the state comes to the fore. Since the vast majority of the citizens are ordinary people, they need information to get protected against manipulations, to which resorts a variety of information sources. After all, every day maladaptive factors are increasing. Accordingly, the information security in counter-information operations is extremely important. If well-versed in the mass media manipulations, one can choose the right protection techniques. The aforementioned work determines the basic techniques of manipulations in the media:
1. Distraction. The main element of social control is distraction of people from important issues and decisions that are taken by the political and economic leaders. This technique uses influencing the society through flooding the information space with uncomplicated messages.
2. Creation of problems with further provision of methods for solving them. The problem itself (that is a certain “situation”) is created, which should cause a certain reaction among the population with the further need for its resolving, needed by manipulators. The further action will be the resolving itself.
3. The technique of gradual use. To make the society accept some moot decision, it is enough to introduce it gradually — hour after hour, day after day, year after year, trying not to cause a rush.
4. Postponement of execution. Another method of promotion of an irrelevant solution is to present the decision as a “necessary” and at the moment to achieve the consent of citizens for its implementation in the future.
5. Appeal to the people as a child. In many designed for the general public statements they use such arguments, characters and intonation, as if the audience were made up of children of school age. The harder someone tries to mislead the listeners, the more one tries to use infantile speech patterns.
6. Emphasis on emotions is stronger than that on thinking. Influencing the emotion is a classic technique, which is to block a person's capability of rational analysis and critical understanding of what is happening. Using the emotional factor allows the manipulator to “open the door” into the subconscious in order to bring in there certain thoughts, dreams, fears, concerns, persistent patterns of behavior. This technique is often used by politicians, media and people engaged in advertising.
7. Keeping people in ignorance, cultivating and imposing mediocrity. If this technique is used, people lose the ability to understand the means and methods, and this is most often used in the politics to lead and control subordinates.
8. Forcing citizens to be fond of mediocrity. To convince the population at the level of consciousness that is not important to be aware. Of course, there are always plenty of those who want to be ultramodern. They will act as poorly oriented individuals, and will participate in dirty political games.
9. Gaining a sense of personal guilt. This technique is used to force a person to plead guilty in the troubles that take place due to the scarcity of mental abilities or lack of effort. As a result — instead of looking objectively at the situation and evaluating it, a person will blame himself/herself for his/her shortcomings and misfortunes.
10. The gap between knowledge and information available. With the development of biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the current “system” has got into its disposal the latest knowledge about the human, from the sphere of both, physiology and psychology. We may conclude that in most cases, the “system” has much more power and abilities and better controls people than they can do it themselves.
11. The principle of priority. The essence of this method is based on specific principles of the psyche, which always considers truthful the information, which was the first to be processed by the consciousness. The fact that afterwards we can get more accurate information does not matter. Here works the effect of perception of the first information as the only truth. It is impossible to understand its contradictions immediately, and it is difficult to change the formed opinion later.
12. “Witnesses” of events. At the same time, there are supposedly witnesses of those events pretending to be very honest and sincere, report the information previously received from the manipulator, and give out this information as their own. Sometimes in such cases, the identity of these witnesses is allegedly hidden or a pseudo is published. Along with falsified information, all these tricks are effective enough for the perception of the audience, as they influence the unconscious part of the human psyche.
13. The image of the “enemy”. Artificial creation of a threat aggravates and alters the mental state of people, so that they become more manageable. An exacerbation of passions takes place and in this state, people succumb to emotions rather than to logic.
14. Shifting the emphasis. The purposeful shifting of emphasis in the submitted material. Something undesirable for manipulators is overshadowed, and the information they need comes to the foreground.
15. The use of the “leaders' opinion”. In this context, manipulating the mass consciousness is carried out taking into account the fact that individuals are guided by the views of the leaders in this or that question. Those leaders may be the persons having authority in a certain strata of the population, based on their activities and experiences.
16. Refocusing people's attention. Manipulators can provide virtually any material without fear of its negative component. This is possible due to the refocusing of attention when necessary information is preserved as a background of the events that seem to be accidentally observed but at the same time serve as a distraction.
17. Emotionally charged. This manipulation technique is based on one of the features of the human psyche — emotional charge. It is known that when an unwanted flow of information is coming, the person begins to build protective barriers. To bypass this barrier (censorship of mentality), the manipulative influence is directed to emotions. Thus, “having charged” the necessary information with needed emotions, the manipulator is able to overcome the barrier of the mind and cause an explosion of the person's passions, to make him/her really worry about the information heard. Next works the effect of emotional charge. Best of all it works in a crowd, where the critical threshold is much lower. As an example, such a method of manipulation is used in many reality shows where participants interact with increased tone and show a strong emotional excitement. This forces the viewer not just to follow the ups and downs, but also to sympathize with the main characters. Ambitious politicians, impulsively proclaiming slogans of exit from crises, especially influence the feelings of the audience.
18. Indicative issues. Different representation of the same material can cause the opposite reaction. That is, one event can be deliberately “missed”, while the other is paid much more attention (and on different channels). At this, the truth itself goes to the background, and depends solely on the wishes of the manipulator. Submission of information with the help of manipulative technique leads to artificial creation and publicizing of non-existent problems, which hide something important that can anger the citizens. This principle is also called the “information blockade”. It is when a certain part of the information (unwanted by manipulators) is deliberately not allowed to be spread.
19. Unavailability of information. This technique of manipulating is also called the “information blockade”. It is based on the fact that much of the information is extremely undesirable for manipulators and deliberately is not spread.
20. A pre-emptive strike. This kind of manipulation is based on early presenting of negative information causing the maximum resonance. In other words, first they present some damaging information, and later, when about the object (for example — a political figure) a new, more substantial dirt turns up; the majority of the audience already react instinctively to it.
21. Purposeful aggravation of passions. We mean here a method of manipulating the mass-media audiences, especially when they use erroneous aggravation of passions by providing supposedly sensational material. As a result — there is an unnecessary hype, the human psyche does not have time to react to it properly. In the future, the information submitted will not impress because critical thinking, offered by the censor of mind, has decreased.
22. Effect of plausibility. The basis for the manipulation is a human tendency to believe any information that does not contradict the one, which already exists on the relevant issue. In other words, when we get information from the media with whom we do not agree internally, we block the channel of information. But if we get the information that is not contrary to our understanding of the issue, we will continue to “absorb” information, reinforcing the previously formed patterns of behavior and mindset in the subconscious. This means that there is a field for activity of manipulators, who will purposefully put lies into the truthful information in order to make people automatically see them as the absolute truth. Through this approach, grows the audience's confidence in the mass media as a source of the truthful information.
23. The information storm effect. This manipulators' trick means a person gets overwhelmed with the flow of useless information, in which the truth is actually lost. People get tired of the data stream, which means that a closer analysis is becoming more difficult for them. This way manipulators can hide the necessary information.
24. The reverse effect. In this case, there comes plentiful negative information in the address of a particular person, and by this an opposite effect can be achieved. Instead of the expected condemnation of this person, people begin to sympathy and pity him/her.
25. Everyday narrative. It could be called manipulative move, when information that might cause unwanted effects, is pronounced with a normal tone, as if nothing bad had happened. As a result — some critical details on entering the human mind loses its relevance. So, the human psyche does not criticize the negative information but actually gets used to it.
26. One-sided coverage of events. This method of manipulation is to provide the ability to express only to one side of the process. As a result of such an influence on the human psyche, a wrong informative and sensive-effect of the information is achieved.
27. The principle of contrast. Another type of manipulation is possible if the information is supplied against the background of some other information, which was originally negative and was negatively perceived by the majority of the audience. In other words, “the white is better seen against the black background”. That is against the background of bad people, they may tell about a good person, his good plans, intentions and deeds.
28. Approved by the alleged majority. The use of this technique to manipulate the masses is based on a specific part of the human psyche — admissibility of any action that had been approved of by other people. As a result of this manipulation, the “barrier of criticism” actually disappears once the information had been approved of by other people.
29. Expressive blow. If used, this method must produce the effect of psychological shock. This result is sought by manipulators through deliberate broadcast to the masses of horrors of modern life, causing the first protest reaction (due to the increased emotional component of the psyche), and then — a demand to punish those responsible. At this, the emphasis when presenting the material are deliberately shifted towards the not needed by the manipulator competitors or against the information that may be undesirable for them.
30. Wrong analogies. This manipulation eliminates the real cause in any important matter, replacing it with false analogy. For example, there is a wrong (intentional) comparison of different conflicting consequences, which in this case are presented as a single or a similar event.
31. Artificial “perception” of the situation. A lot of different information is being purposefully thrown into a media market. The essence of this manipulative approach is monitoring people's interest in the very popular “products”, and the information, which has not received the status of an actual, in the future is simply excluded.
32. Manipulative commenting. Here manipulators' trick is that such technologies are used in covering any undesirable for them events. Thanks to them, this information can get the opposite color. It all depends on how the manipulators will present this or that information, with what commentaries, with what accent, and so on.
33. The effect of presence. There is a stereotype that the witness is always right. Therefore, reference to the personal presence of manipulators at any event allows them to send their technique in the right direction and with the maximum effect.
34. Repetition, repetition, repetition. This technique of manipulation is quite simple. The information has to be repeated many times, in order to be remembered by the mass-media audience and later used by it. At this, manipulators need to maximum simplify the text and make it maximum acceptable for the audience with a rather low intellectual level. Strange as it might seem, in this case one can be sure that the information will not only be fully brought to the mass audience (reader, etc.), but will be “correctly” received by the audience. This effect can be achieved only by repetition of simple sentences or conclusions! The mechanism is that the information is first well fixed in the subconscious of the audience, and then will effectively influence their consciousness, that is, the deeds, the shade of meaning of which has already been secretly laid into the information for mass media audience.
35. Half-truths. According to this technique of manipulation, the public is given only part of reliable information, while the other part, which explains the existence of the first portion, is silenced by manipulators.
That is, there are many techniques and methods of manipulation and they are varied. This article highlights only the main, on the basis of which are combined and formed other methods (techniques) of influence.
Manipulating information is an ancient method of manipulating the consciousness of the people, and history confirms this. There are many examples, because it is observed in different countries, in different time. This is happening today, because ordinary citizens become victims of the “hybrid” information warfare, and thus they are deprived of the right to form their own point of view.
Of course, manipulation techniques by themselves will not disappear from our everyday life, but protection against them is awareness of this problem, as well as analysis of manifestations of some or other techniques of manipulation and the state's appropriate response to them.
Of course, the information security of the state is very difficult to maintain, but for Ukraine, this question is relevant now more than ever. The relevant competent state bodies should take more methodological and practical efforts for ordinary citizens not to get under the influence of different sources of information, but to be able to form their own reasoned opinion.
