Summary of the Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
| Book Summary and Critique: The Hidden Persuaders Summary of THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS by Vance Packard 1. The Depth Approach. This book is about the large-scale -- and sometimes impressively successful -- efforts to use insights from psychiatry and the social sciences (and provided all too willingly by cooperative psychologists and social scientists) to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes. The use of mass psychoanalysis to guide campaigns of persuasion has become the basis of a multimillion dollar industry. Some of the attempted manipulation is simply amusing. Some of it is disquieting, particularly when viewed us a portent of more intensive and effective efforts that may lie ahead. The probers and motivational researchers see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, and irrational emotional blockages. They're looking for the whys of our behavior, our hidden weaknesses and frailties, so that they can more effectively manipulate our habits and choices in their favor, not only in merchandising, but also in politics and industrial relations. One of them, Louis Cheskin, says that the techniques of Motivation Research [henceforth MR] are "designed to reach the unconscious...mind because preferences are generally determined by factors of which the individual is not conscious." These depth manipulators are starting to acquire a power of persuasion that now justifies public scrutiny and concern, especially because their activities have seriously antihumanistic implications; they are a setback in our long struggle to become rational and self-guiding beings. 2. The Trouble with People. MR is a response to the difficulties that marketers kept encountering in trying to persuade Americans to buy all the products their companies could produce. One of these was the consumer's apparent perversity and unpredictability, which cause marketers to question three