The massive, redundant stimuli saturating modern life, are not as intricate and complex as they are competing and repeating. Normal people have to depend increasingly upon shortcuts to handle them. Sir Joshua Reynolds once noted, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." People use a short-hand type of thought-sorting called “stereotyping,” which is employed to rapidly classify people, situations and things.
Each intricate sequence of a human's responsive behavior could be compared to a programmed tape which is played when a trigger feature is identified. A trigger feature usually appears in the form of a word (or words), an image, or some other stimuli or perception set. Some trigger features are complex mosaics of emotion-charged imagery, yet they are so powerful that perception of one tiny aspect of the mosaic can serve as a trigger feature.
Trigger features offer clues that a stereotype has been encountered. A sometimes mindless response or near automatic behavior pattern, is then unrolled
The trigger feature-response action sequence is: (1) A trigger feature is perceived; It causes, click - the appropriate behavioral tape to be activated; (3) Then, whirr - the tape begins to play and a standard sequence of behaviors is performed.
Although there are many situations in which human behavior doesn't work in a mechanical tape-activated way, there are an astonishing number of situations that invariably produce programmed behavior.
Advertising experts regularly exploit trigger feature sequences. The trigger features which activate preprogrammed psychological tapes can be used to dupe people into playing their behavior tapes at the wrong time.
Most advertising deception depends upon verbal and graphic imagery repeated in patterned sequences which first elicit an emotional thought-stopping response. Thought-stopping responses, or stereotyped thinking, place humans in heightened states of susceptibility to suggestion. Such suggestible states also arouse concomitant fear impulses. That is why communist deceivers combine war, or some other terror-provoking imagery, with those behavioral directives impinging upon thought-stopping.
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