Emotional

Emotions are not good or bad.  But emotions can be manipulated.

I've referred to emotional trigger words before, but perhaps it is time to give some examples of what they are and how the words that are used matter.

When I was in high school, English teacher talked about bias and emotional trigger words and how they can be used to shape someone else's thoughts and attitudes towards, well, anything.

One of the examples used was a well known advertising campaign of the day that loudly and proudly announced that "More doctors recommend (insert name of product)!"  The product was a brand of cigarettes and a number of years later it was revealed that the tobacco industry had paid numerous doctors to tout their product.

The teacher however, pointed out that saying 'more doctors' was an emotional tweaking of the attitude of people reading or seeing these ads.  More doctors than who?  What kind of 'doctor'?  Saying 'more' anything without giving the qualifier of who *isn't* recommending the product was essentially meaningless.  More doctors than plumbers?  Who are you going to believe? 

Advertising isn't the only industry that uses such emotional tweaking of course.  Editorial bias can be used in well, editorials.  Fiction.  Non-fiction.  TV shows and movies.  Music.  Sermons.  Any platform at all, including on the internet.

There are groups touting themselves as 'research' groups who constantly and consistently push the right wing agenda under the guise of polls that are heavily skewed.  Of course the left does this as well.  Some groups lost my support when they skewed their message so far out of reality I couldn't support them any more, in spite of some of the good they have done.

One of the groups is PETA.   Their staged situations are quite literally 'fake news'.  The bloody lamb last year was especially irritating.  First of all a lamb is not shorn at newborn age, but only when they turn one year.  And they would never, ever come out of the shearing shed covered in blood or the shearer would be fired instantly and shown to the property boundary post haste.   The fact that the ad used a nubile naked young woman was just plain sexist.

I'm not saying that animals are not abused - of course they are.  And we need to do better.  But the message that PETA was sending was all about triggering emotions and not about anything resembling reality.

The advice given us in class was to pay attention to the emotion being generated when we read or heard a message.  Take note of what that emotion was.  Ask yourself which words were used to trigger that emotion.  Then ask yourself why that word triggered that emotion and if it was an appropriate reaction if you then re-read or edited the comment without the word that triggered the emotion.

Here is an example from an ad I saw recently:

"This bbq cooking surface is made with real copper!"

Real copper?  As opposed to what?  Fake copper?  Why would 'real' copper be identified?  Because anything 'fake' is phony and not to be trusted?  Why not just say "This copper bbq surface provides even cooking and prevents food from falling through the bbq grid."   Focus on the benefits?  But triggering the emotion of 'good' is a subtle form of manipulating what you think so that you are more susceptible to the message. 

I suggest that as we move through the upcoming time of change that people pay attention to the words swirling around them.  Pause and inspect the emotions that those words trigger.  Ask yourself who is working to trigger those emotions and if you really want to be triggered in that way.