Propaganda and Persuasion

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Propaganda and Persuasion

Shaping Perceptions. Shaping perceptions is usually attempted through lan guage and images, which is why slogans, posters, symbols, and even archi tectural structures are developed during wartime. How we perceive is based on "complex psychological, philosophical, and practical habitual thought patterns that we carry over from past experiences" (Hayward, 1997, p. 73). Perception is the process of extracting information from the world outside us, as well as from within ourselves. Each individual has a perceptual field that is unique to that person and formed by the influences of values, roles, group norms, and self-image. Each of these factors colors the ways a person perceives (O'Donnell & Kable, 1982, p. 171). George Johnson, in his book In the Palaces of Memory (1991), offered a colorful description of perception and recognition according to the activity of neural networks in the brain: Looking out the window at the ocean, we might notice a bright light in the night sky hovering on the horizon. Deep inside the brain one neural network responds to this vector, dismissing it as just another star. But its intense bright ness causes another network to guess that it is Venus. Then the light starts getting bigger, brighter, creating a different vector, a different set of firing pat terns. Another network associates this configuration with approaching head lights on a freeway. Then two more lights appear, green and red. Networks that interpret these colors feed into other networks; the pattern for stop light weakly responds. All over the brain, networks are talking to networks, enter taining competing hypotheses. Then comes the roar, and suddenly we know what it is. The noise vector, the growing-white-light vector, the red-and-green vector all converge on the network—or network of networks—that says air plane. (p. 165) Johnson went on to say, "How a perception was ultimately categorized would depend on the architecture of the system, that which a person was born with and that which was developed through experience. Some people's brains would tell them they had seen a UFO or an angel instead of a plane" (p. 165). Because members of a culture share similar values and norms as well as the same laws and general practices, it is quite possible to have group perceptions or, at least, very similar perceptions within a cultural group. Our language is based on a vast web of associations that enables us to interpret, judge, and conceptualize our perceptions. Propagandists under stand that our constructed meanings are related to both our past under standing of language and images and the culture and context in which they appear. Perception is dependent on our attitudes toward issues and our feelings about them. For example, legislation designed to increase timber thinning in national forests was labeled a "Healthy Forests Initiative."