One more abuse of the White House destroying human freedom pushing for more government control. These tactics have been used for many years by corporations to persuade people to love and to purchase their products. Now the control freaks running the White House employ behavior conditioning for all choices. This is known as mind control when used by religious cults. Elected officials take it one step further to undermine choice. It is also how totalitarians employ propaganda which is used extensively by this White House.
[From article]
For the past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens?
The nickname is “nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by presenting choices or information differently. The classic example is requiring people to opt out of being an organ donor, instead of opting in, when they sign up for a driver’s license.
Without any change in rules, the small tweak has boosted the number of registered organ donors in many states.
Nudging has gained a lot of high-profile advocates, including behavioral-law guru Cass Sunstein and former budget czar Peter Orszag. Not everyone likes the idea—“the behaviorists are saying that you, consumer, are stupid,” said Bill Shughart, a professor of public choice at Utah State University—but President Obama was intrigued enough that he actually hired Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard who co-wrote the best-known book about the topic, “Nudge.”
The president officially adopted the idea last year when he launched the White House’s Social and Behavioral Science Team (SBST), a cross-agency effort to bring behavioral science research into the policymaking process. Now the team has published its first annual report on this experiment.
[. . .]
“A lot of the stuff I see on here is just straightforward psychology, just thinking about ways in which people react to forms and how they will be able to make it easier to fill out forms,” said Michael Thomas, an assistant professor of economics at Creighton University who has been skeptical about the uses of behavioral science.
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/obamas-effort-to-nudge-america-000276
Obama’s effort to ‘nudge’ America
The government tried using behavioral science to shape people’s behavior. Here’s what happened.
By Danny Vinik
October 15, 2015
