Can an entire population be steered on purpose? The question sounds like conspiracy — yet it is the subject of an almost century-old, quite sober field of research. The findings cut both ways: the tools of propaganda are superbly documented. How strongly they actually work is far more contested than talk of the "manipulated masses" suggests. This article follows directly on from herd behaviour — because propaganda exploits exactly those social mechanisms.
The Classics: When Propaganda Became a Science
The field emerged after the First World War, in which state war propaganda was run on an industrial scale for the first time.
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922): we react not to the world itself but to the "pictures in our heads" — stereotypes set by the media. From him comes the idea of the deliberate "manufacture of consent".
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928): Sigmund Freud's nephew is regarded as the "father of PR". His most notorious coup was making public smoking palatable to women in 1929 as "torches of freedom" — a textbook case of linking a product to a deeper longing.
- Harold Lasswell: founded the systematic content analysis of propaganda and coined the formula "Who says what to whom through which channel with what effect".
The "Seven Devices"
In 1937 the American Institute for Propaganda Analysis named seven basic techniques still cited today: name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer (borrowing authority), testimonial (celebrity endorsement), plain folks (the man-next-door image), card stacking (one-sided selection) and the bandwagon appeal ("everyone's doing it"). The last is nothing but the deliberate exploitation of social proof.
The Empirical Turn
In the 1940s/50s persuasion became measurable. Carl Hovland and the Yale Studies tested experimentally what makes messages effective: source credibility, order of arguments, one- versus two-sided presentation and the "sleeper effect" (an untrustworthy source is forgotten, the message remains). Hadley Cantril analysed the panic after Orson Welles' radio drama War of the Worlds (1938), and Adorno et al. asked, in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), about susceptibility to authoritarian propaganda.
The Critical Line
Two works shape the socially critical view: Jacques Ellul'sPropaganda (1962) describes it not as a single lie but as an all-pervading climate — and argues provocatively that the well-informed are most affected, because they are "addressable" in the first place. Chomsky and Herman set out their "propaganda model" in Manufacturing Consent (1988): not censorship but structural filters (ownership, advertising, sources) shape what gets reported at all.
Today: Computational Propaganda
The digital variant is studied by Philip Howard and Samuel Woolley (Oxford Internet Institute), among others: social bots, troll farms and microtargeting. The Cambridge Analytica case (2018) made psychometric targeting famous — yet it remains scientifically contested how large the actual electoral effect was; much points to skilful self-marketing by the firm. On the other side stands inoculation theory (William McGuire; today Sander van der Linden): people can be "vaccinated" against manipulation by exposing the tricks in advance — "prebunking".
Soft Power, Nudging and "Cognitive Warfare"
A current German-language voice is Dr. Jonas Tögel, a propaganda researcher and Americanist at the University of Regensburg. His central thesis: the real battlefield is no longer territory but perception — the very thinking and feeling of people themselves. Three terms stand at the centre:
- Soft power. Political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term in 1990 for the ability to win others over through attraction rather than coercion or money — via culture, values, films, music, education. Whoever shapes the "pictures in people's heads" needs no tanks. Its counterpart is "hard power", the pressure of military and economic force.
- Nudging. The gentle "push" popularised by Thaler & Sunstein in 2008: nothing is forbidden and nothing commanded; instead the choice environment is designed so that the desired option becomes the easiest. If the healthy dish sits at eye level in the canteen and organ donation is the default setting (with an opt-out), the majority "freely" chooses as intended. It turns delicate when the same technique works politically without those being steered noticing it.
- Cognitive warfare. A term discussed in NATO circles as a future operational domain — alongside land, sea, air, space and cyber. It means the deliberate shaping of the perception, emotion and judgement of a whole population, in peace as in conflict.
Tögel's thread: this is nothing fundamentally new, but the technical refinement of what Bernays already wanted — to make the unconscious the target. Practically useful is his rule of thumb for spotting manipulation: where emotion replaces the argument — where the appeal is to fear, outrage or group pressure rather than to checkable reasons — caution is warranted.
The honest assessment: that such techniques are researched and deployed is well documented. How strongly they actually work, though, remains open — the effect sizes of nudging, for instance, often turn out smaller in independent meta-analyses than the "weapon" rhetoric suggests. So here too this article's double message holds: take the mechanisms seriously without mystifying their power.
An Honest Assessment
Two points are routinely confused in the popular debate:
- The mechanisms are established. That repetition, emotion, authority, social proof and enemy images are used is undisputed and well documented.
- The strength of the effect is overstated. The old "hypodermic needle" thesis is considered obsolete. More realistic is the limited-effects model: propaganda mostly reinforces existing convictions rather than reversing them. People are more resistant than manipulators hope.
Why This Is Here
For the themes of this site the symmetry matters: these techniques work in every direction. A widespread consensus — say the reflexive dismissal of near-death or mediumship research — can arise through repetition and bandwagon pressure just as much as a counter-conviction. As the article Majority versus Experts shows, the sheer frequency of a claim is no criterion of truth. The best protection is the one inoculation research recommends and this site shares: know the mechanisms, check the source, separate the matter from its packaging — and only then judge.
Sources
- Lippmann, W. (1922): Public Opinion.
- Bernays, E. (1928): Propaganda.
- Lasswell, H. (1927/1948): war-propaganda analysis; "Who says what to whom…".
- Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937): the seven propaganda techniques.
- Hovland, C. et al. (1953): Communication and Persuasion (Yale Studies).
- Adorno, T. et al. (1950): The Authoritarian Personality.
- Ellul, J. (1962): Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.
- Herman, E. & Chomsky, N. (1988): Manufacturing Consent.
- Woolley, S. & Howard, P. (eds., 2018): Computational Propaganda.
- van der Linden, S. (2023): Foolproof — inoculation / prebunking.
- Nye, J. (1990/2004): Soft Power. — influence through attraction.
- Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008): Nudge.
- Tögel, J. (2023): Kognitive Kriegsführung (Cognitive Warfare). Westend. — and the conversation "Unsichtbare Waffen der Propaganda", SMP LeaderTalks #98 (2025).