We have not yet spoken of the suggestive power of the means of
propaganda. Every one knows the influence on taste and smell, on
social vanity, on local pride, on the gambling instinct, on the
instinctive fear of diseases, and above all on the sexual instinct,
can gain suggestive power. Everywhere among the uncritical masses such
appeals reach individuals whose psychophysical attitudes make such
influences vivid and overpowering. Every one knows, too, those often
clever linguistic forms which are to aid the suggestion. They are to
inhibit the opposing impulses. The mere use of the imperative, to be
sure, has gradually become an ineffective, used-up pattern. It is a
question for special economic psychotechnics to investigate how the
suggestive strength of a form can be reinforced or weakened by various
secondary influences. What influence, for example, belongs to the
electric sign advertisements in which the sudden change from light to
darkness produces strong psychophysical effects, and what value
belongs to moving parts in the picture?
The psychologist takes the same interest in the examples of window
displays, sample distributions, and similar vehicles of commerce by
which the offered articles themselves and not their mere picture or
description are to influence the consciousness of the prospective
customer. Here, too, every element may be isolated and may be brought
under psychotechnical rules. The most external question would refer to
the mere quantity of the presented material. The psychologist would
ask how the mere mass of the offering influences the attention, how
far the feeling of pleasure in the fullness, how far the æsthetic
impression of repetition, how far the associative thought of a
manifold selection, how far the mere spatial expansion, affects the
impression. In any case, as soon as it is acknowledged as desirable to
produce with certain objects the impression of the greatest possible
number, the experimental psychologist stands before the concrete
problem of how a manifoldness of things is to be distributed so that
it will not be underestimated, perhaps even overestimated as to
quantity. Again, the laboratory experiment would not proceed with real
window displays or real exhibitions, but would work out the principle
with the simplified experimental means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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