Please post your responses to "The Persuaders" in the comments section below. And thanks for coming to class with your drafts!

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Harvard Gazette: Freedom squelches terrorist violence: "A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.

Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks.

Abadie, whose work was published in the Kennedy School's Faculty Research Working Paper Series, included both acts of international and domestic terrorism in his analysis.

Though after the 9/11 attacks most of the work in this area has focused on international terrorism, Abadie said terrorism originating within the country where the attacks occur actually makes up the bulk of terrorist acts each year. According to statistics from the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base for 2003, which Abadie cites in his analysis, there were 1,536 reports of domestic terrorism worldwide, compared with just 240 incidents of international terrorism."

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frontline: the persuaders: neuromarketing | PBS: "Getting an update on research is one thing; for decades, marketers have relied on behavioral studies for guidance. But some companies are taking the practice several steps further, commissioning their own fMRI studies � la Montague's test. In a study of men's reactions to cars, Daimler-Chrysler has found that sportier models activate the brain's reward centers -- the same areas that light up in response to alcohol and drugs -- as well as activating the area in the brain that recognizes faces, which may explain people's tendency to anthropomorphize their cars. Steven Quartz, a scientist at Stanford University, is currently conducting similar research on movie trailers. And in the age of poll-taking and smear campaigns, political advertising is also getting in on the game. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have found that Republicans and Democrats react differently to campaign ads showing images of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks. Those ads cause the part of the brain associated with fear to light up more vividly in Democrats than in Republicans."

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bizarre japanese mcdonald's commercial

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A Critique of The Persuaders

Warning: naughty words in above link.

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onfocus.com | the persuaders: "Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commerical interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."

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gladwell dot com: Tipping Point - The Mysteries of Mind-Reading: "Much of our understanding of mind-reading from two remarkable scientists, a teacher and his pupil: Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Tomkins was the teacher. He was born in Philadelphia, at the turn of the last century, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers, and was the author of 'Affect, Imagery, Consciousness,' a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant."

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gladwell dot com: Tipping Point - Why do we love tall men?: "On a conscious level, I'm sure that all of us don't think that we treat tall people any differently from short people. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that height--particularly in men--does trigger a certain set of very positive, unconscious associations. I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list--the largest corporations in the United States--asking each company questions about its CEOs. The heads of big companies are, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5'9 that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex."

posted by craniac @

gladwell dot com: Blink: "Where did you get the idea for 'Blink'?

Believe it or not, it's because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, 'The Tipping Point,' you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. "

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