Manipulate Me, Please

Image credit: Buzzemand

Last semester, my English professor assigned us students to critically analyze a print advertisement. As part of his introduction to the assignment, he explained that he wanted us to learn to hate ads. We spent a few class periods discussing the evils of advertising and how advertisers are maliciously manipulating the consumers' subconscious minds. Now I must confess that at this point in the semester, I wasn't too happy with my professor. He hadn't returned my first paper as timely as I would have liked, and he hadn't given me the grade I felt I deserved. (I should point out that I kinda like him now because I got an A in his class. Cha-CHING!) So the more he talked about how bad advertising is, the more I began to think, "Wow. I actually really like advertisements!"

Unfortunately, my positive view towards advertising led me to make a fatal mistake in my ad analysis paper: in my conclusion, I specifically stated that I enjoyed the advertisement that I analyzed. Gasp. When I got the paper back from my professor, he expressed his own views on the ad and said, "Seen in this light, the ad gets a little less funny . . ." This paper received a worse grade than my first one. I was not very pleased, especially since I felt like his grade was based on the fact that my opinions differed from his.

Fast forward to the first meeting of my film history class this semester. My professor showed a clip from Toy Story 2, the one where Jessie sings to Woody about her former owner and how her owner abandoned her. When my professor asked for our thoughts on the clip, one student in the class briefly described what he thought was good about it, but then he went on to say that he thought it was a cheap way to manipulate the viewers' emotions, and in his experience, manipulating emotions was just a way of getting people to spend money. (Sound familiar?) My professor said that he agreed with everything this student said except for one thing: that being manipulated is a bad thing. He argued that when people go to movies, they expect to be manipulated. After all, if a movie doesn't elicit an emotional response from you, is it really worth watching?

These recent experiences with manipulation remind me of another experience I've had, which was certainly not a pleasant one. I was around sixteen years old, and our stake had a young men's activity planned. We were going to hike Mt. Timpanogos, and the priests were supposed to be leaders of the younger kids. I do not like hiking or leading; needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), I was not excited about this activity. However, I felt obligated to go, for whatever reason, so I did.

About a week before the hike, all the priests in the stake had a leadership meeting of sorts. One of the stake young men's presidency counselors had us write on a wooden board something in our lives that we wanted to "break through" and then taught us how to break our boards, which we all did. Further, we were taught how to hold the boards properly so others' could break them. Apparently, before we actually start the hike, we were going to help the younger kids break their own boards.

On the day of the activity, all the young men in our ward met at the base of Mt. Timpanogos. It was very early in the morning, especially considering that it was a day during our summer vacation. Before we started breaking boards, the board-breaking-expert counselor tested all the priests to make sure that we all remembered how to hold the boards correctly. I had a lot of trouble with holding the board. The guy kept on telling me to lock my arms, bend my knees, and pretend that I was a tree. Sadly, I experienced difficulty in trying to do all three things at once. Plus, I didn't really want to be there (I was just there out of my sense of duty). All things considered, I was getting really frustrated.

The counselor sensed my frustration, and said (in effect), "You don't want to be here, do you? Do you want to quit? Are you a quitter?"

. . .

I can think of very few times in my life when I've been that angry at someone. Truth be told, thinking about this situation makes me a bit angry even today. Seriously, who did this guy think he was? Who gave him the right to use stupid sports psychology to manipulate me into doing something I didn't want to do? So I told him I quit, and then I sat down. And cried. I was miserable.

And then, the young men's president called me over to hold a board for people to break, and I did. Some of the kids broke boards and some didn't, but I think I did all right. I hiked up the mountain, too. The whole thing was a miserable experience, but I did learn a lot of good things, including the fact that I did not enjoy being manipulated.

But wait a second. Didn't I insinuate in the third paragraph that I enjoyed being manipulated? I guess what I'm really try to do in this post is change the way people look at manipulation. Every day, in some way or another, we are being manipulated. That's just life. People always want to get us to do what they want us to do. A man gives flowers to his wife with an apology to try to get himself out of the doghouse. A commercial tells a woman (subtly, of course) that's she's too fat and needs to join a diet program to lose weight. A motivational speaker uses her life experiences and eloquence to convince people to change for the better. A thief brandishes a gun to scare the store clerk.

As we begin to understand that we're constantly being manipulated, we begin to understand that manipulation can be bad or good. It can be bad to be manipulated to lose weight if that creates a eating disorder in a person, but it can be good if it improves someone's quality of life. If we recognize when someone is manipulating us, we can then choose for ourselves whether or not we want to manipulated. The important thing is to remember that we all have our own agency, and in the end, we alone are responsible for our actions.