03/09/16 – Robert Epstein – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Welcome back to the show, y'all.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Dr. Robert Epstein.
And he is the former editor of Psychology Today.
He's senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and is a contributing editor for the Scientific American Mind.
He's also the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts.
And, well, he's got a bunch of books.
Most of them I think about adolescence, the case against adolescence.
That's interesting.
I bet Gatto would have been a fan.
So, anyway, he's also the guy I've been telling you all week and all last week, I guess, about this article in Aon.co, The New Mind Control.
Welcome to the show, Robert.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Dr. Epstein, I should say.
Very good to have you here.
And a very interesting article you've written here about how the order of search engine results can manipulate basically anybody but me.
Is that right?
Well, actually, it would be anyone including you.
No.
To be honest, yes.
Okay.
Well, all right.
I'll hear you out then.
Go ahead.
And including me, too.
And it's very interesting because when my staff will show me, for example, some search results that I know are biased in some way, very often I can't see that myself.
I mean, so when you get your search results for anything you're searching on, they may look fine, but the fact is we tend to trust that the higher ones are better, right?
And we tend to click mainly on the higher ones.
In fact, 50% of our clicks go to the top two.
So whatever those top ones are, we tend to click on those and we read whatever the web pages are.
And that ends up being the basis for a lot of opinions that we form, including how we vote, which is kind of scary.
Right.
Well, and it's a good thing that you pick voting to focus on, at least for some of these experiments, to show the import of this and how powerful this could be if someone was using it in an untoward way.
And, you know, you start out actually talking about Brave New World and this kind of thing where, you know, the science, where social psychology is basically all just a conspiracy by power against their subjects and controlling how we think, feel and react about whatever the issue is.
Yeah, there have been a lot of novels written that had that theme, where governments use all kinds of psychological techniques to get control of populations.
And basically what I discovered in research I began with Ronald Robertson is that, you know, this is happening today just as, you know, it's described in these novels like Brave New World and 1984.
But in fact, it's happening on a larger scale than anyone ever envisioned.
And it's happening more invisibly than anyone ever envisioned.
And that no one ever really thought about before.
The fact that you could manipulate, in this case, hundreds of millions of people around the world in a way that, so that they don't even know they're being manipulated, number one.
And number two, in a way that doesn't even leave a paper trail, no paper trail for authorities to find.
And yet you can have a dramatic impact on what they believe and the decisions they make.
And, you know, as you pointed out, who they vote for in an election.
All right, well, so we got to get into the mechanics of the experiment and what all you learned here and how and all that kind of thing.
But I want to get into what you just said there about the no accountability.
You compare Google's algorithm for deciding what to show you to the formula for Coca-Cola, which I guess means it's out of the hands of even the courts.
And so the code is not even up for examination in any context.
And if it was, it wouldn't say vote for Hillary right in there.
It just very well may be that that's what they're pushing you towards.
But you wouldn't be able to understand that just by looking at some symbols in the code, you know, right?
That's right.
So the code is completely off limits to everybody.
That's right.
That's one problem.
And, of course, the other is presumably it's very complicated.
And so we wouldn't even be able to spot what we were looking for necessarily.
But, you know, that doesn't mean at some point that, you know, that the courts or regulators or the FBI, you know, doesn't break the door down.
They could break the door down at some point and they probably could figure out what's going on.
But, yeah, this is very secretive stuff, you know, controlled by a handful of corporate executives who are not accountable to the general public.
They're only accountable to their shareholders.
And, you know, that's the that's the problem.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, now, so I'm sorry, we only have a couple of minutes left in this segment.
So we won't be able to get just in this segment.
We're going to come back after the break for another one.
But I sort of wanted to get just a little bit into the experiment itself here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did I not hear about this for the first time, say, about a year ago?
And then do I understand you right that you kind of went back and redid the experiment a bunch of times?
You learned a lot more things.
And this is sort of the update of, boy, it's even worse than we thought, that kind of thing.
Well, sure.
After we did the first experiment, I didn't believe it because we shifted people's voting preferences by over 48 percent after just after just one online search.
I thought it would be two or three percent and it was over 48 percent.
So, yeah, we repeated it.
But this is actually started getting into the news three years ago.
It's been in the news.
It's been in the news that long because once I realized that this this how big this was, you know, I did talk to colleagues and friends and I got a call from The Washington Post.
So there's been a there's been more than a thousand news stories about this.
And the piece that you mentioned in Aon magazine that's now gone viral on Facebook.
I think it's had 17,000 shares so far.
And the numbers are increasing pretty fast.
Yeah.
Well, now, so the reason I started off the interview, too, with this could work on everybody but me.
Right.
Is because I think just like everybody else, I believe that what I believe is what I believe.
And it's not subject to simple manipulations like putting this search result above that one.
And, you know, basically you're calling out my humanity.
Am I a damn animal and nothing but or do I own my own mind here?
And and what you're doing is you're making me feel uncomfortable with little cognitive dissonance here about how easy it is to get me to change what I think without me even knowing that that's what you're doing to me.
I think everybody probably feels the same way.
And I think now I hear drums and guitar.
So we got to take this break.
We're going to be right back with Robert Epstein about these social psychology experiments he's been doing on the power of search engine results order.
Hey, guys, you heard him say 48 percent.
Just wait till we get back.
We're going to find out all about this.
The new mind control at Aon dot CEO.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say the one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by our RBI dot CEO.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Liberty dot me the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles.
Plus, you get your own publishing site and their classes, shows, books and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty dot me.
I on the empire with Liberty dot me's chief liberty officer, Jeffrey Tucker, every other Tuesday.
And the future freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there.
Scott Horton dot Liberty dot me.
Be free.
Liberty dot me.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I told y'all before I took social psychology in community college just to try to protect myself from this kind of thing.
Find out how they do it.
So it won't work on me.
But apparently, yeah, it does work on me.
It works on everybody.
All of it does.
My favorite is if you get people together, just strangers and kind of gather them together, people from the neighborhood and show them a propaganda video, whether it's an environmentalist Greenpeace thing or whether you're trying to get them to join the John Birch Society, whatever it is, your numbers will triple if you feed them jelly beans.
That's my favorite.
But anyway, and there's a million of them, right?
You introduce a third person into an equation and people's entire idea about how things work completely changes.
But anyway, like, for example, this conversation is different because I know all you guys are listening in.
Who knows how different it would be if I knew that you weren't.
But anyway, so talking with Dr. Robert Epstein, this article is at Aeon, A-E-O-N, Aeon.co.
The New Mind Control.
And it's about simple search engine results.
And so at least in the original incarnation, you have, I believe it is Americans.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
Before we get into the experiment, I wanted to ask you about that part about our susceptibility to this.
Because I was talking before about how much it bothers me, the idea that this could work on me.
And I wonder whether you, I guess we could say this.
I'm sorry, I'm not very organized.
But I wonder whether you try to control for that, whether people who have strong beliefs in something are just as easy to manipulate.
Or, you know, does it matter whether you're asking about Australian elections or American ones and this kind of thing?
Is there any armor against this kind of manipulation, I guess?
Well, as a matter of fact, that's something we've been looking at more carefully just recently.
And the stronger someone's opinions are about something, the harder it is to shift them.
And that's long been known.
In fact, people who have strong opinions, they suffer from what's called confirmation bias, which means they only pay attention to things that support their opinions.
So what we've been studying, which is called SEME, the Search Engine Manipulation Effect, S-E-M-E, that applies best, it works best on people who are undecided.
But it turns out in elections, you know, those are the people who determine who wins.
They are the undecided voters.
And that's where all the resources are poured, you know, toward the end, you know, the last few days in the election.
They're all focused on the undecided people.
The margin.
And it's a hell of a big margin.
That's what you show here.
It's a margin in the tens and tens of percents even.
That's right.
And so we can have an enormous impact on people who are undecided, perhaps about any issue at all.
But if they're undecided in an election, it turns out it's very easy to shift them using search rankings.
And you asked why this effect works so well.
We've actually done new research on that issue as well.
It turns out that we are basically trained.
We're being trained like rats in a Skinner box on a daily basis to believe that what's higher in the list is better.
And that training works this way.
Most of the searches that we conduct are basically routine searches where we're just looking for simple facts, like what is the capital of, you know, of Uganda.
And whenever we conduct a routine search, which are most of our searches, the answer just pops up in the first position.
So over and over and over again, we're being trained to believe that, you know, what's higher is better, what's higher is truer.
And then when that day comes, when we look something up that we're really unsure about, really undecided about, then we take very seriously what's high in the list.
It's that simple.
Wow.
Okay, so now paint a picture for the audience and explain how you did this experiment.
Because we all know that social science, no offense, isn't really science, but it sort of kind of is.
And I know that you're really trying to control as best you can against confirmation bias that you mentioned previously, et cetera.
You said you didn't even believe your own results the first time.
They were so outrageous.
So explain to us how it is that you do this and how you're so sure.
Well, sure.
These are randomized, controlled, counterbalanced, double-blind experiments.
And that's why it got published in the top science journal in the world, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That means you randomly assign people to one group or another.
That kind of evens them out.
And in one group, you know, they see search rankings that favor one candidate, that make one candidate look better than the other.
In the second group, they see search rankings that favor the other candidate.
In a third group, which is a control group, they're seeing search rankings all mixed up, so they favor neither candidate.
And, you know, we get some initial numbers by giving people very brief information about candidates and then just saying, you know, asking a bunch of questions like, which one do you trust, who would you vote for, that kind of thing.
And in the beginning, you know, we're pretty much even, obviously.
But then we give them up to 15 minutes to do an online search using our search engine that works just like Google and using real Web pages, real search results, and they can search us freely for up to 15 minutes.
And some of them, again, are seeing biased rankings, though.
And then we ask them all the questions again.
And what we found, again, was this enormous shift in experiment after experiment after experiment toward whichever candidate was, you know, favored in search rankings.
And you're right, I did not believe the numbers at first.
So, you know, we've repeated this thing over and over again in, you know, laboratory and national online studies in the U.S., even in India.
And now we've actually expanded, but we've replicated this with people in 38 countries and connected with three different elections.
So we're very, very confident that this is a real effect.
And then as you say in here, in America, it's 85 percent.
In most countries, 90 percent of online searches are conducted by Google.
So this is, you know, basically, I guess, a textbook natural monopoly, basically, that they've created here.
Because after all, I mean, you have to admit, if it's something specific that you're looking for, not just a general question, but even something specific, their algorithm is pretty damn good, whether they're trying to manipulate you or not.
It's usually right that the thing you're looking for is at least on the first page, you know, depending on how obscure it is, that kind of thing.
And so they've just, there's no need for Northern Lights to exist anymore.
Ask Jeeves or whatever these things.
Everybody uses it, but that gives them such power.
It's impossible to even compare it to anything else in terms of, I mean, I know they don't have an army, but neither did the Pope.
But you know what I mean?
This is really huge.
Well, not only that, their influence is bigger than we think it is, because it's so expensive to do what they do.
They're literally, you know, they're logging right now 47 billion web pages.
It's so expensive to do that, that more and more of these smaller search engine companies are actually drawing their results from Google.
The latest deal, as I document in my new article in Aeon, is between Yahoo and Google.
So Yahoo is now drawing search results from Google, which is actually good, because that means Yahoo's results are now much better than they used to be.
But it further extends the monopoly, and that, of course, is very, very dangerous.
Because, you know, in other kinds of media, like newspapers and TV, you know, we're getting all kinds of different opinions blasted at us all the time.
But search engines, no.
We're mainly just seeing one, because it's so good.
And there really isn't much in the way of competition.
And we believe that what they're showing us is objective.
We say that's a big problem.
So the trust level is extremely high, and that's why they can shift so easily people who are undecided.
All right.
Now, so what's their reaction been to all of your work?
I mean, they must have put out a statement saying, trust us, or something, huh?
Well, they normally do not.
But in this case, the head of Google Search actually published a big article on Politico, which you can find easily online.
And I encourage people to read that.
It was supposed to be a criticism of my research, but I really, really think people should read it, because it's really, in a way, very scary.
Because it doesn't actually criticize my research at all.
It really just says, hey, we're Google.
We would never do anything like that.
And we're cool, and we're awesome.
And it says it over and over again, without actually looking at our work.
So I published a piece, which you can also find.
It's called Google's Hypocrisy, in which I talk about their official response.
But basically, so far, they're just trying to brush all this aside.
And that's not smart, because, again, this is rock-solid research, and a lot of people around the world are taking it very seriously.
Yeah, I guess.
But so far, there's no real organized pressure group trying to force them to expand transparency in any way, or at least promise that, geez, when it comes to politics, we'll randomize the top five for you, or anything like that at all, no?
Well, there is in Europe, and there is in India.
There are big antitrust actions that are ongoing against Google, and they're really at risk for paying tens of billions of dollars in fines.
In the U.S., the FCC confirmed really what our research is about.
They confirmed that Google does routinely show us biased search rankings.
But in this country, they've bought off the government.
They bought off the Obama administration.
That's easy to document.
And so in this country, all the authorities have backed off from Google, letting them do what they want.
But in Europe, they're in deep trouble.
Well, and I guess all the executive regulation protects them from civil litigation, too.
Because, hey, Your Honor, the regulators said it was cool, so these guys have nothing on us, right?
Well, they're smart people, and they protect themselves pretty well.
You know, I think at the moment, we really have to think twice about what's happening, because we've calculated that in November, they'll be able to shift between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton without anyone knowing that they're doing this, and without leaving a paper trail.
That's pretty serious.
Say that again?
How many million?
Between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes without anyone knowing they're doing it, and without leaving a paper trail.
All right, you guys, that is Robert Epstein.
The article is at aeon.co, A-E-O-N dot C-O.
And it's called The New Mind Control, How the Internet Flips Elections and Alters Our Thoughts.
And it's just going to blow your mind.
It's so good.
And then also check out his own website, drrobertepstein.com.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
It was a pleasure.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for NPV Engineering.
This isn't for all of you, but for high-end contractors specializing in industrial construction and end users who own and operate industrial equipment, NPV offers licensed professional consulting on chemical and mechanical engineering for your projects.
Tanks, pressure vessels, piping, heat exchangers, HVAC equipment, chemical reactors for oil companies or manufacturing facilities, as well as project management support and troubleshooting for those implementing designs.
NPV will get your industrial project up and running.
Head over to NPVEngineering.com.
So, you're a libertarian, and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support The Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.