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Editor's note: This article is part of "The Ten Today," a series that examines the Ten Commandments in modern society. This story explores the tenth commandment: "Thou shalt not covet."

It's hard to say how many hours a week Erin Wilson spends on social media. She's on Twitter, Facebook and a sprinkling of online dating apps, but her favorite is the photo-sharing social network app Instagram.

Wilson, a professional stage actress and singer, leads what looks like a glamorous life traveling with Broadway shows like "Wicked" and "Sister Act," and she has two Instagram accounts: a personal account that documents her everyday life performing or living in New York City, and one that chronicles her home shopping trips. The second, which goes by the Instagram handle homegoodsobsessed, has 4,000 followers. She is in the process of launching a third account, prettyeasyco, for hair and makeup tips.

Wilson is a savvy user of social media, but she's a consumer, too. She just bought a trendy crochet swimsuit, for example, that she saw on Nordstrom.com. It wasn't the marketing that sold her; it was seeing the image again and again on Pinterest and Instagram.

"You see it once and you think, 'That's cute.' It's seeing it repeatedly, and on people whose life looks desirable, that puts you over into 'I have to have that,'" she said.

There's a term for this. Social psychologists, journalists and social-media users call it "lifestyle envy," or Instagram envy, and savvy smartphone users are well-acquainted with its tell-tale sign: the little pang you get when a friend posts photos from his or her swanky vacation in Istanbul, or when actress Mindy Kaling snaps her newest pair of spike-toe Christian Louboutain pumps.

Envy has long been a concern of civilization, mentioned in the Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins and countless other works down to present day America, in which the newest iteration, social media envy, is driving consumerism in new ways. According to a study by New York marketing communications firm JWT, fame and fortune are currently replacing faith and family as the core of the American Dream. Two-thirds of Americans in the study said traditional notions of the ideal life - community, religious faith and middle-class values - have shifted.

"More Americans see the ability to spend - whether by accumulating wealth or accessing credit - as a component of the American Dream," the study indicates. Also, 58 percent of respondents said "becoming wealthy" is key to the American Dream for them personally; 54 percent said "social recognition and status" were a big part of it for people today. A quarter said a big part of the dream for them was "becoming famous." Traditional ideals of the good life such as "getting married" and "attending religious services" were more likely to be categorized as part of a past definition of the American Dream than as part of the present one.

Instagram alone, which became a social media phenomenon by allowing people to transform ordinary photos into magazine-shoot images with fancy filters and then share them with others, grew last year from 80 million to 150 million users worldwide. Are Americans becoming coveting, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumers one perfectly filtered post at a time?

People are inspired by comparing themselves to peers through social media, and that is why they feel a little lift when they see an image of a friend triumphantly crossing a finish line or a co-worker's twins happily hugging. But people also become hyper-aware of the achievements and success of those peers, said Ann Mack, director of trendspotting at JWT Worldwide. Thus cuts the double-edged sword of social media.

Traditional advertising is losing some of its power over consumers who instead look to one another for trends and opinions, she said.

"If you think about 100 years ago, people would go to the town dance and see what the Joneses are doing. This comparison has always been around," Wilson said. "But now you can do it on an extreme scale. You can compare yourself to thousands of people."

And it's not just celebrities that people are comparing themselves to - it's one another as well.

Not only that, but Twitter and Facebook have brought down the wall that separated actors, musicians and athletes from the rest of the world. Now anyone can see even more closely the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Sometimes, social media blurs the lines between peers and stars, Wilson said, because people are able to package their lives on social media as though they are celebrities.

"Instagram makes our peers' lives look glamorous, but almost attainable. If Beyonce has something, that's one thing, but if a friend does, it's almost in reach - or feels like it should be," Wilson said.

The term for this kind of comparison is "relative deprivation," a sociological term that refers to the dissatisfaction that people feels when they compare their 3-year-old's Buzz Lightyear birthday, for example, to their friend's party with letter-pressed invitations, homemade cupcakes and customized muslin juice box bags all captured by a professional photographer.

It doesn't matter that these are middle-class problems. People compare their positions to others and grasp that they have less, Mack said: "Social media is bringing us closer to the upper echelons yet simultaneously back down to reality."

Susan T. Fiske, social psychology professor at Princeton University and author of " Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us," said envied groups include high-status people, such as the rich and wealthy entrepreneurs. Studies find that people deem them competent but "not on our side," and therefore "cold and exploitative."

Fiske has studied envy using brain scans, and in one of her favorite experiments, subjects watch images of investment bankers encountering bad luck (such as stepping in gum or getting splashed by a car), and they smile. This Schadenfreude (malicious glee) "activates the reward areas of the brain," according to Fiske, when subjects see envied others receive bad outcomes.

Comparison - to co-workers, neighbors, friends or social media contacts - is part of human nature, Fiske said. People need to know where they stand in social hierarchies, and the best way to do it is by gleaning that information from peers. Traditionally, envy has played a different role in American culture because of the American Dream and the notion that everyone has equal access to success and opportunity, she said.

"If you work hard enough and keep your nose clean, you will advance. That's part of our American culture," Fiske said, but because of her research, she now thinks attitudes about envy may be changing in the U.S.

"Everyone likes to think that they are middle-class, but that simply isn't true anymore," she said. In fact, about one-third of people move up in social class in their lifetimes, while one-third stay where they are at and one-third move down.

Americans are becoming aware of social inequality, and it can pique envy, Fiske said.

"Until Occupy Wall Street, we had a tendency to deny social class - before, it was only sociologists that would acknowledge it," Fiske said. "Now people realize that the middle class is shrinking and (their) share of wealth is shrinking."

Out-smarting comparison

Marcia Reynolds had a compulsive need for a bigger house. She moved again and again, she acknowledges now, despite living in a number of great homes.

Reynolds finds she falls victim to envy like anyone else, even though she's an expert on the subject. She's a psychologist and author of "Outsmart Your Brain" and has explored the topic of jealousy and competition.

"It is amazing, globally, the awareness of having to have the best," Reynolds said. "It'll kill you moneywise unless you have an endless stream - but then psychologically there's always going to be someone who has more and looks better. So when does it end?

"If I'm saying, 'I need to have that,' or 'Why should other people have that and not me,' then on the flip side that means if I don't have that I'm not good enough," Reynolds said. "We start really devaluing ourselves in the process."

Andrea Mouritsen is a blogger turned Instagrammer. She loves the quick hit of feedback and keeping in touch with friends and family. What she doesn't love is the consumerism, especially "blog swag," or the free stuff that bloggers get and then post to social media.

"There's a photo of them pushing an $1,800 stroller while a professional photographer follows them," she said. "It feels very staged."

Still, it's easy to be affected by it, she said: "Suddenly, I feel like my stroller is a piece of crap, and it puts me in a state of annoyance."

She knows logically that those people couldn't afford those things if they didn't get them for free, but she has stopped following those kinds of feeds.

"I clicked away feeling a little down," she said. "So now I like to find things that are uplifting, or make me think or make me happy."

Reality check

Part of the allure of the Instagram image is that it purports to represent a person's "real" life. Wilson, who artfully curates her own photos, has to remind herself it's still manufactured.

She offers an Instagram image that she just posted on her phone. It's a photo of half her face; her eyes are lined in black, her eyebrows arched and her lips pop in a perfect movie-star red.

"In editing, this is what I ended up with," she said. "Could I sell this red lipstick to anybody? Yes. Is that legitimately 100 percent what it looks like? No. It's touched up. It's an ideal. You're giving somebody something to aspire to. That's an immediate sell."

The seeming ease with which people can acquire beauty, a perfectly styled home or even fame and success becomes skewed, said Jean Twenge, author of "Generation Me" and a professor of psychology who noticed that the 20-somethings in her undergraduate classes were inundated with messages about self-esteem. Young people in particular grew up with the idea that people like Justin Bieber get famous over YouTube, and there's a feeling that anyone can be famous in a moment, she said.

"I amend that phrase 'You can be anything you want to be,'" Twenge said. "You can be anything you want to be as long as you have the talent, you work really hard and you get some luck along the way. It's not as pithy, but it's a lot more accurate."

On the upside, aspirational thinking helps counterbalance the disheartening economic realities that young people face, Mack said. They have an entrepreneurial mindset facilitated by technology. YouTube and Twitter spread original, creative ideas quickly, and if a person has a good business idea, he or she can get it funded on Kickstarter.

Wilson turned her Internet shopping habits into a business idea. She had just come off a bad breakup, and she poured herself into furnishing her apartment. She checked sale sites for home goods daily, but there was a time where she had to hit the brakes. "I said to myself, 'You have enough. You're done. You don't need it - this is becoming obsessive.' "

She realized that she could use the shopping impulse to chronicle products that she loves on Instagram and share them with other people. Not only is her Home Goods feed - which features discounted and sale products - popular with other would-be buyers, but it satisfies that acquisition craving: "I wouldn't think of it as coveting, but I guess that's what it is," she said.

But someone doesn't have to actually buy things to scratch that itch, she said. Most of the fun is in the looking. Half the time, she finds herself sending back things she bought. Now her Instagram feed allows her to "collect" the things that she wants without opening her wallet.

She thinks of it as a service, not another envy-inducing feed of beautiful, unattainable objects.

"Looking at pretty things on the Internet doesn't have to be a bad thing," she said. "It can inspire you."

Likewise, Fiske said emotions such as envy and scorn are adaptive, evolved responses, but people can control them. If a peer wins a prize, some people can interpret it as being bad for them, or it can be interpreted as good for the group, she said.

She's hopeful that envy can be used for good if people adopt "benign envy," or being inspired by someone's example: "Comparison becomes a problem when we forget that we're all in this together," she said.

Email: laneanderson@deseretnews.com

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The Instagram effect: How the psychology of envy drives consumerism

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Shutterstock Editor's note: This article is part of "The Ten Today," a series that examines the Ten Commandments in modern society. This story explores the tenth commandment: "Thou shalt not covet." It's hard to say how many hours a week Erin Wilson spends on social media.

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Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic, but "Mass Customization" author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because, well, there's no such thing. He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.

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The Rise of American Consumerism | American Experience | PBS

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Postwar consumerism was praised as a patriotic contribution to the ultimate success of the American way of life.

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The Negative Effects of Consumerism | Greentumble

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The biggest problem with consumerism: the fact that people don’t realise that there is a problem. But there are a number of negative effects caused by the society…

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12.3 We Buy, Therefore We Are: Consumerism and Advertising

Learning Objectives

1. Define consumerism.

2. Discuss the power and problems surrounding advertising that creates desires.

3. Consider special issues surrounding advertising and children.

4. Investigate the penetration of advertising in life.

What Is Consumerism?

The word consumerism is associated with a wide range of ideas and thinkers, ranging from American economist John Kenneth Galbraith and his book The Affluent Society to the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard. While definitions of the word and responses to it vary, consumerism The identification of ourselves with the products we buy and an accompanying need to buy in order to exist. in this text is defined in two parts:

1. We identify ourselves with the products we buy. Consumerism goes beyond the idea that our brands (whether we wear Nike shoes or TOMS shoes, whether we drive a Dodge Charger or a Toyota Prius) are symbols of who we are. Consumerism means our products aren't just things we wear to make statements. They are us; they incarnate the way we think and act.

2. If we are what we buy, then we need to buy in order to be. Purchasing consumer items, in other words, isn't something we do to dispatch with necessities so that we can get on with the real concerns of our lives-things like falling in love; starting a family; and finding a satisfying job, good friends, and fulfilling pastimes. Instead, buying becomes the way we do all those things. The consumption of goods doesn't just dominate our lives; it's what we do to live.

The subject of consumerism goes beyond business ethics to include every aspect of economic life and then further to cultural studies, political science, and philosophy. Staying within business ethics, however, and specifically with advertising, the subject of consumerism provokes the following questions:

Does advertising create desires (and is there anything wrong with that)?

Do advertisers have a responsibility to restrain their power?

Should there be different rules for advertising aimed at children?

Is advertising too intrusive in our lives?

Does Advertising Create Desires (and Is There Anything Wrong with That)?

Our society is affluent. With the exception of marginal cases, all Americans today eat better, enjoy more effective shelter from winter cold and summer heat, are healthier, and live longer than, say, the king of France in 1750. In fact, necessity in the sense of basic life needs hardly exists. We struggle heroically to afford a better car than our neighbor, to have a bigger home than our high-school classmates, to be thin and pay the doctor for a perfectly shaped nose, and so on, but no one worries about famine. Our economic struggles aren't about putting food on the table; they're about eating in the most desirable restaurant.

How do we decide, however, what we want-and even what we want desperately-when we don't truly need anything anymore? One answer is that we create needs for ourselves. All of us have had this experience. For our entire lives we lived without iPhones (or even without cell phones), but now, somehow, getting halfway to work or campus and discovering we left our phone at home causes a nervous breakdown.

Advertising plays a role in this need creation. Take the Old Spice body wash ad. Body wash as a personal grooming product was virtually unheard of in the United States until only a few years ago. More, as a product with specific characteristics, it's hard to see how it marks an advance over old-fashioned soap. This absence of obvious, practical worth at least partially explains why the Old Spice ad provides very little information about the product and nothing by way of comparison with other, similar options (like soap). Still, the Old Spice body wash is a hit. The exact techniques the ad uses are a matter for psychologists, but as the sales numbers show, the thirty-second reel first shown during the Super Bowl has herded a lot of guys into the idea that they need to have it.

Is there anything wrong with that? One objection starts by pointing out that corporations producing these goods and selling them with slick ad campaigns aren't satisfying consumer needs; they're trying to change who consumers are by making them need new things. Instead of fabricating products consumers want, corporations now fabricate consumers to want their products, and that possibly violates the demand that we respect the dignity and autonomy of others. The principle, for example, that we treat others as ends and not means is clearly transgressed by any advertising that creates needs. First, guys out in the world aren't being respected as "ends," as individuals worthy of respect when corporations stop producing their required products better or more cheaply. Second, guys out in the word are being treated as means-as simple instruments of the corporations' projects-when their desires are manipulated and used to satisfy the corporations' desire to make money.

Another argument against this kind of desire-creating advertising starts from a rights approach. According to the theory that freedom is the highest good, we're all licensed to do whatever we want as long as our acts don't curtail the freedom of others. The argument could be made that using sophisticated advertising campaigns to manipulate what people want is, in effect, curtailing their freedom at the most fundamental level. Old Spice's advertising strategy is enslaving people to desires that they didn't freely choose.

A final argument against need creation with advertising is the broad utilitarian worry that consumers are being converted into chronically, even permanently unhappy people because they have no way to actually satisfy their desires. If you work to attain something you've been told you're supposed to want, and the second you get it some new company enters with the news that now there's something else you need, the emotional condition of not being satisfied threatens to become permanent. Like mice trapped on a running wheel, consumers are caught chasing after a durable satisfaction they can't ever reach.

On the other side of the argument, defenders and advocates of desire-creating advertisements like the one Old Spice presented claim (correctly) that their announcements aren't violating the most traditional and fundamental marketing duty, which is to tell the truth. The Old Spice ad, in fact, doesn't really say anything that's either true or false. Given that, given that there's no attempt to mislead, the company is perfectly within its rights to provide visions of new kinds of lives for consumers to consider, accept or reject, buy or pass over.

Stronger, advocates claim that consumers are adults and attempts to shield them from ads like those Old Spice produced don't protect their identity and dignity; instead, they deny consumers options. Consequently, ethical claims that ads aiming to generate new desires should be constrained actually violate consumer dignity by treating them like children. We should all be free, the argument concludes, to redefine and remake ourselves and our desires in as many ways as possible. By offering options, advertising is expanding our freedom to create and live new, unforeseen lives.

Do Advertisers Have a Responsibility to Restrain Their Power?

The Old Spice ad didn't end after its thirty seconds of fame on the Super Bowl broadcast. The actor Isaiah Mustafa went on to became a Twitter sensation. By promising to respond to questions tweeted his way, he effectively launched a second phase of the marketing effort, one designed to stretch out the idea that body wash is big and important: it's what people are talking about, and if you don't know about it and what's going on, you're out of the loop, not relevant. The tone of the invitation to Twitter users to get involved stayed true to the original commercial. Mustafa asked people to "look for my incredibly manly and witty and amazing responses" to their questions.

On YouTube, Mustafa's status went to instant legend: not only has his commercial been viewed about 20 million times (by people who actually want to watch and pay attention and at zero cost to Old Spice), there's also a long list of copycat videos, derivative videos, spoof videos, and on and on. The depth of the advertising campaign is now virtually infinite. You could pass years watching and listening and reading the social media generated and inspired by the original commercial.

All that is advertising. It's not paid, it's not exactly planned, but it is part of the general idea. When Old Spice spent big money to get a Super Bowl slot for their ad, they weren't only trying to reach a large audience; they were also hoping to do exactly what they did: set off a firestorm of attention and social media buzz.

Called viral advertisingThe exploitation of consumers to do a company's promotional work. , this consumer-involved marketing strategy drives even further from traditional, informational advertising than the activity of branding. Where branding attempts to attach an attitude and reputation to a product or company independent of specific, factual characteristics, viral ads attempt to involve consumers and exploit them to do the company's promotional work. When viral advertising is working, the activity of branding is being carried out for free by the very people the advertising is meant to affect. In a certain sense, consumers are advertising to themselves. Of course, consumers aren't rushing to donate their energy and time to a giant corporation; they need to be enticed and teased. The Super Bowl ad with its irresistible humor and sex-driven come-on does that-it provokes consumers to get involved.

Viral ads-and the techniques of public enticement making them spread contagiously-come in many forms. One ethical discussion, however, surrounding nearly all viral advertising can be framed as a discussion about knowledge and resource exploitation The employment of specialized marketing knowledge and the use of the vast financial resources to condition consumers. . Two critical factors enabled Old Spice, along with its advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, to generate so much volunteer help in their endeavor to get the body wash buzz going:

1. Knowledge of consumer behavior

2. Tremendous resources-especially money and creative advertising talent-that allowed them to act on their knowledge

Compared with the typical person watching a TV commercial, the raw power of Old Spice is nearly immeasurable. When they aim their piles of money and sharp advertising experts toward specific consumers, consumers are overwhelmed. Without the time required to learn all the skills and strategies employed by today's advertisers, they literally don't even know what's hitting them. From that fact, this ethical question arises: Don't today's sophisticated marketers have a responsibility to inform consumers of what they're up to so that potential purchasers can at least begin to defend themselves?

Making the last point stronger, isn't the economic asymmetryIn the field of marketing, a large imbalance in monetary power and commercial knowledge favoring professional advertisers when weighed against consumers. -the huge imbalance in monetary power and commercial knowledge favoring today's professional advertisers-actually an obligation to restraint, a responsibility to not employ their strongest efforts given how comparatively weak and defenseless individual consumers are? The "yes" answer rests on the duty of fairness-that is, that we treat equals equally and unequals unequally. In this case, the duty applies to companies just as it does to people. Frequently people say to large, muscle-bound characters caught up in a conflict with someone smaller, "Go pick on someone your own size." It's simply unfair to challenge another who really has no chance. This duty comes forward very graphically on a video snippet from MTV's Jersey Shore when a thin girl attacks the physically impressive Ronnie. He just shoves her aside. When her boyfriend, however, who's about Ronnie's size and age, shows up and starts swinging, he ends up getting a good thumping. Leaving aside the ethics of fistfights, it doesn't take profound thought to see that Ronnie understands his superior physical power is also a responsibility when harassed by a comparative weakling to hold himself in check.

While the case of Old Spice and Wieden+Kennedy isn't quite as transparent as Ronnie on the street, it does obey the same logic: all their power and marketing expertise is both a power over consumers and an equally forceful responsibility not to exercise it. Compare that situation with the famous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" advertising campaign. No one objects to powerhouse Apple taking some figurative swings at powerhouse Microsoft since that company clearly has the means to defend itself. When a corporation manipulates innocent and relatively powerless individual consumers at home on the sofa, however, it's difficult to avoid seeing something unfair happening.

The argument on the other side is that consumers aren't powerless. There's no real imbalance of might here because consumers today, armed with their Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, are perfectly capable of standing up to even the mightiest corporations. Viral messaging, in other words, goes both ways. Old Spice may use it to manipulate men, but individual men are perfectly free and capable of setting up a Facebook group dedicated to recounting how rancid Old Spice products actually are. Beneath this response, there's the fundamental claim that individuals in the modern world are free and responsible for their own behavior, and if they end up voluntarily advertising for Old Spice and don't like it, they shouldn't complain: they should just stop tweeting messages to Isaiah Mustafa.

Further, the proposition that consumers need to be protected from Old Spice is an infringement on the dignity of those who are out in the world buying. Because today's consumers connected to social media are alert and plugged in, because even a solitary guy in pajamas in his basement running his own YouTube channel or Facebook group can be as influential as any corporation, attempts to shield him are nothing less than disrespectful confinements of his power. Protection, in this case, is just another word for condescension.

Should There Be Different Rules for Children?

The discussion of knowledge and resource exploitation leads naturally to the question about whether children should be subjected to advertising because the knowledge imbalance is so tremendous in this particular case.

According to a letter written by a number of respected psychologists to their own professional association, children should receive significant shielding from advertising messaging. The first reason is a form of the general concern that advertising is creating desires as opposed to helping consumers make good decisions about satisfying the desires they have: "The whole enterprise of advertising is about creating insecure people who believe they need to buy things to be happy."

The problem with advertising that creates insecurity is especially pronounced in the case of society's youngest members because once that attitude of constant need and consequent unhappiness is bred into these consumers, it's difficult to see how it will be removed. Since they've known nothing else, since they've been taught from the very start that the natural condition of existence is to not have the toys and things that are needed, they have no way of escaping into a different (nonconsumerist) way of understanding their reality. Finally, if this entire situation is set inside a utilitarian framework, it's clear that the ethical verdict will fall somewhere near reprehensible. If, as that ethical theory affirms, moral good is just any action contributing to social welfare and happiness, then advertisements consigning children to lifetime dissatisfaction must be prohibited.

The second part of the psychologists' argument elaborates on the condition of children as highly vulnerable to commercial message techniques. Children aged three to seven, for example, gravitate toward the kind of toys that transform themselves (for example, Transformers). Eight- to twelve-year-olds love to collect things. Armed with these and similar insights about young minds, marketers can exploit children to want just about anything. The virtual defenselessness of children, the point is, cannot be denied.

Still, there is a case for child-directed advertising. It's that where children are defenseless, parents have a responsibility to step in. First, they can turn off the TV. Second, no young child can buy anything. Children depend on money from mom and dad, and to the extent that parents enable children to live their advertising wants, it's parents who are at fault for any feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction affecting their kids.

Whether advertising aimed at children is right or wrong, the stakes are certainly high. Children under twelve are spending around $30 billion a year, and teenagers are hitting $100 billion in sales.

Are Ads Too Intrusive in Our Lives?

Another sentence from that letter written by concerned psychologists indicates a distinct area of ethical concern about advertising: "The sheer volume of advertising is growing rapidly and invading new areas of childhood, like our schools."

It's not just children in their schools. We all go to concerts at the American Airlines Center, our shirts and shoes are decorated with the Nike swoosh, public parks are sponsored by corporations, the city bus is a moving billboard, the college football championship will be determined at the FedEx Orange Bowl. Every day it's harder to get away from ads, and each year the promotions and announcements push closer to those parts of our lives that are supposed to be free of economic influence. Maybe someday we'll attend Mass at the Diet Coke Cathedral, weigh guilt and innocence in the Armor All courthouse, elect senators to vote in the Pennzoil chamber.

And maybe that's OK. The push of advertising into everything is a proxy for a larger question about the difference between business life and life. It could be that, at bottom, there is no difference. We are Homo economicus. The antiromanticists were right all along: love can be bought with money, fulfillment is about consuming, and that bumper sticker "He who dies with the most toys wins" is true.

Since serious thought about what really matters in life began in Greece 2,500 years ago, people have promoted the idea that there are more important things than money and consumption. Those usually ill-defined but nonetheless more important things have always explained why most poets, artists, priests, and philosophy professors haven't had much in the way of bank accounts. Possibly, though, it's the other way. Maybe it's not that there are more important things in life that lead some people away from wealth and consumption; maybe it's that some people who don't have much money and can't buy as much as their neighbors explain away their situation by imagining that there are more important things.

Who's right? The ones who say money and economic life should be limited because the really important things are elsewhere, or the ones who say there are no other things and those who imagine something else are mainly losers? It's an open question. Whatever the answer, it will go a long way toward determining the extent to which we should allow advertising into our lives. If there's only money and consumption, then it's difficult to see why the reach of the branding factories and viral marketers should be significantly limited. If, on the other hand, there's life outside the store, then individuals and societies wanting to preserve that part of themselves may want to constrain advertising or require that it contribute to noneconomic existence.

Key Takeaways

Consumerism places our entire life within the context of consumer goods and services.

Advertising can create desires.

Advertising creating desires raises questions about whether ads violate consumers' dignity and rights.

The knowledge and financial power of companies (and their ad agencies) may also be an obligation for restraint.

Children are especially vulnerable to sophisticated advertising and may require special protections.

Discussion of the advertising that creates needs is a proxy for a larger discussion about the role of money and consumption in our lives.

Review Questions

1. Put into your own words the definition of consumerism.

2. How can an ad create a desire?

3. Why might an advertiser seek to create a desire?

4. Make the case that ads that create desires violate a consumer's basic rights.

5. Why might a consumer want advertisers to create desires?

6. What is a viral ad?

7. With reference to the concept of economic asymmetry, why is advertising aimed at children the subject of special concern?

8. Why might an advertising company feel obligated to limit the places in which its work appears in the name of protecting the noneconomic parts of our lives?

9. Why might someone want advertising to be everywhere?

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We Buy, Therefore We Are: Consumerism and Advertising

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Define consumerism. Discuss the power and problems surrounding advertising that creates desires. Consider special issues surrounding advertising and children. Investigate the penetration of advertising in life. The word consumerism is associated with a wide range of ideas and thinkers, ranging from American economist John Kenneth Galbraith and his book The Affluent Society to the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard.

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More money, more problems? It might just be true. Americans today, compared to 55 years ago, own twice as many cars and eat out twice as much per person, but we don't seem to be any happier because of it. Rather than rising levels of well-being, we've seen mounting credit card debt and increasing numbers of self-storage facilities to house the things we compulsively buy.

The holidays in particular have become a time when consumer culture comes out in full force. Black Friday, the annual post-Thanksgiving discount shopping spree, results each year in multiple deaths and injuries of consumers trampled by crowds in stores and shopping malls.

In a poignant, viral Huffington Post blog last month, "If You Shop On Thanksgiving, You're Part Of The Problem," writer Matt Walsh cast a harsh light on what the holiday shopping frenzy really says about our culture:

That's our entire economic system: buy things. Everybody buy. It doesn't matter what you buy. Just buy. It doesn't matter if you don't have money. Just buy. Our entire civilization now rests on the assumption that, no matter what else happens, we will all continue to buy lots and lots of things. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And then buy a little more. Don't create, or produce, or discover -- just buy. Never save, never invest, never cut back -- just buy. Buy what you don't need with money you don't have... Buy like you breathe, only more frequently.

To some extent, most of us participate in consumer culture and value material possessions, and that's perfectly fine. But in excess, materialism can take a toll on your well-being, relationships and quality of life. Here are six things you should know about the psychology of consumption -- and strategies to find freedom from materialism.

Consumer culture may be harming individual well-being.

Research suggests that Americans' well-being has, if anything, declined since the 1950s, according to the American Psychological Association, while our consumption has only increased.

"Compared with their grandparents, today's young adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness and much greater risk of depression and assorted social pathology," David G. Myers, author of The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, wrote in an American Psychologist article. "Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being."

The materialistic values that consumer cultures support may be to blame. Those who pursue wealth and material possessions tend to be less satisfied and experience fewer positive emotions each day. On the other hand, research has found that life satisfaction -- surprise, surprise -- is correlated with having less materialistic values.

Materialist values are linked to Type-A behavior.

Are you highly ambitious and competitive? It could mean you're also more materialistic. Australian research from the 1990s found materialist values and a possessions-based definition of success share common characteristics with type-A behaviors, including competitiveness and aggression. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology reiterated the finding that the desire to accumulate wealth and possessions is related to Type-A qualities.

Money really can't buy you happiness.

The Beatles wisely noted that money can't buy love, and we'd do well to remember that money can't buy happiness, either. Research has shown that there is no direct correlation between income and happiness. Once our basic needs are met, wealth makes very little difference to one's overall well-being and happiness. And in fact, extremely wealthy people actually suffer from higher rates of depression.

"The failure of additional wealth and consumption to help people have satisfying lives may be the most eloquent argument for reevaluating our current approach to consumption," the authors of Worldwatch Institute's 2011 State of Consumption report wrote.

Some data, however, has suggested that there could be a link between higher income and increased life satisfaction. It seems that it may not be the money itself that leads to dissatisfaction, but rather, the continual striving for greater wealth and more possessions that is linked to unhappiness.

Materialism could ruin your relationships.

Can money buy you love? Not so much, and according to a study published in the Journal Of Couple & Marriage Therapy, materialism is actually correlated with unhappiness in marriages. Researchers studied more than 1,700 couples to find that those in which both partners had high levels of materialism exhibited lower marital quality than couples with lower materialism scores. Previous studies have found that students with higher extrinsic, materialistic values tend to have lower-quality relationships, and to feel less connected to others.

Materialistic people also typically have less pro-social and empathetic qualities, both towards others and towards the environment.

Consumer cultures may breed narcissistic personalities.

Some psychologists have suggested that consumer cultures may contribute to the development of narcissistic personalities and behaviors, "by focusing individuals on the glorification of consumption," psychologist Tim Kasser wrote in The High Price Of Materialism. Narcissists generally act with arrogance and are deeply concerned with issues of personal adequacy, seeking power and prestige to cover for feelings of inner emptiness and low-self worth, Kasser explains.

"Narcissists' desire for external validation fits well with our conception of materialistic values as extrinsic and focused on others' praise," he writes. "Thus it was not surprising to find that students with strong materialistic tendencies scored high on a standard measure of narcissism, agreeing with statements such as 'I am more capable than other people' ... 'I wish somebody would write my biography someday.'"

Consumerism is fueled by insecurity -- and remedied by mindfulness.

Research suggests that materialistic values are fueled by insecurity. A 2002 study published in the journal Psychology and Marketing found that those who chronically doubt themselves and their own self-worth tend to be more materialistic.

Consumerism -- which has been called a "modern religion" -- tends to capitalize on this insecurity and use it to sell products.

"In a practical sense, consumerism is a belief system and culture that promotes consuming as the path to self- and social improvement," Stephanie Kaza, University of Vermont Environment Professor and Buddhism practitioner, wrote in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. "As a dominant cultural force, consumerism offers products to address every dissatisfaction."

So what's the antidote? Mindfulness -- the focused awareness on the present moment, which can be cultivated through meditation and contemplative practice -- may be an effective remedy to empty or compulsive consumption. As beat writer and American Buddhist thinker Allen Ginsberg put it in a 1966 letter to the Washington Post: "You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug."

Americans are redefining success beyond money and power.

Our collective definition of the American Dream is slowly starting to change from one of materialism to a more purposeful idea of what it means to live the good life. According to the 2013 LifeTwist study, only around one-quarter of Americans still believe that wealth determines success.

"Dozens of the survey's findings reflect a new American notion of success, but perhaps none more starkly than the sentiment that Americans ranked 'having a lot of money' 20th on a list of 22 possible contributors to having a successful life," the LifeTwist Study's authors wrote in a press release. "This sentiment mirrors the steadily rising trend ... that Americans are increasingly placing greater priority on living a fulfilling life -- in which being wealthy is not the most significant factor."

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The Holiday Habit That's Making You Unhappy

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More money, more problems? It might just be true. Americans today, compared to 55 years ago, own twice as many cars and eat out twice as much per person, but we don't seem to be any happier because of it.

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TIME Magazine - OJ Simpson - ALTERED IMAGES

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Photoillustrator Mat Mahurin, who was given the image to "interpret," claimed his edits had no racial agenda. "Much like a stage director would lower the lights on a somber scene," he recalled in a book later published on the history of TIME magazine, "I used my long-established style to give the image a dramatic tone."

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What is Propaganda? Neil Postman once wrote that of all the words we use to talk about talk, the word "propaganda" is the most mischievous. That's because the word has a wide variety of definitions.

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Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past.

Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they'll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue. Perhaps that could dissipate the amount of malarkey online, though news consumers themselves are the best defense against the spread of misinformation.

Not all of the misinformation being passed along online is complete fiction, though some of it is. Snopes.com has been exposing false viral claims since the mid 1990s, whether that's fabricated messages, distortions containing bits of truth and everything in between. Founder David Mikkelson warned in a Nov. 17 article not to lump everything into the "fake news" category. "The fictions and fabrications that comprise fake news are but a subset of the larger bad news phenomenon, which also encompasses many forms of shoddy, unresearched, error-filled, and deliberately misleading reporting that do a disservice to everyone," he wrote.

A lot of these viral claims aren't "news" at all, but fiction, satire and efforts to fool readers into thinking they're for real.

We've long encouraged readers to be skeptical of viral claims, and make good use of the delete key when a chain email hits their inboxes. In December 2007, we launched our Ask FactCheck feature, where we answer readers' questions, the vast majority of which concern viral emails, social media memes and the like. Our first story was about a made-up email that claimed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted to put a "windfall" tax on all stock profits of 100 percent and give the money to, the email claimed, "the 12 Million Illegal Immigrants and other unemployed minorities." We called it "a malicious fabrication" - that's "fake news" in today's parlance.

In 2008, we tried to get readers to rid their inboxes of this kind of garbage. We described a list of red flags - we called them Key Characteristics of Bogusness - that were clear tip-offs that a chain email wasn't legitimate. Among them: an anonymous author; excessive exclamation points, capital letters and misspellings; entreaties that "This is NOT a hoax!"; and links to sourcing that does not support or completely contradicts the claims being made.

Those all still hold true, but fake stories - as in, completely made-up "news" - have grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Still, we find it's easy to figure out what's real and what's imaginary if you're armed with some critical thinking and fact-checking tools of the trade.

Here's our advice on how to spot a fake:

Consider the source. In recent months, we've fact-checked fake news from abcnews.com.co (not the actual URL for ABC News), WTOE 5 News (whose "about" page says it's "a fantasy news website"), and the Boston Tribune (whose "contact us" page lists only a gmail address). Earlier this year, we debunked the claim that the Obamas were buying a vacation home in Dubai, a made-up missive that came from WhatDoesItMean.com, which describes itself as "One Of The Top Ranked Websites In The World for New World Order, Conspiracy Theories and Alternative News" and further says on its site that most of what it publishes is fiction.

Clearly, some of these sites do provide a "fantasy news" or satire warning, like WTOE 5, which published the bogus headline, "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement." Others aren't so upfront, like the Boston Tribune, which doesn't provide any information on its mission, staff members or physical location - further signs that maybe this site isn't a legitimate news organization. The site, in fact, changed its name from Associated Media Coverage, after its work had been debunked by fact-checking organizations.

Snopes.com, which has been writing about viral claims and online rumors since the mid-1990s, maintains a list of known fake news websites, several of which have emerged in the past two years.

Read beyond the headline. If a provocative headline drew your attention, read a little further before you decide to pass along the shocking information. Even in legitimate news stories, the headline doesn't always tell the whole story. But fake news, particularly efforts to be satirical, can include several revealing signs in the text. That abcnews.com.co story that we checked, headlined "Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegiance In Schools Nationwide," went on to quote "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin." We have to assume that the many readers who asked us whether this viral rumor was true hadn't read the full story.

Check the author. Another tell-tale sign of a fake story is often the byline. The pledge of allegiance story on abcnews.com.co was supposedly written by "Jimmy Rustling." Who is he? Well, his author page claims he is a "doctor" who won "fourteen Peabody awards and a handful of Pulitzer Prizes." Pretty impressive, if true. But it's not. No one by the name of "Rustling" has won a Pulitzer or Peabody award. The photo accompanying Rustling's bio is also displayed on another bogus story on a different site, but this time under the byline " Darius Rubics." The Dubai story was written by "Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers." The Pope Francis story has no byline at all.

What's the support? Many times these bogus stories will cite official - or official-sounding - sources, but once you look into it, the source doesn't back up the claim. For instance, the Boston Tribune site wrongly claimed that President Obama's mother-in-law was going to get a lifetime government pension for having babysat her granddaughters in the White House, citing "the Civil Service Retirement Act" and providing a link. But the link to a government benefits website doesn't support the claim at all.

The banning-the-pledge story cites the number of an actual executive order - you can look it up. It doesn't have anything to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Another viral claim we checked a year ago was a graphic purporting to show crime statistics on the percentage of whites killed by blacks and other murder statistics by race. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump retweeted it, telling Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly that it came "from sources that are very credible." But almost every figure in the image was wrong - FBI crime data is publicly available - and the supposed source given for the data, "Crime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco," doesn't exist.

Recently, we've received several questions about a fake news story on the admittedly satirical site Nevada County Scooper, which wrote that Vice President-elect Mike Pence, in a "surprise announcement," credited gay conversion therapy for saving his marriage. Clearly such a "surprise announcement" would garner media coverage beyond a website you've never heard of. In fact, if you Google this, the first link that comes up is a Snopes.com article revealing that this is fake news.

Check the date. Some false stories aren't completely fake, but rather distortions of real events. These mendacious claims can take a legitimate news story and twist what it says - or even claim that something that happened long ago is related to current events.

Since Trump was elected president, we've received many inquiries from readers wanting to know whether Ford had moved car production from Mexico to Ohio, because of Trump's election. Readers cited various blog items that quoted from and linked to a CNN Money article titled " Ford shifts truck production from Mexico to Ohio." But that story is from August 2015, clearly not evidence of Ford making any move due to the outcome of the election. (A reminder again to check the support for these claims.)

One deceptive website didn't credit CNN, but instead took CNN's 2015 story and slapped a new headline and publication date on it, claiming, "Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency... Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio." Not only is that a bogus headline, but the deception involves copyright infringement.

If this Ford story sounds familiar, that's because the CNN article has been distorted before.

In October 2015, Trump wrongly boasted that Ford had changed its plans to build new plants in Mexico, and instead would build a plant in Ohio. Trump took credit for Ford's alleged change of heart and tweeted a link to a story on a blog called Prntly.com, which cited the CNN Money story. But Ford hadn't changed its plans at all, and Trump deserved no credit.

In fact, the CNN article was about the transfer of some pickup assembly work from Mexico to Ohio, a move that was announced by Ford in March 2014. The plans for new plants in Mexico were still on, Ford said. "Ford has not spoken with Mr. Trump, nor have we made any changes to our plans," Ford said in a statement.

Is this some kind of joke? Remember, there is such thing as satire. Normally, it's clearly labeled as such, and sometimes it's even funny. Andy Borowitz has been writing a satirical news column, the Borowitz Report, since 2001, and it has appeared in the New Yorker since 2012. But not everyone gets the jokes. We've fielded several questions on whether Borowitz's work is true.

Among the headlines our readers have flagged: " Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies" and " Trump Threatens to Skip Remaining Debates If Hillary Is There." When we told readers these were satirical columns, some indicated that they suspected the details were far-fetched but wanted to be sure.

And then there's the more debatable forms of satire, designed to pull one over on the reader. That "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin" story? That's the work of online hoaxer Paul Horner, whose "greatest coup," as described by the Washington Post in 2014, was when Fox News mentioned, as fact, a fake piece titled, "Obama uses own money to open Muslim museum amid government shutdown." Horner told the Post after the election that he was concerned his hoaxes aimed at Trump supporters may have helped the campaign.

The posts by Horner and others - whether termed satire or simply "fake news" - are designed to encourage clicks, and generate money for the creator through ad revenue. Horner told the Washington Post he makes a living off his posts. Asked why his material gets so many views, Horner responded, "They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore."

Check your biases. We know this is difficult. Confirmation bias leads people to put more stock in information that confirms their beliefs and discount information that doesn't. But the next time you're automatically appalled at some Facebook post concerning, say, a politician you oppose, take a moment to check it out.

Try this simple test: What other stories have been posted to the "news" website that is the source of the story that just popped up in your Facebook feed? You may be predisposed to believe that Obama bought a house in Dubai, but how about a story on the same site that carries this headline: " Antarctica 'Guardians' Retaliate Against America With Massive New Zealand Earthquake." That, too, was written by the prolific "Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers."

We're encouraged by some of the responses we get from readers, who - like the ones uncertain of Borowitz's columns - express doubt in the outrageous, and just want to be sure their skepticism is justified. But we are equally discouraged when we see debunked claims gain new life.

We've seen the resurgence of a fake quote from Donald Trump since the election - a viral image that circulated last year claims Trump told People magazine in 1998: "If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific." We found no such quote in People's archives from 1998, or any other year. And a public relations representative for the magazine confirmed that. People' s Julie Farin told us in an email last year: "We combed through every Trump story in our archive. We couldn't find anything remotely like this quote -and no interview at all in 1998."

Comedian Amy Schumer may have contributed to the revival of this fake meme. She put it on Instagram, adding at the end of a lengthy message, "Yes this quote is fake but it doesn't matter."

Consult the experts. We know you're busy, and some of this debunking takes time. But we get paid to do this kind of work. Between FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, the Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact.com, it's likely at least one has already fact-checked the latest viral claim to pop up in your news feed.

FactCheck.org was among a network of independent fact-checkers who signed an open letter to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that Facebook "start an open conversation on the principles that could underpin a more accurate news ecosystem on its News Feed." We hope that conversation happens, but news readers themselves remain the first line of defense against fake news.

On our Viral Spiral page, we list some of the claims we get asked about the most; all of our Ask FactChecks can be found here. And if you encounter a new claim you'd like us to investigate, email us at editor@factcheck.org.

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Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past.

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Propaganda can be either beneficial or harmful, depending on the substance of the message.

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Propaganda plays on human emotions-fear, hope, anger, frustration, sympathy-to direct audiences toward the desired goal. In the deepest sense, propaganda is a mind game - the skillful propagandist exploits people's fears and prejudices. Successful propaga

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Media's Use of Propaganda to Persuade People's Attitude, Beliefs and Behaviors
War &amp Peace: Media and War

Attitudes, Belief's and Behaviors

The previous picture and poem is a clear example of propaganda which is a form of persuasion used to influence people's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. A working definition of propaganda is the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. While propaganda has been around for almost a thousand years, only recently (last 100 years) with the advent of technologies that allow us to spread information to a mass group has it evolved to a scientific process capable of influencing a whole nation of people. While propaganda is most evident in times of war as in the poster, it is constantly being used as a political and social means in even less obvious ways to influence peoples attitudes. This is currently evident with all the election commercials on TV, where the candidates are using propaganda techniques to elevate themselves above their competitor. Another place propaganda is being exploited is by the use of the media in its portrayal of countries that have nuclear technology.

Modern propaganda uses all the media available to spread its message, including: press, radio, television, film, computers, fax machines, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing, handbills, buttons, billboards, speeches, flags, street names, monuments, coins, stamps, books, plays, comic strips, poetry, music, sporting events, cultural events, company reports, libraries, and awards and prizes. It is most likely that some of these media uses are surprising, but that only serves to show how easy it is to not even recognize propaganda as such. For the purpose of our paper we will focus on mainly the usage of the press in their tactics of shaping people's opinions. The press (newspapers and magazines) is important because the most current news and issues are spread every day through them. The Dune affect is a term we coined--after the movie Dune--which explains that those who control and have access to media have access to and potential control of public opinion.

Indeed, propaganda is so powerful because everyone is susceptible to it. This is true as explained by Robert Cialdini, an expert in influence, because people exist in a rapidly moving and complex world. In order to deal with it, we need shortcuts. We cannot be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day. We do not have the time, energy, or capacity to process the information; and instead we must very often use our stereotypes, our rules of thumb, to classify things according to a few key features and then to respond without thinking when one or another of these trigger feature are present (Cialdini 6). While this makes people highly susceptible to a propagandist who understands persuasion, in general it is the most efficient for of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. Additionally, propaganda includes the reinforcement of societal myths and stereotypes that are so deeply embedded within a culture that it is often difficult to recognize the message as propaganda.

For example I just used a persuasive technique that propagandist use all the time by introducing Cialdini as an expert. The heuristic this follows is the obedience to authority and is a rule that when someone credible and in this case by title of an expert, a person will automatically believe the information to be correct. "Titles are simultaneously the most difficult and the easiest symbols of authority to acquire. To earn a title normally takes years of work and achievement. Yet, it is possible for somebody who has put in none of this effort to adopt the mere label and receive an automatic difference" Cialdini 181). After all, what really makes Cialdini an expert?

Since propaganda is such a powerful tool and because people are so susceptible of it, it is our goal in this paper to outline how to analyze propaganda, the techniques that are used through case studies of the media's portrayal of nuclear power for France and Pakistan, and how one can defend against the influence of propaganda.

Why Were Pakistan and France Chosen?

In selecting subjects for the case study, it became increasingly important to select countries where there would be a clear advantage for the United States media to favor the atomic power of one over the other. For instance, France has historicallyas far back as the American Revolutionbeen a United States ally, not to mention a close economic partner. Especially at the start of the 1960s, when France exploded their first atomic bomb, the relationship between the two countries was steadily growing tighter through the formation of NATO in 1949, with the common communist enemy for both countries ensuring cooperation. Therefore, there is a logical connection between the French prosperity and American welfare.

The relationship is not so reciprocal between the United States and Pakistan. A Muslim nation, Pakistan has conflicted with United States interest in and support of Israel. The ties between the United States and Pakistan are not very strong, and there is no United States gain in the creation of a strong Pakistan.

Based on the relations between the United States and France and Pakistan, we predicted that propaganda would exist in the American media that portrays the powerful nuclear technology of France significantly more positively than that of Pakistan. We will analyze specific examples of such propaganda based on a methodical process as described below.

How to Analyze Propaganda

Sine propaganda has become a systematic process it is possible to analyze how the media has used it in shaping our opinions about France having a nuclear bomb verse Pakistan. Propaganda can be broken into ten stages when analyzing it in detail. These stages are: 1) the ideology and purpose of the propaganda campaign, 2) the context in which the propaganda occurs, 3) identification of the propagandist, 4) the structure of the propaganda organization, 5) the target audience, 6) media utilization techniques, 7) special various techniques, 8) audience reaction to various techniques, 9) counterpropaganda, if present, and 10) effects and evaluation (Jowett and O'Donnell 213).

While it is possible to go into detail about each point, we are mainly concerned with numbers six and seven: What techniques the media uses. There are many techniques and persuasion tactics the media uses to disseminate information. We will specifically focus on three case studies in the France / Pakistan nuclear issue that highlight different tactics the media use. What is important to understand about all the tactics is that no matter which one is being used they all follow the same criteria: it must be seen, understood, remembered, and acted upon. Thus, propaganda can be evaluated according to its ends and interestingly enough this is the same criteria that advertiser use every day in ads, and commercials in "selling" a product.

Case Study #1: Social Proof, Societal Norms, Similarity, and Dehumanization

Studying media coverage of Pakistans nuclear achievement, it becomes clear that a certain amount of propaganda was used to make Pakistan appear threatening. The fact that Pakistan developed the technology was not what shaped the articles, but rather how this information was presented to the reader. In a sense, the propagandists were looking to turn Pakistan into an enemy of sorts, a country to be feared, instead of embraced.

One method used to by propagandists to create an enemy is through the technique of social proof. One way in which we process information is by observing what other people are doing that are similar to us or linking them to social norms. "When we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct" (Cialdini 106). Since it is almost impossible for the common American to be an expert in nuclear cause and effects, he looks to what others say as a means to form his opinion. This allows him to be persuade to an ideology not of his own. Furthermore, it is possible to rely on past stereotypes as form of linking one idea to another group.

For example, articles that took such an approach attempted to use a subset of social proof, where one casts the enemy by declaring it to be a friend of an already established enemy. For instance, in order to persuade the American public to think of Pakistan in such terms, media will link Pakistan to historically defined United States enemies such Libya, Iran, Iraq and the former Soviet Union. This tactic plays on the principle of social proof in which people look for justifications to quickly form their beliefs. Thus, linking to a country America already has shared beliefs about quickly allows one to associate and project the existing beliefs on the new group, which in this case is Pakistan.

An article in the Washington Post took such an approach by starting with a quote from the Iranian Foreign Minister, congratulating Pakistan. "From all over the world, Muslims are happy that Pakistan has this capability," the Minister was quoted at the start of the article (Moore and Khan A19). By beginning with this quote, the article ensured a link would be established between Iran and Pakistan, playing off the propaganda theory of similarity, in which we fundamentally like people who are similar to us and share our beliefs, values, and ideas. Therefore, an object deemed as bad or dissimilar will make all associated objects bad as well and allows the media to use social proof and similarity to create an enemy as friend of enemy. Arguably, the presentation of this quote may be deemed important factually for the development of the article, but the placement of the quote right at the start of the article strongly suggest propagandistic intentions.

To strengthen the feel of Pakistan as a friend of the enemy, the article continues to use the dissimilar tactic or hatred through association by further linking Pakistan with Syria Libya:

At the same time, the prospect that Pakistan could share its nuclear technology with other Islamic states, or serve as their protector, concerns many Western analysts, who fear that nuclear materials and technology may fall into the hands of countries the West has branded sponsors of terrorism, such as Syria and Libya (Moore and Khan A19).

Thus the distinction at this point is that because the article began by subliminally suggesting connections between Pakistan and a nation connected to terrorism (Iran), the ability of the aforementioned passage to link Pakistan with Syria and Libya all the more affective. By creating the sensation that Pakistan is connected with such nations early on, the notion becomes all the more believable later, even when no direct evidence is presented.

The Washington Post article is not merely an isolated incident. We have found many examples of this propagandistic approach in our research, from newspapers in the United States and other ally nations (Fisk 9, Goldenberg 19, Stockill 22). Interestingly, a Jewish newspaper in Jerusalem adopted this approach as well. The Jerusalem Post published a similar article on Pakistans atomic weapons, starting with a reference to the Iranian Foreign Minister. Using the same propagandistic method of creating an enemy through association, the article stated: "Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazis visit to Islamabad a few days after Pakistan joined the nuclear club seemed to emphasize [the dangers of an Islamic bomb]" (Steinberg 8).

The Jerusalem Post and the Washington Post articles also take another approach to the propagandistic tactic of creating an enemy as friend of enemy. Not only do both of them link Pakistan to Iran, Syria, and Libya politically--by showing ties between the countries--they further connect the countries through religion by using the coined term: Islamic bomb. The term is not a new one, originating in the 1970s after the former President of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutton referred to the desire to produce a nuclear bomb to help counter the nuclear arsenals of the Christians, Communists, and eventually Hindus (Downie A20).

Largely misquoted, the term became used in much of the anti-Pakistani propaganda of labeling by generalization. In fact, both the articles in the Washington Post and the Jerusalem Post make references to the potential threat of an "Islamic bomb." Such references are made despite repeated statements from the Pakistani government explaining that Pakistan does not intend to share any of its nuclear technology with any country. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said, "No one should give religious color to the success achieved by our nuclear scientists.... It is incorrect to call it an Islamic bomb" (Moore 19).

Despite the Pakistani attempts to disavow the notion of an Islamic Bomb, American media has been using the term rather liberally as a propaganda tactic of dehumanization, a tactic that involves lumping a group together in such a way that takes away any individuality. This is effective because we systematically blur distinctions and insist that the enemy remain faceless so that any acts are done not against men, women, and children, but a mass identity and in this case surrounded by the group with the "Islamic bomb."

Such techniques can be found in even scholarly works, such as one written through the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University where the term Islamic Bomb is used to persuade the public to see nuclear proliferation into South Asia as a threat to national security. Using the faceless enemy tactic, the paper written by Rodney Jones states that Pakistans centrifuge program in 1979 "were accompanied by suggestions that the program was financed by Libya and dramatized the notion that the end result would be an Islamic bomb" (44).

Similar to the articles previously described that used suggested links between Iran and Pakistan in connection to the Islamic Bomb, Jones follows a similar path. After establishing a faceless enemy Jones mentions the "rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical associates in Iran" (44). From a propagandistic point of view, this approach is the same as the newspaper articles that provide indirect connections between Iran and Pakistan, a tactic described as similarity. This same tactic is used by Jones to connect Pakistan to Libya as well. He describes, "Libya happens to be the one country where motives, financial capabilities, and mineral geography could have smoothly converged to make the Pakistani project feasible" (49).

In addition to linking Pakistan with terrorist nations, there was a desire to also link it with the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. The need, from a propagandistic point of view, is one in the same. That is, there was a desire to expand the ideology by mentioning almost every United States enemy surrounding Pakistan. Although there was virtually no political connection between Pakistan and the former Soviet Union at the time (1981), Jones was able to make the connection through another avenue of thought:

If proliferation in the region furthers divisiveness and political instability, the Soviet Union will be impelled to make the best of it, and the net consequence of that over the long term are likely to be adverse for the West. In short, although nuclear proliferation as a general matter is contrary to the interests of both superpowers, it is arguably less damaging to the superpower that ultimately prefers fundamental changes in the structure of world politics than to the one that favors evolutionary change in the world order (45).

Therefore, Jones used three approaches to linking Pakistan with American enemies: 1. Creating political ties by suggestions that one is another through similarity by association with another pre-established norm as with the reference to Iran. 2. Creating religious ties of labels and dehumanization of the Islamic Bomb 3. Creating external relationships playing on social proof and paranoia in which there was a passage where he described how Pakistan would indirectly help the former Soviet Union whether they wanted to or not, since their control of nuclear technology would upset the current balance of power in the area.

It is not simply the presentation of the information that makes Jones approach propagandistic, and the same is true for newspaper articles, television shows, and radio broadcasts. The media will present the reader of viewer with information, but specific propaganda tactics help shape the presentation of the information to be more effective and help persuade people to think about the topic in a certain context.

Case Study #2: Enemy as Barbarian, and Authority

We will explore another example of how the facts are tinted using propaganda tactics with a focus on how the American media portrays the stability of Pakistan. As with the tactics that link Pakistan to nations that are considered enemies of the United States, the key will be to focus on how the factual information is presented, in what context, to serve what purpose. By media displaying Pakistan as an unstable nation while discussing nuclear technology, it will persuade the public to fear Pakistan. This tactic which is Enemy as Barbarian: threat to culture is intended to create an enemy, by creating a sense that Pakistan is a country that is not worthy of nuclear technology. The idea behind enemy as barbarian is to portray the subject as rude, crude, uncivilized, and animalistic.

Thus the media describe Pakistan in terms that will establish it as a global threat because of their instability. For example, the Washington Post Quote of the Day was by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani engineer responsible for nuclear development. It read as follows: "I am one of the kindest persons in Pakistan. I feed the birds, I feed ants in the morning. I feed monkeys that come down the mountain" ("Quote of the Day" 38). Although the Post acknowledges the accomplishments of Khan as an engineer, they clearly represent Pakistan in a way that is far from establishing it as an advanced country technically. The rural feel of "monkeys that come down the mountain" is enough to make any reader question the reliability of nuclear technology in a country that appears to be far from modern.

In fact, this propagandistic tactic is highly subtle, since the connection to nuclear weapons is not directly made in the quote. It is not until the reader read the last two lines that the connection is made:

Abdul Qadeer Khan

"the father of the Islamic bomb" ("Quote of the Day" 38).

By connecting the speaker with the nuclear weapons, the Post was able to thus connect the rural feeling created by the quote to the nuclear technology. Since one does not imply the other, there is a sense of uneasiness created in the mind of the reader. The critical point is that although the quote is correct factually, the context in which it is presented, the specific form and placement of labels, is what makes it propaganda.

In another article in the Los Angeles Times describing nuclear technology in Pakistan, the reference to the instability of the nation was more direct:

For more than two decades, the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and South Asia has stirred the concept of an Islamic bombthe entry of an Islamic nation into the ranks of the nuclear powers and its impact on religious, ethnic and political conflict in one of the worlds most volatile regions (Daniszewski A10).

By locating Pakistan in "one of the worlds most volatile regions" the authors quickly establish why the country should not have nuclear weapons without ever explicitly making the statement. The article continues by explaining that "Myron Weiner, a sociologist and South Asia expert at MIT, is one of the many analysts who say they are concerned that if Pakistan is pushed to the brink of financial ruin...it might respond by selling its nuclear technology" (Daniszewski A10). This tactic relies on authority of an expert testimony which is explained in the introduction as a heuristic that when someone credible and in this case by title of an expert, a person will automatically believe the information to be correct. To media uses this tactic to help establish the ideologue that the unstable region of Pakistan can only cause problems with their nuclear technology.

Case Study #3: Dune Affect, Reprogramming, and Commitment to Consistency

In order to get a better feel for how the United States media is able to persuade the public to think about Pakistans nuclear technology in a negative way, it is helpful to see how the same media is able to make a different countys nuclear technology appear unrelated to global stability and safety. In effect, the purpose of the propaganda will be to ensure that French nuclear technology appears non-threatening.

In order to achieve this goal, the media had to take the focus of nuclear technology away from the military implications and focus it elsewhere. Many articles that came out in newspapers across America after France exploded their first atomic bomb on February 13, 1960 shifted the focus toward more political themes. This is a clear example of the Dune affect, which states that those who control the media control the opinions of the people. Subjectively, the media focuses on shifting the focus from something bad to something good when it serves the ideology they wish to spread. Furthermore, it is possible for this to be work because this exploits a well-known principle of human behavior which says, "people simply like to have reasons for what they do" (Cialdini 3). Thus, the media only needs to give a reason for their message despite its validity in order for it to be accepted.

For example, the Chicago Tribunes article on the French test on the day of the explosion downplayed all military applications of the nuclear technology. It stated: "The initial effect is likely to be the strengthening of President de Gaulles position when soviet Premier Khrushchev visits France March 15 (1960)" ("Sahara Blast Successful" 1). Moreover, the article continues to take away emphasis on the war-related side of the technology by refocusing on politics: "The meeting [with Khrushchev] will be followed quickly by de Gaulles trips to Britain and the Untied States. In all three meetings hes expected to assert his views with more force than ever" ("Sahara Blast Successful" 1). Thus the reader becomes interested the diplomacy that comes with the nuclear technology instead of the implications for destruction.

To strengthen this effect of the shift of emphasis, the Tribune article moves to discuss the effects of the nuclear weapons of "restoring French grandeur and influence...and greater cooperation within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)" ("Sahara Blast Successful" 1). Effectively turning the emphasis from war to de Gaulle and French diplomacy relies heavily on the persuasive techniques in reprogramming which allows the author to shift the focus and begin making greater speculations. In another Chicago Tribune article published that same day, the author actually shifted the focus from war technology to disarmament talks: "The explosion placed France in a better position to conclude agreements with the worlds atomic powers leading to nuclear disarmament" ("France Sets Off A-Bomb in the Sahara" 13). Twisting the focus 180 degrees, from the destructive technology, to diplomacy, to disarmament talks, the article was able to spin the truth or reality because it served the purpose of the propagandist who had control of the media.

Similarly, the New York Times published an article a week after the test in which it emphasized the impact of the French nuclear technology on NATO instead of war: "By joining the atomic club, de Gaulle hopes to gain a voice in big power disarmament decisions and to increase the influence of French diplomacy" (Sulzberger 22). And so the propaganda tactic of giving any justification because people simply like to have reasons for what they do comes into play as the article persuades the reader to focus on the non-threatening nature of the technology. This persuasion comes across the strongest when the article explains that the French nuclear technology was designed "to increase the influence of French diplomacy," since this goal encompasses no aggressive intentions on the part of the French.

The article continues by stating that "Eventually it would be sensible to give the French certain nuclear arms in return got promises to use such weapons as NATO requires" (Sulzberger 22). Since the article began by suggesting that France is worthy of nuclear weapons, since they will not use them for ill deeds, the idea of giving them nuclear technology would now seem logical. This is a persuasion tactic known as commitment to consistency, which is plays on human's "obsessive desire to be (and appear to be) consistent with what we have already done" (Cialdini 50-51). The tactic works by starting small and building by slowly reinforces be consistent with commitment whether it be public or private. This tactic allows the author and media in general to slowly bring the reader to a conclusion that would normally be difficult to justify. C. L. Sulzberger ends this New York Times article on such a note: "In aiding France we cannot risk offending other allies. But there is no doubt this country now qualifies for special" treatment (22). Thus Sulzberger takes the tactic of commitment to consistency to the next level as he leaves the future ambiguous, not stating exactly what type of "special treatment" he is referring to.

A Chicago Tribune article published the day after the French test used a similar approach as the New York Times article, in that it turned the focus away from the precarious nature of the atomic technology. In particular, the article noted that "authoritative sources in Britain said the French explosion was an undeniable achievement which will have important political implications" ("World Praise, Anger, Greet French Blast" 4). Although more direct, the Chicago Tribune article will have a similar persuasive effect on the reader, who is encouraged to note the "political implications" of a technology designed for war.

The examples of articles using such a propaganda tactic are numerous, and most can be found by studying articles printed the week of the French atomic bomb explosion. A New York Times printed the day after the explosion points to other diplomatic issues with the new French power: "Politically, the French are now entitled to a seat in the conference room [in Geneva]" (Rosenthal 2). The subtle point that was made was that the French are now involved with disarmament talks, something that completely shifts the focus away from aggressive acts as a result of having nuclear technology.

Indeed, there is more to the presentation of information than the facts one uses. The placement of the facts and the order can slowly mold the understanding of the reader. Through specific propaganda techniques reprogramming, authority, and commitment to consistency the author is able to take a potentially dangerous situation and make the reader feel completely comfortable with the various scenarios that may ensue.

How to Defend Against Propaganda

As a result of our increasing sophistication and to build our civilization, we have created and environment so complex, so fast-paced, and information-laden, that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended. Thus, from the case studies on how the media uses propaganda, we can understand that the media does more than presentation facts and information. The media has the ability to exploit persuasive tactics to the specific definition of propaganda: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. Indeed, as we have shown, this does not have to be the "in your face," World War II propaganda. Instead, the presentation is subtle and unaware to the untrained eye, so that even slight difference in the presentation can help change contextual understanding.

We are not advocating that propaganda is wrong; we have tried to show, that overall it is usually helpful to respond to messages mindlessly, and that the truly only way to defend against it is to be more aware of the tactics being used.

Phil Zimbardo, an expert in mind control tactics, outlines in a paper twenty ways to resist unwanted social influence. We have listed three ways that are most relevant to defending against propaganda:

1. Be aware of the general perspective that others use to frame the problem or issue at hand, because accepting their frame on their terms gives them a powerful advantage. For example, the reader of newspaper articles on Pakistan's nuclear weapons must be aware that the author has inserted his understanding of situations that do not fall into the category of the article headline: whether this be in terms of Pakistan as a nation, Pakistan's military, or the Pakistani culture. In fact, it is usually through this framing of the situation that the author can persuade the reader to think of the issue in a different light.

2. Be sensitive to situational demands however trivial they may seem: group norms, group pressures, symbols of authority, slogans, and commitments. Don't believe in simple solutions to complex personal, social, and political problems. As with the media coverage of Pakistan and France, it is usually much easier for the reader to let an article tell him what to believe, instead of using the article as merely a suggestion of what may be believed. Especially as the tactics grow more and more refined, more and more subtle, and more and more persuasive, we find that the minute we stop observing with a critical eye, we have already been persuaded. It is so often that we find ourselves overwhelmed by work that needs to be done. It is so often that we do not have time to sort through the information presented to us so that we may derive our own solution. And sadly, it is so often that we let ourselves fall prey to propaganda for we have grown too weary to defend ourselves.

3. In the end, it must be remembered that it is not enough to dissent vocally -- one must be willing to disobey, to defy, to challenge, and to suffer any ensuing consequences of these actions (Zimbardo 47). The goal and proactive nature of this paper fall under this category. We hope that through our case studies of Pakistan and France, we were able to educate the reader in such a way that he becomes less susceptible to propaganda and realizes that it is all around, not just limited to a collection of World War II posters.

In a sense, the main theme of prevention is awareness; understand the situation and act accordingly. Only through this can one recognize persuasive tactics in propaganda and how they shape our beliefs.

Sources

Blaire, Granger. "De Gaulle Claims World Atomic Role As Test Succeeds." The New

York Times February 14, 1960: 1.

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: Science and Practice. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Daniszewski, John. "Tests renew fear of nuclear arms race in the Mideast." Los Angeles

Times May 31, 1998: A1.

Downie, Leonard. "U.S. says Evidence Shows Pakistan Planning A-Bomb." The

Washington Post September 21, 1980: A20.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: the Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Alfred

A. Knopf, 1966.

Fisk, Robert. "Summit exposes depth of the Arab worlds disunity." The Independent

(London) June 8, 1998: 9.

"France: All Power to De Gaulle." Time Magazine February 15, 1960: 36.

"France: Atomic Member No. 4." Time Magazine February 22, 1960: 22.

"France Sets Off A-Bomb in the Sahara." The Chicago Tribune February 13, 1960: 7.

Goldenberg, Suzanne. "Fear of the Muslim bomb." The Guardian (London) June 3, 1998:

19.

Hamid Fahim. "What Islamic bomb? It doesnt exist." The Los Angeles Times July 2,

1998: B9.

Hussam, Ayloush. "Pakistans nuclear tests." The Los Angeles Times June 7, 1998: M4.

Jones, Rodney. Nuclear Proliferation: Islam, the Bomb, and South Asia. Beverly Hills:

Sage, 1981.

Jowett, Garth. Propaganda and Persuasion. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1992.

Kenworthy, E. W.. "Aides in Capital Resigned to Test." The New York Times February

14, 1960: 3.

Moore, Molly and Kamran Khan. "Pakistani A-Tests Seen as Triumph for Islam." The

Washington Post June 15, 1998: A19.

"Quote of the Day." The Washington Post June 1, 1998: A13.

Rosenthal, A. M. "Paris Bomb felt by Geneva Parley." The New York Times February

14, 1960: 2.

"Sahara Blast Successful." The Chicago Tribune February 13, 1960: 1.

Siddiqui, Ghayasuddin. "Islamic bomb." The Guardian (London) June 1, 1998: 15.

Steinberg, Gerald. "No Islamic bomb yet." The Jerusalem Post June 12, 1998: 8.

Stockill, Peter. "Proliferation of danger." The Guardian (London) May 30, 1998: 22.

Sulzberger, C. L. "French Atomic Plans and NATO." The New York Times February 20,

1960: 22.

"World Praise, Anger, Greet French Blast." The Chicago Tribune February 14, 1960: 4.

Zimbardo, Phil. Understanding Mind Control. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

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Media's Use of Propaganda to Persuade People's Attitude, Beliefs and Behaviors

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Media's Use of Propaganda to Persuade People's Attitude, Beliefs and Behaviors War &amp Peace: Media and War Attitudes, Belief's and Behaviors The previous picture and poem is a clear example of propaganda which is a form of persuasion used to influence people's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

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What Authenticity Really Means in Politics

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This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system.

The subject of "authenticity" is a standard fixture of presidential election coverage. To political scientists, it represents the worst of conventional media wisdom: candidate-centric, hard to define, and almost certainly an impossible standard. It also possesses very little relevance for winning the party nomination, much less for governing.

Others have written at length about the false promise of authenticity, here and elsewhere. Within the Mischiefs' ranks, Richard Skinner and Seth Masket have done a nice job explaining why understanding a candidate's true feelings on a subject isn't a substitute for enlightenment or competence. The topic has appeared in other venues this week. Marc Ambinder writes that "there's no objective measure for authenticity," and Brendan Nyhan offers a persuasive argument that it's a label that's arbitrarily applied. While authenticity is difficult to measure, and the way it's applied to candidates defies clear patterns, our apparent national obsession with authenticity reveals how we think about the presidency. The concept may be devoid of direct meaning, telling us very little about the candidates and how genuine they are. Its meaning, instead, is in what it shows about our anxieties as we select someone to lead the executive branch.

Authenticity taps into the "Green Lantern" presidency

When we ask candidates to be authentic, we are asking them to perform what Nyhan has smartly called the Green Lantern presidency. This idea of presidential leadership essentially calls for the president to rule through the sheer force of his personality. The implicit argument is that by virtue of the realness of their personalities and convictions, "authentic" politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders will be able to change the political system. Their intolerance for nonsense and pretension will strip away the obstacles of a Madisonian system and produce results!

This is absurd, of course. But it suggests that when people talk about authenticity, they're articulating a theory about how the presidency works.

Authenticity enforces gender and race boundaries

Authenticity can also act like a code word. This way of thinking about the presidency has some pretty significant gender implications: It's all about power and dominance. It's hard to test this empirically because there have been so few mainstream women presidential candidates, but it makes sense when we think about the double bind that Clinton has found herself in with regard to authenticity: It's like her critics want her to be grittier and more forceful, but then that's unfeminine and thus abrasive, so that won't work either. We can find an instructive contrast in the early days of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy. She was praised for her authenticity - she was feminine, maternal, and folksy - but ultimately these qualities were held up as incompatible with the pursuit of higher office.

There's a race link, too. The times when Hillary Clinton has earned high marks for authenticity in the press have been when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 and "connected" with working-class white constituencies in places like Indiana and West Virginia - sometimes with whiskey shots! The racial undertones of the authenticity argument are especially transparent in the idea that Donald Trump "says what others are thinking," and doesn't shrink from the political correctness police. When someone talks about a candidate who "tells it like it is and isn't worried about offending people," there's a decent chance that the potential targets for offense include historically marginalized groups about whom derogatory language used to be acceptable.

Authenticity, then, can work in a complex way for nonwhite candidates just as it does for women. When Obama was running, there were persistent comments about whether he was "authentically" black. Obama's relationship with the African-American community as he entered politics is certainly an interesting and rich topic. But questions aimed at race and authenticity - just like questions about authentic womanhood - ultimately serve to reduce both the candidate and the community in question to a narrow set of stereotypical characteristics.

Oddly, for a brief moment in 2008, a line of commentary emerged that identified Obama with the "neutral" school of the presidency and race -by virtue of having one white and one black parent, he could embody an image of "authentic" colorblind America. Obviously, this didn't last very long. But it had a connection with Obama's efforts to discuss race during the primary. One example of this was his April 2008 speech in which he spoke about mutual distrust among white and black Americans. Although the policy substance is very different, there's a connection with the response to Trump's eschewal of "political correctness" - a demand for unvarnished truths about difficult issues, particularly taboo topics like race and group identity.

In this way - again, tough to test given the small number of relevant observations - authenticity sets up a kind of a trap for candidates who challenge the conventional demographic boundaries of the presidency. By asking that they prove authentic womanhood or blackness, we're not just asking them to embrace unfair clichés. We're also calling for them to depict themselves in ways that are at odds with the traits we associate with effective presidential leadership.

Authenticity represents the democratic side of the presidency, too

The evil genius of the authenticity question is that it doesn't just point to presidential power through the brute force of personality. It also refers to the notion of the president as a small-d democratic actor. Requests for authenticity call for blunt talk - and also for a performance that casts the candidate in the role of "ordinary American" (a term that is, of course, laden with race and class baggage). We're asking the president to be a strong, uncompromising, and unwavering actor - in language that begs him or, more to the point, her to prove she's just like us. Questions about Clinton's authenticity may have no relevance to her ability to govern. But they reveal some key points about presidential politics. It's regrettable, but not entirely surprising, that there would be anxiety about opening the nation's highest office to the types of people who, until recently, would never be seriously considered. Presidential leadership also has a dual nature, with expectations that the president will be powerful and decisive while also remaining accessible and ordinary. And there's the sense that the public side of politics is scripted, while the important decisions are made out of sight. That's a fair concern - but efforts to sell authenticity to the public are as scripted as anything in politics.

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Questions of authenticity are really questions about race, class, and democracy

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This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction , an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. The subject of "authenticity" is a standard fixture of presidential election coverage. To political scientists, it represents the worst of conventional media wisdom: candidate-centric, hard to define, and almost certainly an impossible standard.

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Just after Virginia's election, my friend Jesse Ferguson explained in these pages that one of Gov.-elect Ralph Northam's greatest assets was his authenticity.

Studies reveal that consumers will pay more for products they deem authentic. "Authentic" Asian restaurants in San Francisco command higher ratings than clean ones, according to one careful analysis.

A Saudi prince recently purchased a Da Vinci for an astounding $450 million. Had it not been an "authentic" Da Vinci - had the master's first cousin or his best friend's son created the work - it may not have fetched even $400.

Authenticity pays. Or, at least, it seems to.

I can assure you, had the painting been an authentic "Mellman," it would not have brought even 40 cents to the auction house.

And so, we begin to see that authenticity, as valuable as it certainly can be, is not such a simple subject.

Allan Sherman, a rarely referenced comic song writer of the early '60s, captured a bit of the complexity in a parody exhorting shoppers to "grab those bargains off the rack." At one point, a store patron suddenly exclaims (in song), "Just what I've been looking for-a genuINE copy of a fake Dior."

Echoes of Sherman's lyric were heard when both and attempted to borrow some working-class authenticity from a character dubbed "Joe the Plumber," who was, it turns out, neither a plumber, nor named Joe.

In common parlance, people use the word "authenticity" to encapsulate a number of desirable traits: being credible, original, sincere, natural, genuine or "real."

On the one hand, being a genuine Mellman is worth approximately nothing. By contrast, the sparks of authenticity contained in a "genuine copy of a fake Dior," or in Sam (his real name), the non-plumber, may carry some value. The "real thing" can be worth a lot.

In politics, we tend to think about authenticity as meaning simply "just being who you are."

Most people "are who they are" and get no special credit for it. It certainly doesn't catapult them to high public office.

It's more complicated than that.

Scholars have identified several distinct types of authenticity. Nominal authenticity is based on knowable facts - did Da Vinci paint the canvass, or did someone else?

Other forms of authenticity rely on beliefs, perceptions and judgments, not mere facts.

Type authenticity is something true to its genre. An authentic Chinese restaurant is a good thing in this meaning; an authentic politician - one typical of the type in the public mind - is not so appealing.

Craft authenticity is less relevant to our concerns (but of great moment to today's popular beer brewers and liquor distillers), while idiosyncratic authenticity refers to a commonly recognized quirky uniqueness.

Moral authenticity refers to the sincerity of the values-driven choices a person or organization makes. Put differently, those regarded as authentic are guided by intrinsic motivations, not extrinsic rewards.

One scholar produced data suggesting that baseball fans sought out "authentic" style ball parks as free agency made players seem increasingly focused on extrinsic benefits, i.e., money, not just the intrinsic love of the game.

Moral authenticity is also conveyed by a willingness to suffer in some way for one's convictions. Mother Teressa, and Galileo all exhibited this form of authenticity.

Data also demonstrate a singular focus makes it easier to be perceived as authentic. A restaurant that serves Chinese, Indian and burgers is less likely to be perceived as authentic than one offering just Thai cuisine.

Right or wrong, fair or unfair, in 2016, and Donald Trump were both perceived as authentic, while encountered serious difficulties on this dimension.

Next week we'll explore why, and what we can learn from the uses and abuses of this concept in those contests.
Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. Senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years and as president of the American Association of Political Consultants.

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Mellman: Authenticity in politics (Part I)

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Just after Virginia's election, my friend Jesse Ferguson explained in these pages that one of Gov.-elect Ralph Northam's greatest assets was his authenticity. Studies reveal that consumers will pay more for products they deem authentic. "Authentic" Asian restaurants in San Francisco command higher ratings than clean ones, according to one careful analysis.

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A very necessary part of enjoying reality TV is the suspension of disbelief. You can't get hung up on stuff like wardrobe inconsistencies, obviously dubbed voices, or spontaneous vacations that somehow manage to get every star of a show on a remote island where drama ensues. It's part of the fun. And this is never more true than for Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Though the show's stars grew up with cameras on them 24/7, there have been some pretty egregious slip ups in the last 14 seasons of the show. In fact, there have been enough mishaps for people like me to make a career out of tracking them. Sometimes it feels like the inconsistencies are so apparent, that they might as well pull a hammer out of their purses and literally break down the fourth wall. In honor of 10 years and ahead of the 14th season premiere on Sunday, let's take a look back at some of the questionably real scenes in Keeping Up with the Kardashians history.

Khloé's Arrest: Season 1, Episode 5

In March of 2007, Khloé Kardashian was arrested in the wee hours of a Calabasas morning for driving while under the influence. This was one of the first story lines of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and the episode aired on November 11, 2007.

Here's the problem: According to Wikipedia, Keeping Up wasn't greenlit until August 2007 (5 months after Khloé's arrest in March), and filming began shortly after so there's no way they could have actually filmed Khloé getting arrested. So there's that - and then there's the so-called reason for her arrest. In the show, the drunken night out that led to Khloé's arrest is said to be directly tied to her the anniversary of her father, Robert Kardashian's death. The episode is titled "Remembering Dad," and even Hulu's description of the episode states "Khloé has trouble coping with the anniversary of her father's death." But, the anniversary of his death would would have been on September 30, 2007, 6 months after Khloé was arrested. I can't be too mad at them because it gave us Kimberly Kardashian taking selfies in a car while accompanying Khloé to jail.

Kim and Kris talk about Kim and Kris: Kourtney and Kim Take New York, Season 2, Episode 7

On October 31, 2011, Kim Kardashian announced that she was divorcing Kris Humphries after just 72 days of marriage. The demise of the marriage is chronicled on Kourtney and Kim Take New York and one of the most pivotal conversations that Kim had about her marriage takes place between Kim and her Mom on a business trip to Dubai in early October (Kim's seen here entering her hotel on October 11, 2011). In the scene, Kim tells Kris that she's not eager to leave Dubai and return to New York to see her husband. Kim asks Kris if her feelings are "normal," and Kris tells her that they aren't.

Here's the problem: This scene is made to look like it was filmed in Dubai, but was actually filmed on December 6, 2011 in Los Angeles. On December 6, Kim and Kris were seen leaving a studio in Hollywood, wearing the exact same outfits they were wearing during their episode 7 conversation about Kris Humphries, as they prepared to leave Dubai and head back to New York. That's over a month after Kim filed for divorce from Kris Humphries. It seems as though Kim and Kris had to take to a studio to reshoot some scenes (which coincidentally turn out to make it seem like divorce is the best option for Kim).

Kris Humpries's Proposal: Season 6, Episode 13

During his divorce proceedings, Kris Humphries testified that his proposal to Kim was made-for-TV. "I remember, like, Kim - she didn't know he was going to propose at that moment, and she came in and she was completely surprised, and I think she had a bad reaction or something and she was embarrassed," Humphries said. Humphries told the court that Kim wasn't satisfied with her initial reaction to his proposal in Season 6 Episode 13, so she asked to reshoot the scene so that they could get a better take. "She said can we just, like, have me come back in one more time and be, like, really surprised. Because she had no idea it was going to happen. It was in her bedroom." Humphries's claim was substantiated by a Keeping Up producer, Russell Jay, who confirmed, in a 165-page deposition, that this scene was reshot. To my knowledge, Kim has never publicly commented on the matter.

Kylie's Lips: Season 10, Episode 9

Back in 2014, everyone was talking about Kylie's lips (and this was before she launched her lip kits). An entire episode of Season 10was centered around Kylie's suspected injections. In it, she spends a good amount of time trying to avoid answering questions about whether her lips are enhanced.

Here's the problem: In her first interview of the episode, Kylie tells a New Zealand magazine, Remix, that her lips are au naturale, and and the fullness is due "to, like, six different colors." She doesn't admit to the fillers in this interview because she's just not "comfortable" talking to reporters about her lips just yet. However, in the last scene of the episode Kylie finally tells Teen Vogue that she has in fact had her lips enhanced with temporary fillers. The catch is that Kylie was interviewed by Teen Vogue (the interview where she admitted to fillers) on February 6, 2015, 4 days before her interview on February 10, 2015 with Remix (where she lied about not having fillers). The episode was edited to look like Kylie was building up to feeling "comfortable" enough to admit to getting lip injections, when it seems as though she just wanted to break the news to the most popular source.

Kris Jenner and Corey Gamble's Relationship: Season 10, Episode 2

In the winter of 2014, Kim Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Scott Disick chat around Kris Jenner's kitchen island to break down what's really going on between Kris and her new man Corey Gamble. They filmed this scene on December 17, 2014 (as evidenced by Khloé's gram that day), and in it they ask one another who exactly Corey is, and if anyone has any details on him (other than what Scott, Kendall, and Kylie found on him in texts on Kris's phone in October 2014).

Here's the problem: Unfortunately, for the Kontinuity of their show, we know the family met Corey - latest - in October of that same year when he went with the family to Vegas. This scene was filmed almost three months later.

Missing Cuba: Season 12, Episode 13

In season 12 episodes 12 and 13, our beloved Kardashian dolls, Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé took a trip to Cuba with their families and Everybody's Favorite Best Friend Malika. Scott Disick and Kris Jenner miss them so badly they hatch a plan to bring Cuba to Calabasas. They rent a brightly colored convertible, stock up on cigars, put on fedoras, and invite Kylie Jenner and French Montana to ride around Southern California with them, while pretending to be in Havana.

Here's the problem: the scene of Scott and Kris bringing Cuba to Los Angeles is inconsistent, because it was filmed on May 26, 2016. For proof, you can take a look at Kris and her crew in their car on May 26, 2016, here. That's 20 days after the ladies returned to California from Cuba on May 6. This means they weren't experiencing FOMO in real time, since the ladies had already returned from Cuba.

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5 of the Most Obviously Staged Moments in Kardashian History

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A very necessary part of enjoying reality TV is the suspension of disbelief. You can't get hung up on stuff like wardrobe inconsistencies, obviously dubbed voices, or spontaneous vacations that somehow manage to get every star of a show on a remote island where drama ensues. It's part of the fun.

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Needless to say, what we consider to be real and authentic has changed over time and has varied according to whom you ask. For Freud, our authentic selves wanted to sleep with our mothers and murder our fathers, and it was civilization and psychoanalysis that kept our murderous ids in check. For Rousseau, authenticity was man's blissful state in nature, before he was corrupted by society.

But the fixation on finding a core self by peeling away social conventions also had its naysayers. Adorno was suspicious of the "jargon of authenticity" and the attempt to find a self unmediated by language, pretense and power. Adorno recognized that our understanding of authenticity was necessarily shaped by the very society it's supposedly defined against. As something discoverable and elusive, authenticity was desirable, and desirable meant marketable, especially in a society as relentlessly commercial as ours. By 1999, Joshua Glenn, the editor of the semiotics zine (yes, really) Hermenaut, devoted an issue to fake authenticity, or what Glenn denounced as "the spectacle of (usually white, middle-class) people" doing things like "spending $15 for turkey burgers in urban hunting lodges" and "throwing out perfectly good kitchen tables for expensive new tables made out of old barn doors."

This anxiety might look like a symptom of its late-1990s cultural moment - don't we have bigger things to worry about than the willingness of moneyed white folk to pay exorbitant amounts for minuscule tubs of hand-churned butter? - but Glenn was suggesting that the commodification of authenticity often involved "fetishizing people darker and/or poorer than themselves." The search for authenticity becomes a way of "knowing" other people without really knowing them. In its most presumptuous and insidious form, we believe we have access to people's inner lives, that we know where they're coming from and what motivates them - when that knowledge is heavily filtered through a mishmash of our own projections, prejudices and how much they remind us of us.

Case in point: President Obama has been perceived, variously, as the great prophet of hope and change; an arugula-loving, Whole Foods-shopping elitist; and in Newt Gingrich's formulation, the nation's "food-stamp president." Michael P. Jeffries, the author of "Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America," says the president's most vociferous critics have drawn on notions of authenticity, trying to undermine his legitimacy by making racially coded insinuations and casting doubt on his religion and his birth certificate. "They kept saying, 'Who is the real Barack Obama?' Implicit was that the result of that search would be a lazy, lying, shiftless predator."

The impulse to think in terms of who someone really is can have serious policy implications too. It finds expression in the American criminal-justice system, in which prescriptions of punishment or rehabilitation are predicated on determinations of whether a person's actions reflect something authentic about him - determinations that typically fall, according to sentencing statistics, along racial lines. It informs legislation like the new measure governing bathrooms in North Carolina, where the law defines transgender people according to the sex listed on their birth certificates, rather than accepting how they define themselves. We persist in deciding who people authentically are even though we often get it wrong - and even when it's ultimately beside the point.

For a long time, Americans decided that the most authentic politicians were the most likable ones. This method of appraisal wasn't entirely frivolous. Samuel L. Popkin, the author of "The Candidate," says that the interest in the personal qualities of politicians stems from legitimate concerns in a diverse democracy: "Are you real or not? Because you're not like me." Officeholders end up having to make decisions in unforeseen situations, so we gauge their judgment based on how much we like and trust them. In "The Politics of Authenticity in Presidential Campaigns, 1976-2008," the pollster Erica J. Seifert sees a pivotal moment after Watergate, when the electorate, betrayed by Richard Nixon, voted in the avuncular outsider Jimmy Carter.

But the kind of authenticity that's prized in the 2016 election looks different. Frustration with the establishment is so pronounced that affability seems less a factor than a candidate's anti-establishment bona fides and a penchant for blunt, even brutal, statements. "There's a huge difference between Jimmy Carter on his peanut farm and Donald Trump riding on his escalator railing against Mexicans," Seifert told me. "These are not the same brands of authenticity."

This hasn't stopped some Republicans from claiming that Trump's brand of authenticity is as artificial as they come. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, insists that Trump's taco-bowl tweet, not his repeated inflammatory comments, reflects Trump's "gracious and personable" self. "Honestly," Priebus told Politico, "he's trying." Whether Priebus's words amount to desperate optimism or disingenuous salesmanship remains to be seen - or not, because at a certain point, what a politician believes in his heart of hearts matters less than what he summons in his supporters. In the end, their demonstrations of tolerance or bigotry may offer as good a measure as any of the differences between authenticity and the real thing.

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Needless to say, what we consider to be real and authentic has changed over time and has varied according to whom you ask. For Freud, our authentic selves wanted to sleep with our mothers and murder our fathers, and it was civilization and psychoanalysis that kept our murderous ids in check.

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We live in an era when the demand for authenticity trumps a number of qualities that our society (and others) used to deem more important. Authenticity has always loomed large, in other words, but its stock has risen and fallen depending on the times. Right now it beats out excellence, cool and artifice; to jump to the top of the charts or the bestseller list, you have to be ready to open up.

But of course the most successful people in any walk of life have figured out the art behind the authenticity. So it may not be that we live in more authentic times, truly, but rather that we live near the end of a number of artistic trends that have exhausted themselves, leaving only authenticity as the last artifice. Authenticity seen in this way is more about shock value than real honesty.

The story of the white women pretending to be black is instructive here.

But it's good to be authentic, right? A recent study suggests that if you're not, you'll suffer. If you violate your values, you'll feel distressed and morally impure, according to a study published in Psychological Science. According to one of the authors of the study, Dr Maryam Kouchaki, "Our work shows that feeling inauthentic is not a fleeting or cursory phenomenon - it cuts to the very essence of what it means to be a moral person."

And the study also finds that if we have been inauthentic, we need a cleanse. But not only that. We also suffer lower moral self-regard, less generosity, and less cooperation. Being inauthentic has consequences not just for ourselves, but for those around us as well.

So how do you combine the need for authenticity with a bit of artifice - the best of the times and the storytelling art?

Western society contains a few basic stories that everyone knows and resonates to, so if you can invoke one of those stories, you'll get instant buy-in from your audience. You'll lessen resistance. That will free you up to be authentic.

For example, if you ask your employees to embark with you on a long and arduous journey to develop a new product, they'll complain about the obstacles along the way, unless you invoke a Quest story. Then, the obstacles are to be expected because that's what happens on a quest. The heroes (your audience) meet obstacles and suffer reversals - but eventually overcome them all to reach the goal. Don't make the mistake of casting yourself as the lone hero - always bring the audience along with you.

The Quest story is the most basic one, and audiences get the idea very quickly because the story is so deeply ingrained in our psyches. Quest stories have heroes, journeys, obstacles, mentors, and most importantly a goal at the end. For more information on the subject, read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces the definitive book on the subject.

After the Quest, the other fundamental stories are: Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Story, Rags to Riches, and Revenge.

The way to think about these stories is as thematic ideas that you invoke as you go through your speech. You might do it with a specific reference to a particular, well-known Quest story, like the Holy Grail, the Wizard of Oz, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or you might use the elements and the language of a Stranger in a Strange Land story in order to bring the audience into that magical space without actually telling them bluntly that 'you're on a quest'. It's better in this case not to be blunt, but rather to evoke the stories with their unconscious power to orient us and bring us into a space where we see the outcome as ordained by the structure of the story.

Once you've picked your thematic story and you're off on a Quest or you're all Strangers in a Strange Land, then you want to think about using archetypes to get further storytelling mileage out of our common mythology.

Basically, an archetype is a model of a character, or part of a character. The word and concept have been around for a long time, but they were made famous, so to speak, by the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

When Jung talked about archetypes, he meant primarily aspects of a person - the Self, the Shadow (your Dark Side) and the Persona (the face you put toward the world). But he also talked about a host of other kinds of people, and aspects of people and the natural world, that could be archetypes, from the child, hero, mother and wise old man to the fish.

The idea is that your particular mother resonates for you with the archetypal mother in some ways, and not in other ways. You may develop a mother complex as a result. We live at our best and most fully when we're in harmony with all the archetypes we summon up.

Jung believed that archetypes were real - a kind of bridge between our inner psychological world and the real world out there. More than that, we all have access to universal wisdom and understanding through and with these archetypes.

OK, so what does that mean for speakers?

I think we can invoke the power of the basic archetypes by naming them at appropriate moments in our stories and by using them as ways to connect with the audience. Words like 'child', 'mother', 'father' and so on have enormous resonance for just about everyone in your audience. The trick is to let your audience do the work, creating the associations, by giving them enough detail to get their minds working, but not so much that you stop them from using their imaginations.

Archetypes work best in simple stories that allow audiences to fill in the blanks. You need to craft these stories - really parables - with great care so that they are not hackneyed or silly.

If you do it right, you can create powerful, memorable stories - on a variety of levels - in your speeches that call us all to our best, archetypal selves and move your audiences to action.

And that's the subject of the online course we're launching today, Presentation Prep: 10 Steps to Persuasive Storytelling. Authenticity and art, combined.

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We live in an era when the demand for authenticity trumps a number of qualities that our society (and others) used to deem more important. Authenticity has always loomed large, in other words, but its stock has risen and fallen depending on the times.

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The beauty of the internet is that if you are into something, there is someone else who is into it, too. Instagram is full of accounts with relatively small but devoted followings: not the Kim Kardashian Wests of the world, with hundreds of millions of followers, but people with tens of thousands of followers who are specifically interested in whatever thing they are posting about: Design. Puppies. Pictures of themselves.

For Maggie Michalczyk, the thing is pumpkins. Michalczyk runs the blog Once Upon a Pumpkin and has 26,400 followers on her Instagram account of the same name. This year, she wrote a pumpkin cookbook, which is filled with pumpkin recipes. Her dog, a cavalier King Charles spaniel, is named Pumpkin.

Last fall, she left her full-time corporate job as a dietitian in Chicago to focus on what had been her side hustle. "I felt like if I just had a little bit more time to dedicate to this, I could do some really cool things that would allow me to partner with brands and really showcase pumpkin in different ways," she says. "I just really wanted to explore how much more I could push the pumpkin envelope." A year in, she still works one on one with clients and takes on nutrition consulting projects. The rest of the time, she is all about pumpkins. She is officially a pumpkin micro-influencer.

Confused and intrigued - I have never talked to a pumpkin influencer before, and also aren't pumpkins seasonal? - I reached out to Michalczyk to talk about pumpkins, as a food, a flavor, and a calling. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Rachel Sugar

I haven't counted, but you have more than 2,000 posts on Instagram, and the vast, vast majority of them seem pumpkin-related. How did you realize there was even an opportunity here? It's not an obvious job, like doctor, lawyer, firefighter, pumpkin influencer.

Maggie Michalczyk

The first time I can really remember being like, "Pumpkin is my thing," was in high school or college, in one of those get-to-know-you icebreakers. I think the question was "What's the most interesting thing you've ever eaten?" I was like, "Well, my name is Maggie and my favorite thing that I ever ate was pumpkin." I forgot what the thing was, exactly. It may have been pumpkin ice cream - just something really standard at the time. But then for the whole rest of the year, everyone just remembered that I liked pumpkin-whatever-it-was, and they remembered me that way.

And then as the first wave of major pumpkin products were hitting Trader Joe's, I just remember being so excited to go there and then post about all that stuff on Instagram. I think pumpkin yogurts were really big when the first pumpkin craze started happening and it was like, "Let's put pumpkin in everything!"

Rachel Sugar

When do you locate the first wave of the pumpkin craze?

Maggie Michalczyk

This was 2015. At the beginning, [my Instagram feed] was really, really simple, just me posting products I saw, mainly stuff at Trader Joe's. But then it became - I don't want to say a game, because that's not the right word - but it was really fun to go pumpkin-hunting for things. And it still is. I have seen, in the last two years, people are willing to go miles to find the pumpkin things that they see out there or see on my page.

It's a really fun conversation on a product level - "Oh, my god, have you seen this new pumpkin product?" - but from a more nutrition-oriented recipe perspective, when I put pumpkin into something unique, I love it when people say, "Oh, my god, I did not know you could do that!" Or if I say, "It's good for dogs too!" I just love having those conversations with people sharing what they've done with pumpkin, how else they've used it, and then me experimenting in my own kitchen as a dietitian so I can say, "Hey, it adds texture, flavor, and nutrition to X, Y, and Z."

Rachel Sugar

So what should I be doing with pumpkin that I don't know I should be doing with pumpkin?

Maggie Michalczyk

One thing I've been doing a lot lately is a pumpkin green smoothie. For a while, cauliflower was definitely having this moment where people were like, "We need to put frozen cauliflower into smoothies to get 'em really thick!" But I could still taste the cauliflower, and while I like it roasted, maybe I don't want cauliflower in a smoothie. But pumpkin has a similar effect. It'll really thicken up your smoothies, and if you mix it with spinach, banana, almond milk, you get that thickness.

I also really like exploring savory dishes with it. I'm actually doing a pumpkin risotto today. I think using it in chili or in a savory pasta is always really good and unexpected.

On the sweet side, I think you can't go wrong with pumpkin cookies. I just feel like those taste like fall. I think pumpkin bread is quintessential. It just brings up a lot of nostalgia for the season, too. A lot of cozy vibes.

Rachel Sugar

One thing you brought up earlier is this idea that people think of pumpkin as being " basic." Pumpkin as a category - maybe actual pumpkins, definitely pumpkin spice flavoring - is, in the US, associated with girlish women, usually white ones, who have "unsophisticated" taste. They're the Ugg boots of seasonal gourds. What's going on there?

Maggie Michalczyk

I think it was born out of the pumpkin spice latte. Going to Starbucks at any other time is not really associated with being basic, but now you think in the fall, "I'm going to Starbucks to get my latte and maybe I'm wearing yoga pants and Ugg boots." That idea was a lot more prominent maybe two years ago, but it's one of those things that sticks. Now every fall, people are like, "it's basic season again."

I always try to say, "Hold up. Pumpkin pie spice is not basic. It's actually a blend of a bunch of different spices that all have good nutritional properties. Look at how complex this is." Ginger is great for digestion; cinnamon has been studied for lowering blood pressure; nutmeg is a good source of certain vitamins and minerals that are really not easy to come by all the time, so even that little sprinkle that you're adding helps.

Rachel Sugar

I want to talk about the logistics of pumpkin Instagram for a minute. Are there other pumpkin influencers? I'm not an expert, but from what I can tell, there are a lot of people who have "pumpkin" in their handle, but very few of them are actually posting about pumpkins, as in, the raw material for jack-o'-lanterns.

Maggie Michalczyk

Yeah, I've seen that too. If people like my photos and they have pumpkin in their handle, I'll look because I'm curious, but I've only ever seen one other account that had pumpkin things, and it definitely was not showing how to use it in recipes. It was just about products, or it would be sharing memes or basic and pumpkin spice things. It was more like a let's make fun of it-type thing.

For a good pumpkin Instagram, there's gotta be that element of - I wanna call it "the pumpkin factor," or "the pumpkin spice factor." Let's use Cheerios as an example. I feel like when people see a pumpkin version of a brand they recognize, they flip out because they're like, "Oh, my gosh, I love Cheerios, I can't believe they're making a pumpkin spice flavor. I need to go find these and try these."

Or maybe it's a product just coming out, or maybe it's new for the season. If a lot of people have not seen the pumpkin product, I kind of have an inkling that the photo is going to do really well, and there's gonna be a lot of conversation around finding it.

And I think the more unique I can be with putting pumpkin into something, the better. For example, I recently did a pumpkin quesadilla and that, I think, was really successful because people were like, "What? Oh my gosh! I would never have thought of that, I can't even believe you did that."

It's also worth mentioning that any new pumpkin or squash stuff Trader Joe's puts out is very sought after. They recently put out a butternut squash pizza crust and for that, I saw a ton of engagement.

Rachel Sugar

So you'll post other squash beyond pumpkins?

Maggie Michalczyk

Yeah. As we head into Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and the winter months, I do talk about winter squash. I definitely incorporate recipes for spaghetti squash, acorn squash, butternut, delicata squash, because I've sort of found over the years that a lot of people don't know what to do with them or how to eat them, or if they're even good. So while pumpkin is my main priority and my focus, I do think it makes a lot of sense to touch on the other squashes throughout the year, especially in the winter months when they're in season.

Rachel Sugar

Speaking of seasons, it seems like the big obstacle with building a brand on pumpkins is that, you know, they're seasonal. And maybe part of that is us, and we should just open our minds, but part of that seems like it's just nature. How do you keep up a pumpkin account in April?

Maggie Michalczyk

That's a question I get a lot. My following is really receptive to pumpkin stuff year-round because they are thinking about pumpkin year-round. Even in the summertime, people will say, "I'm starting to think about fall and pumpkin." In July, they'll say, "I'm so over summer. I just want to bake with pumpkin."

I'll talk about other seasonal vegetables, but I do think what keeps me relevant is that I'll always have an underlying pumpkin tone or make a reference back to pumpkins. I do think people are looking for them more than we think throughout the year, which is crazy.

Rachel Sugar

How much of your income is coming from pumpkin influencing?

Maggie Michalczyk

In addition to Instagram and the blog stuff, I also frequently go on TV here in Chicago for food things, and in some instances, I also partner with brands for that. So I think, looking at the pie chart of things I do, I would probably say that collaboration for recipes and social media exposure would be maybe half to a little more than half of my income.

Rachel Sugar

So that's Instagram, the blog, and the TV stuff?

Maggie Michalczyk

Correct. And then the rest ... a little bit is from private [nutrition] clients, obviously. Some is just from passive income streams on the blog, like affiliate programs. But I would say the bulk is coming from blog partnerships, Instagram partnerships, and TV segment partnerships.

Being a dietitian, I was lucky enough to have experience interacting with different food brands, so I kind of knew what these companies are looking for in terms of partnering with somebody to get their message across. Brands are obviously looking on Instagram, so it's nice this season to be considered that type of expert. If a company has a pumpkin product that's coming out, I think they want to work with me because they know my audience is just as excited about that pumpkin product and they know it's the right people to speak to.

Rachel Sugar

So let's say a brand approaches you. What are they asking for?

Maggie Michalczyk

A couple of things, the main one being an Instagram feature on my page of their product if it is a new and novelty pumpkin item that's just come out. Another really popular way that I partner with brands in the fall is for a giveaway - I know that my followers are extremely excited for the chance to win that pumpkin product sent directly to them. So I will do a feature of the product, I'll talk about it in my Instagram stories, and then perhaps we'll do a giveaway of it too. And then recipe collaboration is probably the second most popular project.

Rachel Sugar

This is kind of a weird question, but do you feel ... influential?

Maggie Michalczyk

Yeah, it is kind of like a weird thought. I didn't realize how much of an impact this was having I guess, until I would get messages that were like, "I was just in Europe and I had pumpkin soup and I thought of you!" Honestly, that's the most common comment I get when someone meets me in real life: I was at the store and I saw all this pumpkin stuff and I thought of you. People will message me different pumpkin things they find, share their pumpkin finds with me, tag me. I do see that it is catching on and that [I've developed that] sphere of influence.

Rachel Sugar

And who are you influencing?

Maggie Michalczyk

I think it's people who love fall in general - the scary movies, the pumpkin picking, the leaves, the baking, the cooking, the holidays. I really do think that's the bread and butter of it. They love that so much, and when they can see a picture of all of my pumpkins, or a picture of all this pumpkin bread baking, then that resonates with them. It creates a connection: "We all love it so much, let's celebrate it together." I think it's people who are interested in food and nutrition, and who love fall.

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On Instagram, there's an influencer for everything. Even pumpkins.

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The beauty of the internet is that if you are into something, there is someone else who is into it, too. Instagram is full of accounts with relatively small but devoted followings: not the Kim Kardashian Wests of the world, with hundreds of millions of followers, but people with tens of thousands of followers who are specifically interested in whatever thing they are posting about: Design.

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When Sahara Lotti started her lash extensions company, Lashify, in 2017, she didn't know what she was getting herself into. It wasn't making and selling fake lashes that stumped her-she was more than prepared for that-but rather the bizarre and shadowy industry that seemed to envelop her.

The suggestions started early. Months before Lashify had officially launched, one of her investors, who had ties to the cosmetics industry, pulled her aside. He told her to prepare to pay influencers to speak positively about her lashes on YouTube and Instagram. She thought he was being dramatic. He wasn't.

Lotti recalls the investor saying that if she wanted Lashify to succeed, quality didn't matter, nor did customer satisfaction-only influencers. And they didn't come cheap. She was told to expect to shell out $50,000 to $70,000 per influencer just to make her company's name known, an insane amount for a new startup. There was no way around it; that's just how things worked.

At the time, Lotti found the suggestion absurd, bordering on offensive. She thought paying some random person on the internet tens of thousands of dollars just because they had a lot of followers was beneath her, so she brushed off the suggestion. Looking back now, Lotti realizes how horribly naive she was. She may have avoided forking over cash, sure, but she ended up paying for her decision nonetheless.

Lotti found herself thrust into the wild world of influencer marketing, where prices and pressure are high, and hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands daily on murky terms, seeking sway over the posts in your feed. "It was literally like the mafia," Lotti says. "[It] was a total nightmare because I didn't understand the climate."

Social media influencers ply their trade in realms far beyond fake lashes. Marketers of literature, wellness, fashion, entertainment, and other wares are all hooked on influencers. As brands have warmed to social-media advertising, influencer marketing has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Unlike traditional television or print ads, influencers have dedicated niche followings who take their word as gospel.

There's another plus: Many users don't view influencers as paid endorsers or salespeople-even though a significant percentage are-but as trusted experts, friends, and "real" people. This perceived authenticity is part of why brands shell out so much cash in exchange for a brief appearance in your Instagram feed.

Many influencers with substantial followings "are not promoting products without being compensated," said Kevin James Bennett, a cosmetics developer and consultant who works with brands interested in influencer marketing. "That doesn't make them bad people, it makes them salespersons-and you, the consumer, deserve to know when you're being 'sold' something."

The Federal Trade Commission agrees. As the practice has become more popular, the agency has adopted rules governing the disclosure of paid endorsements on social media. The text is long and complicated, but can be reduced to two essential concepts: If an influencer has received anything-be it cash, free products, or something else-that could affect how a viewer interprets their mention of a brand or product, they must disclose it; and the disclosure must be displayed prominently, and plainly, in the video, photo, or blog.

Ethical Concerns

In interviews, more than a dozen people involved in influencer marketing expressed concerns over the ethics of the burgeoning industry, where brands routinely shell out well over $60,000 in exchange for one video review-or upwards of $85,000 to publicly disparage a competitor's product. The activity is not confined to reviews. Influencers with a sizable following rarely have to purchase products in their niche. Makeup, clothing, plants, books, you name it-all come free, often delivered to the influencer's home or office in a highly Instagrammable box. That's given rise to a new variation of the influencer game, similar to product placements in movies or television: Brands pay influencers to position products on their desks, behind them, or anywhere else they can subtly appear onscreen for a few seconds. Payouts increase if an influencer tags a brand in a post or includes a link to the company's site, but silent endorsements are often preferred.

Sanders Kennedy, a popular YouTuber with over 200,000 subscribers and known for chronicling the drama within the influencer community, was once offered a couple of thousand dollars to leave a particular beverage on his desk while filming. He does not recall the brand but says a representative told him he only needed to make sure the drink appeared within the frame to get his paycheck. And he would not need to tell his audience that he was being paid for the placement, Kennedy says the rep told him.

Thataylaa, a beauty influencer with nearly a million followers collectively on YouTube and Instagram, says she's turned down over $100,000 in brand deals in the past two years because of concerns over what she'd have to say. "In most [influencer advertising] campaign briefs, there are 'talking points' or things the brand would like you to hit on in your own words," she says. "If a brand requires that I say certain things that I don't feel compatible with"-like use language she doesn't think is accurate or hype a product she thinks is subpar-"I decline the sponsorship." Kennedy says contracts often dictate not just specific language, but the exact time a post must be published, the number of follow-up posts to be made, and the expected reach.

Influencers with millions of followers usually have management teams or agents dedicated to identifying the best advertising deals. Most others turn to sites and apps that operate as digital marketplaces, connecting brands with content creators looking to craft the perfect #ad. There are thousands of these marketplaces; two of the most popular are FameBit and Grapevine. FameBit in particular took off after YouTube bought it in 2016. Brands interested in hiring YouTubers as promoters post an ad on FameBit detailing their goals for the campaign, then influencers on the service can submit proposals detailing how they'd tackle the ad. The marketplaces have grown more popular since YouTube limited content creators' ability to generate revenue from preroll ads in 2016. Through FameBit, YouTube has partnered with over 9,000 brands and countless influencers, generating revenue from each deal.

Common sense would suggest that these marketplaces operate like, well ... marketplaces, where buyers-brands-and sellers-influencers-agree on a price. But the influencer world often defies economic logic. Recently, at least, influencers seem to have all the bargaining power, and prices have skyrocketed to meet their demands. Bennett, the influencer marketing consultant, says that in 2016 an endorsement from a top-level influencer would generally cost about $5,000 to $10,000; now, brands are expected to pay "well over $100,000 for the same placement."

Gil Eyal, CEO of HYPR Brands, an influencer analytics company, attributes the shifting leverage to competition among marketplaces for the top influencers. The more money an influencer can pocket, the more likely they are to stick with that marketplace, Eyal says. Bigger paychecks also mean a bigger commission for the marketplaces themselves. He says some marketplace operators and influencers even buy fake followers or use other tactics to boost their perceived influence. This often leads to more money in the pockets of influencers with an impressive-looking follower count but a puny actual reach, according to Eyal. There's no evidence to suggest that some of the larger, more established companies, like FameBit or Grapevine, engage in these practices; it's more common among smaller marketplace operators looking to get a competitive edge, according to Eyal.

FameBit posts reviewed by WIRED touted potential earnings of up to $20,000 for what appeared to be a single review or video. Some campaigns specified the type of influencer they were looking for, others were more general. Several influencers mentioned seeing high-paying offers from online mattress retailer Casper on Grapevine, another influencer marketplace. Those offers often include a free Casper mattress, valued at $995. In a Grapevine posting from November 2016 reviewed by WIRED, the company said it wanted to convert the influencer's audience into Casper customers and specified that "with this campaign, we want you to experience and evangelize the outrageous comfort of the Casper mattress as well as the ease and convenience of the shopping experience." In an email to WIRED, a Casper spokesperson confirmed that the company used Grapevine in 2016 for a YouTube marketing campaign and that it offers free Casper products to its influencer partners. Since then, the spokesperson said, Casper has continued to work with influencers and occasionally pays them "a small fee" in exchange for their endorsements, in addition to the free products.

MannyMUA

Lashify's early 2018 "soft" product launch came and went with little fanfare. At the time, the company's only marketing was on Instagram, where Lotti promoted Lashify's posts in a series of sponsored ads. The bare-bones campaign began to take off. She soon noticed users tagging the same handful of super-popular profiles-beauty influencers-in the comments section below posts, begging them to try the Lashify extension kit. One influencer's handle in particular, @MannyMUA, caught her eye, mostly because the acronym at the end of his name stood for "MakeUp Artist." She hadn't engaged with any influencers, as a point of pride, but she assumed that that "MUA" meant he was different. He wasn't just another pretty face taking photos on Instagram, he was a makeup artist -her dream clientele! On a whim, she sent him an email introducing her brand and offering to send a sample. MannyMUA, whose name is Manny Gutierrez, never replied.

Two weeks later though, Gutierrez's name popped up on her screen again. He had purchased a set of her lashes. She screamed. Her four-person team jumped with joy. They thought this was their big break. With nearly 5 million followers on YouTube, Gutierrez was the type of super-influencer whose opinion could make or break a beauty brand in a matter of minutes. If he reviewed their product, they'd be golden, Lotti remembers thinking at the time. She made sure his order was filled quickly and tucked a handwritten note in the box thanking him for his interest along with about $200 worth of free products, hoping to win him over. As soon as the package was sent off, the Lashify team scrambled to assemble more inventory to prepare for the coming surge of orders.

One week later, Gutierrez posted a video titled: "TRYING ON THE WORLDS [sic] MOST EXPENSIVE LASHES! $125?! WTF." In it, he trashed the Lashify lash kit for being too expensive and not "cunty" enough for his style. At the end of the video, he ripped the lashes off, calling them "shit." His millions of viewers ate it up.

Lotti was dumbstruck. She had no idea how a popular beauty influencer had looked at her months-old startup and decided it was worthy of such a brutal public takedown. Then, she looked down. In the description below the video, Gutierrez included a list of links, titled "AFFILIATE SHIZ!" which viewers could use to buy products he recommends, and receive a discount by using his "MANNYMUA" affiliate code at checkout. Influencers typically make money each time a viewer uses one of these codes while making a purchase. Two of the affiliates listed below the anti-Lashify video were Lashify competitors: Lilly Lashes and Nubounsom Lashes. In an email, Lilly Ghalichi of Lilly Lashes said the company pays influencers a commission for any sales using the influencer's affiliate code or link. The FTC says that influencers who earn a commission from an affiliate link must disclose it in plain language near the link. None of the codes and links posted below Gutierrez's Lashify video include a disclosure beyond the phrase "AFFILIATE SHIZ!" Nubounsom did not respond to a request for comment.

$50,000 for a YouTube Video

Payments for influencers are rising so fast that some advertisers feel priced out of the market. Marlena Stell, the owner of cult cosmetics brand Makeup Geek and a popular beauty influencer on YouTube, used influencers to promote her brand when it launched in 2011. However, over the last year or so, she's cut back, as content creators demand $50,000 to $60,000 for a video.

These rates are common, according to the more than a dozen people involved in the industry who spoke with WIRED. For a single photo post with a product, prices for an influencer with a million followers on Instagram start at $10,000, they say. YouTube is more expensive. A content creator with 3 million subscribers will usually charge at least $40,000 per video. If the company wants the YouTuber to produce a negative review of a competitor's product, that'll cost extra-often from $10,000 to $30,000 more. And, of course, rates increase with the influencer's follower count.

Many influencers with substantial followings "are not promoting products without being compensated."

Kevin James Bennett

Nearly every influencer and brand representative WIRED spoke with attributes the soaring prices to the agents and middlemen that have swooped into the industry over the past few years. Agents usually charge from $1,000 to $20,000 a month as a retainer, plus a 20 percent commission on every deal the influencer lands, the influencer and brand representatives say. Even if an influencer has a massive, highly engaged following, one product review video or post is unlikely to generate enough direct sales to recoup the most extreme rates, Stell says. But brands continue to pay.

"The system is a bit broken," says Eyal Baumel, CEO of Yoola, a digital media company that works with influencers on YouTube and other platforms. Some brands are so set on working with a particular type of influencer that they'll pay astronomical prices for a single post just to get their name in front of the right audience, Baumel says. Ben Neiley, who has worked in influencer marketing and will soon join L'Oréal as a marketing associate, says the prices reflect the relative youth of social media marketing and brands' eagerness to participate. He says brands crave the perceived authenticity that comes with more subtle campaign styles like influencer marketing. Even if a sponsored post is properly disclosed as an ad, many viewers won't recognize it as such.

The ethical concerns can be more pointed for products more sensitive than cosmetics. More than 100 prominent YouTubers, including Gutierrez, have promoted BetterHelp, a wellness app that offers a therapy-like service. For fees ranging from approximately $140 to $320 a month, users are connected via text, voice, or video calls to counselors. In August, hundreds of YouTube users accused high-profile influencers like Philip DeFranco, Shane Dawson, and Bobby Burns of profiting off of their fans' insecurities by promoting the app in lengthy videos about their own mental health issues. In the videos endorsing BetterHelp, the influencers had encouraged their fans to sign up for online counseling through their custom affiliate links, touting BetterHelp as a good resource for people struggling with mental illness. An email sent to an influencer on behalf of BetterHelp and reviewed by WIRED suggested YouTubers post personal videos about mental health. In the email, BetterHelp offered to pay $200 for each user who followed a link from the influencer and signed up for the service.

Some BetterHelp customers have reported issues with the service, and over 80 complaints have been filed against the company with the Better Business Bureau. Most of the concerns relate to unresponsive counselors or allegedly inadequate care. Some influencers tempered their glowing endorsements of the service in August after users raised these issues. DeFranco, for example, said he was putting his relationship with BetterHelp "on a temp hold."

Gutierrez has posted at least three videos that mention BetterHelp. On June 15, Gutierrez posted a lengthy video about his father's alleged anti-LGBT past labeled "EMOTIONAL." Beneath the video, he urged viewers to "Check out https://betterhelp.com/mannymua." On June 27, he posted a shortened version of the BetterHelp affiliate link in the description of a video about struggling with mental illness. Each video received more than 2 million views. Three days later Gutierrez disclosed he was being sponsored by BetterHelp over a multipart Instagram Story and posted a paid endorsement on behalf of the company.

The FTC guidelines say influencers must disclose their relationship with the company when sharing an affiliate link. Neither the June 15 nor June 27 videos included disclosures. In an email to WIRED, Gutierrez's father said that his son did not receive any commission or compensation in exchange for signups using his affiliate link on his first two BetterHelp videos, but that the link tracked the number of clicks Gutierrez's videos referred the BetterHelp site.

BetterHelp CEO Alon Matas dismissed many of the concerns raised by dissatisfied former clients and YouTube users as conspiracies and cherry-picking in an October 8 Medium post. "We were unable to verify the authenticity of any of these claims," he wrote, "but it's inevitable that on a platform that has facilitated over 30 million counseling interactions, there have been cases where we did not meet expectations." He said the BBB complaints were far outnumbered by positive comments about the company. In an email to WIRED, Matas confirmed that the company sponsored Gutierrez's June 30 Instagram endorsement of BetterHelp, but said the June 15 and 27 videos were not "endorsements" and thus not subject to FTC guidelines.

Lashify Falls, and Rises

Gutierrez's negative review of Lashify blew up hours after it was published in March, when Lotti issued a series of controversial responses to the video on social media. She responded to his "cunty" comment by writing "not everyone wants to look like a drag queen" on Instagram. Gutierrez fired back at her on Twitter. Shortly after, in another Instagram video, she raised the subject again: "Honestly, I don't know what he thought they were. But I have to remember, at the end of the day, he can have all the makeup he wants. But he's still a dude."

"The system is a bit broken."

Eyal Baumel

This infuriated many of Gutierrez's fans. Lotti and other Lashify employees received death threats from his fans over the phone and on social media. They called Lotti a "cunty old hag," a bigot, and a sexist, and implored her to commit suicide, according to more than 50 messages reviewed by WIRED. People who had never purchased products from Lashify (according to Lotti's customer records) started leaving terrible reviews of the eyelash kit and the company. Lotti initially tried to respond individually to each reviewer, but eventually chose to delete her Google Business profile and turn off the reviewing option on Lashify's Facebook page.

As the feud grew more heated, Lotti received emails from other popular male influencers offering to publicly come to her company's defense. In one email reviewed by WIRED, a popular Australian beauty influencer offered to make a post on Lashify and Lotti's behalf. "I think after what happened with Manny MUA you need a strong profile in the LGBTI community to do a post and review of your lashes and I'm willing to help," wrote 26-year-old Jade Kevin Foster. Foster did not name a price, but he attached his " media kit," which contained a detailed description of his reach on Instagram and Instagram Stories, pages of information about his targeted audience and engagement statistics, and examples of positive press coverage about his posts and lavish lifestyle. Foster did not respond to a request for comment.

By August, less than six months after it launched, Lashify's brand was toxic. When Wayne Goss, another popular male beauty influencer, posted a (non-sponsored) photo of Lashify lashes on August 9, his fans turned on him. Shortly after, in a video dubbed "SOMEONE TRIED TO BLACKMAIL ME [sic]," Goss shared a graphic message he received from a viewer who threatened to "destroy" his life if he ever spoke kindly about Lashify again. Goss posted a positive video review on YouTube anyway, and the drama grew only more intense. Then came the Reddit episode.

On August 29, an anonymous person on r/BeautyGuruChatter claimed that Lilly Lashes paid Gutierrez to make the Lashify video. The allegation was unsubstantiated; both Lilly Lashes and Gutierrez deny it. Still, the comment marked a turning point. High-profile influencers began to speak publicly about the ills of influencer marketing, and fans listened. A video posted by Stell about the "truth regarding the beauty community" went viral, gaining over a million views, and inspiring responses from other popular influencers. In a subsequent video series about influencers, PrettyPastelPlease, who has over 200,000 subscribers, mentioned Gutierrez's battle with Lashify and directed viewers to the Reddit comment. Fans latched on to this theory and filled the comment section of Gutierrez's original Lashify video with accusations of impropriety. In a matter of days, the narrative had switched, and Lotti was no longer the villain.

In the months since, Lashify has thrived. The hype from Goss' video review and the Reddit comment generated sales of $30,000 to $40,000 a day, Lotti says, temporarily exhausting her inventory. Still, Lotti wonders where Lashify would be if she had better understood influencer marketing when she began. "I didn't get it. I was so naive," she says. "Now, I don't trust influencers [or] 'makeup artists.' Everybody wants free stuff and they just want to make money-there is no ethics behind it."
WIRED uses affiliate links. When you buy something using the retail links in our product reviews, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works. The author's sister has been paid for promotional posts on Instagram.
More Great WIRED Stories

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Inside the Pricey War to Influence Your Instagram Feed

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When Sahara Lotti started her lash extensions company, Lashify, in 2017, she didn't know what she was getting herself into. It wasn't making and selling fake lashes that stumped her-she was more than prepared for that-but rather the bizarre and shadowy industry that seemed to envelop her. The suggestions started early.

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Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that Facebook plans to ask its community to help rate news producers' credibility. Randomly selected users will be asked whether they are familiar with an outlet, and if so, invited to judge its trustworthiness. The ratio that results - of those who know the source, the proportion that trusts it - will "inform ranking in the News Feed" (though Facebook has remained vague about its relevance compared with other metrics). Rather than relying on expert judgment or hiring his staff to make those assessments, Zuckerberg has concluded that crowdsourcing is the "most objective" way to ensure "high quality" news on the platform.

But the reliability of this "trusted sources" measure is dubious, for two reasons. First, people in superficial surveys of this kind often indicate trust in fake sources that have familiar and vaguely credible names. Second, partisan Facebook users with a high interest in promoting "their" media could bias the results.
Here's how I did my research
I conducted a study before the German 2017 elections that used more than 400 participants who lived in Germany, recruited online by a professional surveying company. I weighted the data to make it representative on a number of demographic variables (more information on the data here). For the following analysis, I also exclude respondents with no Facebook account.

I asked this group to rate the trustworthiness of what they were told were 10 different news outlets. Five outlets were established media brands with a large reach and only moderate partisan leanings. Two were smaller newspapers that were openly partisan, but still professional organizations run by full-time journalists.

Three were unprofessional "news" sites that published made-up or highly distorted stories that had circulated on Facebook. They were "unprofessional" in the sense that they don't offer any information about who is in charge of the publication or how information is sourced, and may even allow anyone to invent and post their own stories. Yet their names sound fairly inconspicuous: "24-aktuelles.com," "Internetz-Zeitung" and "Newsblitz" - the last of which may sound aggressive in English but is less so in German.

I asked participants to rate these outlets on a trustworthiness scale from 0 to 10. Much as Facebook's proposed metric would, I calculated the average trust score from among respondents that said they were familiar with the outlet.
Trustworthy names are easy to fake
The figure below shows that the large professional outlets, which you can see in the left-hand group, indeed scored the highest averages.

But their advantages over the three fake outlets, in the center group, are small. Worse, the scam sites had scores that were equal to or higher than the two partisan but more professional sites, in the right-hand group. Note that these relative measures do not account for the fact that many more people ticked "don't know" for the fake sites.

It's true that survey measures have the notorious weakness of being superficial. Just because a number of people say they would trust an outlet, that does not mean that they would do so if they came across it in real life. Trust is more about actual behavior than about quick reactions; people might be more clever when navigating a real news environment.

But this is exactly the problem: Facebook is proposing a superficial way to measure a complex social phenomenon.

Of course, not all misinformation sources carry staid and familiar-sounding names. But they can do so without effort. Think about the made-up Denver Guardian: Many have surely come across the Denver Post and the Guardian, separately. Our brain likes to manufacture accurate memories into false memories. Within the few seconds that Facebook users have to respond to the "trusted sources" pop-up, a Denver Guardian might sound legitimate enough.
[ Homegrown 'fake news' is a bigger problem than Russian propaganda. Here's a way to make falsehoods more costly for politicians. ]
One could go further and survey people's trust in outlets that do not even exist but have harmless names. Similar results are likely. The fake sources used in my study were small, without much reach; most participants probably had never come across them.
Partisan zeal is hard to avoid
My study data also shows that participants are suspicious of overly partisan outlets, seen in the right-hand group. This may be what Facebook intends.

But the company's approach does not shield against sectarian zeal. Many little-known online news sites preach to the converted; the content is exclusively partisan and all the readers agree. As others have pointed out, if the only people allowed to rate their trustworthiness are their readers, these sites will fare extremely well.

Facebook has responded to this criticism: High trust scores will only be effective when they come from "a lot of different types of people." This sounds promising, but it doesn't address a related, more fundamental problem of surveys: Facebook cannot force the users it sampled to respond, so not all of them will. Academics call this the nonresponse bias and have observed different reasons for it. One of them is that people's interest in a topic increases their motivation to respond. Those who are ideologically most invested in denigrating the other side's media and cheerleading their own side's media are most likely to take the time to rate outlets.
[ Fake news may be harder to spot than most people believe ] Adjust for the absolute level of familiarity
We do not yet know exactly how Facebook's "trusted sources" metric will work. The company clarified in the last days that the metric will interact with many other signals, and only matters for a few outlets so far. But clearly Facebook's new policy will affect the news media market - and therefore public debate. If Facebook's goal is to take account of the trustworthiness of news media sources, then research suggests its trusted sources metric may not actually be able to do so. In the current form, it is likely to lead to overrating of anyone who manages to find a credible name and let those with partisan interests bias scores.

How could Facebook correct for this? By adjusting for the absolute level of familiarity. Looking back at my study, the trust averages of "Deutschlandfunk" (a professional outlet) and "24-aktuelles.com" (a scam site) are very close to each other. But almost twice as many participants indicated their familiarity with the former. This factor could help Facebook to achieve its goal with its "trusted sources" effort.
[ This is how you stop fake news ] Bernhard Clemm (@BernhardClemm) is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, Florence. He studies on political psychology and public opinion on the Internet.

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Analysis | Facebook wants its users to drive out fake news. Here's the problem with that.

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Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that Facebook plans to ask its community to help rate news producers' credibility. Randomly selected users will be asked whether they are familiar with an outlet, and if so, invited to judge its trustworthiness.

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Here's a 3-minute video that shows the reality behind many picture-perfect Instagram photos. It was created by Ditch the Label, an anti-bullying organization working in the USA, UK, and Mexico.

The video highlights how the "perfect" lives seen in social media photos are often faked and completely different from the person's reality. Users can appear to be living lavish, "perfect" lives, but in reality, they are often mundane like everybody else.

The video features scenes of people spending lots of time and effort in capturing one apparently "natural" or "off the cuff" image. But the shots are contrived and not an accurate representation of what's going on.

Unfortunately, the act of sharing photos that embellish the truth in an effort to garner likes and followers can actually be detrimental to onlookers, who are left feeling inadequate.

Ditch the Label just published a new study that found that 42% of over 10,000 young people surveyed had experienced cyber-bullying on Instagram. Not only that, but a previous study published earlier this year found that Instagram was the worst social media offender for fueling anxiety, depression, body image issues, and more.

(via Ditch the Label via DPReview)

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Instagram vs. Reality: How People Lie About Their Lives with Photos

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Here's a 3-minute video that shows the reality behind many picture-perfect Instagram photos. It was created by Ditch the Label , an anti-bullying organization working in the USA, UK, and Mexico. The video highlights how the "perfect" lives seen in social media photos are often faked and completely different from the person's reality.

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Today's idea: Reality TV degrades real life itself, an article says. It has "not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior and murder."

Associated Press

Society | In a feisty piece in Vanity Fair, written before the news last week that reality TV dreams lurked in the background of two White House gate-crashers, James Wolcott says reality TV "has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America."

He says its dire effects include reducing networks "originally conceived as cultural alcoves" to "vanity mirrors for the upwardly mobile" - like Bravo, focus of the gate-crashers' ambitions. And at the depths of reality TV's race to the bottom, Wolcott suggests, it played a supporting role in the "fame-grubbing futility" of an unstable contestant who eventually flipped out and killed his bikini model girlfriend before hanging himself in a motel.

Its "insidious, pervasive" influences go far beyond simply inspiring unseemly quests for fame among the proletariat, lumpen or otherwise; reality TV "has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies" throughout society, Wolcott writes. Remember that next time you're in line at the drug store and forced to endure the acting out of a drama queen ranting profanely into her cellphone in front of you, as if you're an extra in her own self-absorbed production. [ Vanity Fair]
More Recommended Reading:

How Economic Weakness Puts the American Empire at Risk - Niall Ferguson, Newsweek

Memo About the Likelihood of an Israeli Strike on Iran, and Implications for the U.S. if It Happens - Steven Simon, Council on Foreign Relations

The Taliban's Media Blitz - Institute for the Study of War

Yuppie Manhattanites Flock to Anti-Mammon Evangelical Preacher - Joseph Hooper, New York

Florida's Hit-and-Run Car Culture - Tim Padgett, Time

Because English Is a Lingua Franca, Britain Is Run by Foreigners - Jeff Randall, Telegraph

Workers of the World vs. Far-Flung China Inc. - Hannah Beech, Time

Not a Tulip Mania, Perhaps, but China Has an Investment Bubble in Garlic Bulbs - The Economist

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Monday | Today's idea: Reality TV degrades real life itself, an article says. It has "not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior and murder." [ Vanity Fair ]

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This past weekend marked one of the world's most prestigious documentary film festivals, True/False. For four days, attendees in Columbia, Missouri, were pushed by experimental documentaries like Rat Film, Strong Island, Safari, and Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? to think about the deeper meaning of "truth" and how a medium as frequently artificial as cinema can both represent and distort the facts.

Yet if those same folks wanted to be befuddled about reality and fakery in a different way, they could have just stayed home and watched Chrisley Knows Best.

Don't misunderstand: There's infinitely more artistry in the typical True/False film than there is to most reality TV. But given that the genre has been frequently criticized (for decades now) as disingenuous and phony, it's remarkable how increasingly brazen reality TV has become about its contrived situations and staged conflicts... to the extent that the lines between scripted drama and reality programming aren't just being blurred, they're being obliterated. In an era where phrases like "fake news" and "alternative facts" are bandied about by our political leaders almost daily, it's time to start casting more of a critical eye toward the shows that have swallowed up cable television.

Here's a case-in-point: The other day while channel-surfing I landed on an episode of The Grill of Victory, a quasi-competition series which pits teams of BBQ experts against each other. I say "quasi," because unlike purer reality competitions like Chopped or Cutthroat Kitchen (which have their own issues, no doubt), The Grill of Victory is more like Top Chef, blending documentary-style dramatics with what is essentially a game show. But where Top Chef creates the illusion of cameras unobtrusively watching a group of talented professional cooks, the Grill of Victory episode I watched was more awkwardly stagey. At one point, one team realized it didn't have enough of the right kind of ribs and would have to sub in spareribs; and both the revelation and the confessional interviews around it sounded so obviously scripted (and so poorly delivered) that any reasonable person would assume this "screw-up" was planned in advance.

If so, The Grill of Victory would be in good company.

The producers of House Hunters have admitted that in order to make sure that each episode has an ending, they find people who've already bought houses, and then have them essentially recreate a "search" that was completed well before the cameras arrived. Back in 2012, one of the regulars on A&E's Storage Wars filed a lawsuit claiming that the abandoned lockers that he and his cast-mates bid on are pre-selected - and possibly pre-loaded with choice antiques - by the producers, and that the outcome of the auctions are massaged. (A&E has denied stocking the lockers, but has also denied violating any federal laws against fixing game shows, because with Storage Wars there's no "chance" or "intellectual skill" involved. Make of that statement what you will.)

Then there are the survival series, like the still-popular Survivor (returning to CBS for a new season this Wednesday) and the upstart Naked and Afraid. Both have been plagued with claims from former participants that tricky editing creates a false impression of just what happens out in the wilderness. Some contestants complain not just that they were made out to be more villainous - and others more heroic - but that sometimes they and their colleagues received medical attention and nourishment that wasn't included in the final cut, thus making it look like they had it a lot harder.

It's no great revelation to say that reality TV isn't real. But it's the pervasiveness of the fakery that's become more curiously obvious.

The kind of blatant contrivance evident in The Grill of Victory or House Hunters used to be the province of shows like The Hills or The Real Housewives or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where the voyeuristic thrill of peeping in at the lives of rich people is filtered through a framework of episodic stories. In a recent Chrisley Knows Best, for example, part of the half-hour is about star Todd Chrisley becoming a spoiled diva and getting an ironic comeuppance when he takes a stab at becoming a professional musician, and the rest is about the younger Chrisleys competing to see who can host a better dinner party. In other words: The show takes the form of an old-fashioned family sitcom, except with worse actors, worse production values, and worse writing.

That's all fine, as far as it goes. Phoniness is part of the appeal for some viewers. For others, it's a trade-off that allows them to spend time around personalities and locations they find fascinating. There are appealing elements to many reality shows, unrelated to how corny they so often are, such as the actual survivalist tips in Naked and Afraid, the history lessons about antique Americana in Storage Wars, and even the refreshingly ordinary looking women who bare their bodies and souls on Showtime's Gigolos. Still, when a concept as simple as "let's watch a group of people cook separate meals and see which ones the judges like best" can't make it to air without manufactured drama and trumped-up "characters," it does raise the question of what the point of reality TV has become.

As an experiment, I spent an evening bouncing between a handful of new and older shows I'd never seen before, all of which happened to be on basic cable during the same three-hour period: on Discovery ( Rusted Development), Animal Planet ( North Woods Law: New Hampshire), TLC ( Long Island Medium), Travel ( Big Time RV), and HGTV ( Caribbean Life). My goal was to get a better sense of what the baseline is today for the reality genre.

If nothing else, it's always remarkable how tightly constructed so many of these series are. They're designed to keep people watching through the commercial breaks - and then into the next episode, since so many channels schedule reality programs in blocks of repeats. Big Time RV (a kind of Tiny House Hunters for mobile homes) cuts to commercials after potential RV-buyers see something amazing that the audience isn't privy to yet. The other shows above do something similar, teasing a drama or conflict in such vague but compelling ways that it's hard not to keep watching to see what's next.

Even at their lamest, all five of these have some value, whether it's the opportunity to empathize with real people's pain and loss on Long Island Medium, or learning how to chase away a bear on North Woods Law, or gawking at beachfront property in Caribbean Life.

But with the exception of North Woods Law (which is mostly in the "keep taping until something happens" mode, like its obvious inspiration, COPS), all of these shows feature multiple instances of manipulation. Sometimes the fakery is fairly benign, such as when the customers on Big Time RV and Caribbean Life weigh their purchasing decisions in ways that sound very stilted and prepared. Other moments are more egregious. The A-story in the Long Island Medium I watched has the title character officiating at a client's wedding, which is framed as something that just happened as the show was shooting, and not something that was cooked up behind the scenes. Rusted Development is even stranger, following two auto-restorers (one an ex-wrestler) who try to help out car-hoarders, but keep facing difficulties that feel either purposefully plotted-out or re-staged for the cameras.

I don't want to overstate the dangers of this trend, or even to suggest that the popularity of faux-reality has led to America's current made-for-TV presidency. That's too much of a burden to place on mere entertainment. Still, I do wonder when and why we decided as a culture that we'd rather see real people on television instead of actors - but only provided that everything they do and say has been scripted. Why are we afraid to let reality be reality?

Lately I find myself thinking a lot about the documentary Finders Keepers, which I saw at True/False in 2015 (and which is currently available to stream on Netflix). The film is about two men: John Wood, a drug addict who lost his leg in an airplane crash, and Shannon Whisnant, who found the mummified remains of that appendage in an old barbecue grill. Whisnant tried to capitalize on a brief moment of local celebrity, angling to exploit his discovery to get on TV whenever possible. He died of a heart attack late last year, but in the movie his end is more ironic than tragic: He appears on a Storage Wars-like auction program, and is dismayed to find that the producers have only brought him on to make fun of him. They've paid him to pretend to be someone he's not, rather than showcasing off his actual personality and humor.

I'm by no means opposed to reality shows. I watch several regularly, and while I prefer the ones that seem more "fair" about what's true and what's not (such as Top Chef, Alone, Survivor, and Project Runway), I have no illusions that any of these are documentaries, per se. Nevertheless, regardless of whether a series is well-made or embarrassingly cheesy, these days I find myself thinking more and more about Shannon Whisnant. I remember how his face fell when he realized that the attention he craved was only going to happen if he allowed himself to be misrepresented. His story obliges me to look more closely whenever "real" people let me into their world... or into whatever TV writers have decided that world should be.

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How reality TV is getting even more unreal

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This past weekend marked one of the world's most prestigious documentary film festivals, True/False. For four days, attendees in Columbia, Missouri, were pushed by experimental documentaries like Rat Film, Strong Island, Safari, and Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun?

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HOUSTON - Britt Daniel, the lead singer of the venerable indie band Spoon, has started noticing something unusual on the streets of New York City, where he's been spending time with his girlfriend, thousands of miles away from his native Texas: stickers and T-shirts for Beto O'Rourke.

"Maybe there are some Texans up here," Daniel said in an interview. "But it does seem like even non-Texans have taken a lot of interest in this race. Maybe they just see him as someone who has a future for the party, a future in politics, or maybe they're just genuinely inspired by him."

"It is a phenomenon," added Daniel, who has performed at several events for O'Rourke, who is challenging Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Betomania is sweeping the nation - or at least its more liberal enclaves - leading fans to ascribe over-sized ambitions to the underdog Texas congressman, even though polls and prognosticators suggest he may be just weeks away from losing to a man who has made plenty of enemies in both parties.

"BETO FOR PRESIDENT," the comedian Billy Eichner ‏tweeted to his more than 2 million followers, and he's hardly alone.

O'Rourke, a former punk rocker with a message like Obama's and a face like a Kennedy, has seen his star rise so steeply that, for now, he seems to have reached escape velocity from mere politics. For a moment, at least, he's become a cultural phenomenon on the lips and in the hearts of Democrats around the country in a way few outside of Obama and Bernie Sanders have recently achieved before him.

"It's like when the Beatles came to America," Bill Maher said when O'Rourke stepped onto the set of Maher's HBO talk show to thunderous applause.

But if O'Rouke loses, and especially if the margin ends up wider than expected, his star could come hurtling back toward earth, potentially crushing fans' hope for a 2020 bid and exposing him to criticism for spending so much money in a race that was always a long shot.

Jim Messina, who ran Obama's re-election campaign, said O'Rourke has a rare combination of "inspiration, aspiration and authenticity" that moves people as he skateboards his way across Texas.

"People are motivated by him as a political leader and a human being," Messina said in an email. "He is authentic, and luckily, authentically cool. For him to play air drums to the Who or skateboard is both authentic and cool. People want to hang out with him."

O'Rourke yard signs have been spotted in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia, and he just announced that he raised more money ($38 million) than any Senate candidate in history for a single quarter.

Danny Deraney, a Hollywood publicist who has worked with celebrities like Justin Timberlake and Madonna, said he hasn't seen Los Angeles this excited about a national politician in years.

"Barack Obama kind of swept everybody off their feet, and I think Beto has done that here, too," he said. "Here in a city that is pretty left-leaning, they see someone who is hopeful for this party, that is not the same old, same old. I think people see him as someone who is refreshing."

Celebrities and sports stars from LeBron James to Ellen DeGeneres to Tony Dungy to Stephen King have expressed their Beto-love. Steve Kerr, the coach of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors, wants him to run for president. And New York City donors were willing to shell out at least $250 each for a recent O'Rourke fundraiser - even though the candidate only appeared via Skype.

A viral video of O'Rourke defending NFL players' right to kneel during the national anthem garnered more than 67 million views, according to Nico Pitney, the political director of NowThis, which produced it. "(It) was one of our most successful videos this year and the most successful midterms-related video," he said.

O'Rourke, who is giving up his El Paso-area House seat to run, has pledged he will serve his entire six-year term if elected, but so did Obama when he was in the Senate. And when CNN included O'Rourke in a 2020 poll this week, they found him tied with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"Authenticity is intoxicating, and now more than ever," said Jesse Lehrich, a veteran of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Besides, how many other candidates could get Willie Nelson to write a song for them and then get to perform it live, playing guitar with the country legend for 50,000 people? Who else inspires Richard Linklater, the famed Austin-based filmmaker, to make commercials for a super PAC supporting their campaign?

And what other politician has ever produced an entire music festival with hipster bands like Spoon and the Polyphonic Spree, where some attendees don't bother sticking around after the candidate speaks, even though the headliner has yet to perform? "Spoon might have sold out many shows across the country, but for one night, Beto O'Rourke was the rock star the crowd came to see," The Dallas Observer wrote.

None of this is remotely common for a Senate campaign.

To find a comparison, some analysts have reached all the way back to Robert F. Kennedy, who drew huge crowds when he ran for Senate in New York in 1964 and then quickly turned around to run for president before being assassinated.

Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., stumped for O'Rourke in McAllen on Saturday and recalled appearing in the same venue with his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, during a swing for Obama in 2008. "This hall was not as full as it is this morning," Kennedy said, according to The Dallas Morning News.

O'Rourke's weekday rallies attract hundreds. In Houston, he packed a gym at Lone Star College in the morning, spoke to at least 1,000 in Cypress in the afternoon, then addressed many more at a large outdoor concert-rally with rappers Bun B and and Willie D.

Ariana Gordon, a high school senior, told NBC News it was "mind blowing" for her to finally get to see O'Rourke in person after watching videos of him online. Other young people said they might not vote this year were it not for O'Rourke.

Meanwhile, O'Rourke has become something of a heartthrob for the "resistance" set.

"Why does he look so perfect doing even the most simple things?" the women's magazine Elle gushed about a video of O'Rourke petting a chubby bunny. "Beto's like your energetic, young math teacher who got you very hot and bothered about fractions."

The third-term congressman has also managed to avoid taking collateral damage from the Democratic civil war that erupted out of the Sanders-Clinton presidential primary.

O'Rourke aligns with the progressive wing of the party on most policy issues and has the full endorsement of Sanders-allied groups, but he's also a member of moderate New Democrat Caucus in Congress.

"We are big Beto fans," said Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. "He's not with us on every single thing, but his main campaign themes have been very close to what we think a national narrative should be. And the happy warrior approach is just right for running against a horrible person like Cruz or Trump."

O'Rourke was born and raised in El Paso, a border town where he acquired his Hispanic nickname, even though he is of Irish descent. Boyish looking at 46, he has three kids whom he often name-checks in public, along with his wife, Amy, who worked with him at a technology company until they sold it last year. Elected in 2012, he and his past - which includes a DUI arrest - went largely unnoticed until he decided to run for Senate last year.

Unsurprisingly, all the attention has provoked a bit of backlash.

Some Democrats have complained publicly that the $38 million O'Rourke raised last quarter could be better spent in more competitive races that happened to feature less dynamic candidates, though he has resisted calls to share the bounty.

Media critic Jack Shafer, meanwhile, has called for a moratorium on new O'Rourke profiles, writing in Politico that he hasn't seen anything like Betomania "since the press corps fell in love with Barack Obama."

And Cruz has insisted O'Rourke is merely using the Senate race as a stepping stone (even though the Republican senator himself ran for president before his first term was over). "He's pursuing the national Democratic activists in Iowa, New Hampshire - not El Paso," Cruz told reporters last week.

"Beto is the new RFK. He's a natural. You can't train that, you can't focus group it, it either is or it isn't. He's more of a natural than Barack Obama was," said Claude Taylor, a Democratic strategist who founded the Mad Dog PAC.

"But he has to win in Texas," Taylor added. "If he wins in Texas, he'll be the Democratic nominee in 2020."

And if not?

"If he doesn't win in Texas and doesn't become president," Taylor continued, "he'll become No. 2 on the greatest Democratic presidents we never had, after RFK."

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Betomania: Why Democrats are crazy for their 'authentically cool' Senate candidate

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HOUSTON - Britt Daniel, the lead singer of the venerable indie band Spoon, has started noticing something unusual on the streets of New York City, where he's been spending time with his girlfriend, thousands of miles away from his native Texas: stickers and T-shirts for Beto O'Rourke.

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why trump's secret weapon works so well (opinion) - cnn

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Trump has perfected the art of unabashed, unapologetic and unrepentant conviction, Juliana Silva and Bill McGowan write. Researchers have argued that people are willing to look the other way on truthfulness so long as that candidate appears to authentically channel their grievances against the establishment.

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Maxine Bédat, left, and Soraya Darabi, co-founders of the online retailer Zady, at their holiday pop-up shop in SoHo. Credit Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Richard Littlewood, the president of G.J. Littlewood & Son, a fiber dye house in Philadelphia, recently welcomed a client, Soraya Darabi, to his plant.

Littlewood colorizes wool and synthetic fibers for products ranging from pea coats for the Navy to N.B.A. mascots, from high-fashion pieces to home-crafting supplies. Mr. Littlewood develops colors and then dyes them onto fibers in the company's brick-walled plant, which is dominated by giant dye kettles, dryers and bale pressers.

Mr. Littlewood's great-great-grandfather opened for business in this same factory in 1869. "This is a piece of United States history," Mr. Littlewood says, "and it's still in motion, and it's still supplying things, so we're proud to be here."

That kind of provenance matters to Ms. Darabi, a co-founder of the online retailer Zady with her friend Maxine Bédat. Zady, based in New York, sells clothing, household items, jewelry and office supplies from companies that the founders have researched for ethical practices and whose stories they share on the site.

The two women this year created their own clothing label, starting with a wool knit sweater, and they chose Littlewood to dye the fiber. Ms. Darabi was visiting Philadelphia to learn more about the manufacturer's story.

"We are making it entirely in the U.S.," Ms. Bédat says of the sweater. "And by make we mean source and make, from the sheep farm in Oregon to the wash house, dye house, processing and knitting. Along the way we've met some amazing characters. They really tell the story of the history of the country."

Stories are important to Zady's owners. Knowing where their products come from allows them to keep tabs on the way many of their products are made. The narratives also connect consumers to other people and places, adding a personal and experiential component to a tangible good and giving it an aura of authenticity.

For example, Zady sells leashes and collars from Found My Animal, started by a pair of friends who met while walking their rescue Chihuahuas. The products feature "New England marine-grade nautical rope and waxed thread, giving the collars and leashes an authentic look and sturdy design," according to the Zady website.

Authenticity is a fuzzy concept, but Julie Napoli, a marketing professor at Curtin University, and colleagues recently reported in The Journal of Business Research that consumers see three dimensions to brand authenticity: heritage, sincerity and commitment to quality.

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A sampling of the products sold by Zady, including a backpack "from a century-old textile factory in Maryland" whose slanted zipper represents " 'summiting' your goals and aspirations," according to the website. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Ms. Bédat says people love being a part of an authentic brand because they aren't just buying into a logo - but also "buying into a set of values."

Tito's Handmade Vodka, of Austin, Tex., is another company that emphasizes authenticity in its marketing. Its website tells the life story of Tito Beveridge, the founder, highlighting his commitment to quality while also pushing the heritage angle: The vodka is "made in small batches in an old-fashioned pot still," using a "time-honored method." The approach seems to be working: Last year, the company sold 1.3 million cases of vodka, compared with 365,000 in 2010.

Heritage comes through loud and clear when a company puts down roots and stays there. George E. Newman and Ravi Dhar, professors at the Yale School of Management, reported this year in the Journal of Marketing Research that consumers especially valued products that came from a company's original factory.

In one study, subjects who read about a pair of jeans made in the Levi Strauss plant built in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake rated it as containing more of the "true essence" of the brand, compared with people who read about Levi jeans from a newer factory. The first group also rated the pants as more "authentic" and were more willing to pay a premium for them.

Another experiment found that original factories also increased the perceived authenticity and value of chocolates and handbags - and that the effect was stronger after subjects read about the spread of laughter or poison ivy, subtly enhancing thoughts of contagion, according to the authors. The Yale authors quote marketing language from several companies that play up a sense of tradition:

■ From Hershey's: "Hershey, Pa. is where it all started more than 100 years ago, and it's still where the famous Hershey's Kisses are made."

■ From Fuller's Brewery: "Our brewery's stood in London, beside the Thames, since 1845."

■ From New Balance, referring to its factory in Norridgewock, Me.: "Built in 1945, the Depot Street building is the workplace of almost 400 associates. Each pair of shoes they produce is a proud work of craftsmanship that carries a little bit of the long history that is the town and its people."

The French researchers Delphine Dion and Stéphane Borraz have reported in The Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services that luxury brand managers use myths and rituals to cast historical shops as sacred, which then lends authenticity to the merchandise and the brand. Talking to the researchers about Christian Dior's first outlet, on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris, one manager said, "It's a mythical place." He added: "These stores keep the traces of something that has gone."

Several studies have shown that authenticity - real or perceived - can affect the bottom line. Brian Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell University, found that when menu items had geographical or nostalgic labels ("traditional Cajun" red beans with rice, "Grandma's" zucchini cookies), diners bought them more often and said they tasted better.

A cynic might ask whether Zady itself really needs to tell the brand story of something as ordinary as paper clips. "But these are amazing paper clips!" Ms. Bédat protests. Her site explains that the maker of the paper clips, the Mondial Lus company, has been making office supplies in Saronno, Italy, since 1931, using "time-honored production methods."

You could argue that these stories are a reaction against goods delivered by container from China, to be bought at Walmart. James H. Gilmore, a marketing consultant and a co-author of the book " Authenticity," said in an interview that consumers felt a desire for the real "in an increasingly staged, contrived, mediated world."

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Zady, based in New York, sells clothing, household items, jewelry and office supplies from companies that the founders have researched for ethical practices and whose stories they share on the site. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

But of course, companies have been known to slap the words "artisanal," "traditional" and "authentic" on their products without an accompanying story to back up their words.

And then there's J. Crew, which secured the name and logo of the American workwear company Madewell and began manufacturing much of the clothing overseas after Madewell became a subsidiary less than a decade ago. Dan Nosowitz, whose great-grandfather started Madewell in 1937, recently wrote in an essay for BuzzFeed, "How many corporations are out there rifling through the defunct brands of America's past like a bin of used records, looking for something, anything, that will give them that soft Edison-bulb glow of authenticity?"

In defense of the new Madewell, its head of design did tell Mr. Nosowitz that the brand's quality was a reflection of its heritage. "We know this name is a great name and we know this brand is a great brand," Mr. Nosowitz quoted him as saying.

Another factor that could be affecting consumers' authenticity-seeking is what Ms. Bédat calls Globalization 2.0, a new awareness of the ethical and environmental costs of consumerism, enabled by technology.

Ms. Bédat and Ms. Darabi look to Patagonia, the outdoor clothing store, for inspiration. Seven years ago, that company started the Footprint Chronicles on its website, documenting its supply chain with videos, articles and an interactive map showing the farms, factories and textile mills it works with.

Jill Dumain, Patagonia's director of environmental strategy, says that the company's transparency has led to some criticisms - that it should be using more recycled polyester, for example -but says that it has also forged loyalty among its customers. When Patagonia started the Chronicles, she says, "The reaction I feel like I heard the most was, 'I trust what you tell me on the good, because you're willing to tell me about the bad.' "

Ms. Dumain says people are now better informed about their purchases. "We get better questions from customers," she says. "We get deeper questions."

Or as Ms. Darabi of Zady said: "We're at a precipice in what people are about to begin questioning, and our brand is there to give them some answers."

Although Zady did not provide specific revenue figures, its staff has expanded from an initial team of six people in August 2013 to a total of 20 employees now. The first run of its sweater, a batch of 300, sold out in 24 hours, according to the company.

This holiday season, Zady is operating two pop-up shops in New York City, one in SoHo and one at Kennedy International Airport. Staff members at the stores are encouraged to engage customers in conversations about the brands.

"It's storytelling," Ms. Bédat says. "It's people getting to feel that connection and wanting to be part of it."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU6 of the New York edition with the headline: Quenching Consumers' Thirst for 'Authentic' Brands. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Quenching Consumers' Thirst for 'Authentic' Brands

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Richard Littlewood, the president of G.J. Littlewood & Son, a fiber dye house in Philadelphia, recently welcomed a client, Soraya Darabi, to his plant. Littlewood colorizes wool and synthetic fibers for products ranging from pea coats for the Navy to N.B.A. mascots, from high-fashion pieces to home-crafting supplies.

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Taco Bell Instagram Boyfriend commercial