What Is Darkpsychology.co ?

It is usual for study abroad programs to spam the comments section on this site. I usually respond to them by writing on their Facebook page and telling them that if they want to advertise on my site, they can buy ad space like everyone else. Earlier this week I offhandedly mentioned that I thought the website Darkpsychology.co was a spam blog. The next morning I received these two comments on the post:

Dear AAA,
Good Morning AAA, My name is Dr. Michael Nuccitelli and I'm a NYS psychologist and forensic consultant. I have my Google Alerts set up to send me posts and information on "Dark Psychology" and received your post this morning titled "Dark Psychology." I notice you write asking for the definition of Dark Psychology. Having an interest in Theoretical Criminology and a forensic psychologist, I've attached my link to academia.edu that I've posted my theory on all criminal and deviant behavior I've termed Dark Psychology. I hope this provides you the definition. http://psychology.about.com/library/bl_psychosocial_summary.htm Thank you, Dr. Michael Nuccitelli, drnucc@hotmail.com

Dear AAA, Good Morning and my name is Dr. Michael Nuccitelli and I'm a NYS psychologist and forensic consultant. I have my Google Alerts set up to send me posts on "Dark Psychology" and I received you post this morning. I notice in your post you ask what the definition of Dark Psychology is. As a theoretical criminologist, this year I finalized my construct on all criminal and deviant I've termed Dark Psychology. Provided is my link to my theory of Dark Psychology I've posted at academia.edu. Good Luck and Thank you. Respectfully, Dr. Michael Nuccitelli, drnucc@hotmail.com Dark Psychology Academia.Edu Link: http://independent.academia.edu/DrMichaelNuccitelli/Papers/1233777/Dark_Psychology

A website I accused of being a spam blog spammed the article I wrote about them being a spam blog. Sometimes life will write the jokes for you. The first time I heard the term Dark Psychology was through a Lavender Hour podcast, apparently this guy has crated his own definition and is trying to create a business model out of it. I read through the academia.edu article, and then googled "Dr. Michael Nuccitelli". He also runs iPredator Inc, a company that shares a name with The Pirate Bay's VPN service:

Apparently the term "troll" was not sensational enough as "iPredator" is.

When I was a kid I remember "Internet police" web pages on sites like Geocities and Expage. Their whole premise was that if you put their "protected by the cyber police" banner, disclaimer, or whatever on your site, they would protect you from somebody copying your site, or god knows what else. How is this any different?

I found a late night radio show where Michael Nuccitelli as a guest. Right at the beginning the radio host mispronounces diploma as "diplomat", at forty minutes he says "computer swaby". At 56 minutes Nuccitelli says that if we don't create "methodologies" then cyber terrorism will create something "fifty times worse than 9/11". At 64 minutes a listener starts reading from The Talmud of Jmmanuel. Honestly, this show is like public access Coast to Coast AM for rednecks.

Anything Michael Nuccitelli talks about in his Theory of Dark Psychology article, or on that radio show, you can learn in Psychology 100 class. As far as I can tell, he is trying to monger fear into getting people to purchase his useless product. What is the service he is providing? Protection from cyber bullies? A defence against cyber attacks? What is that supposed to mean?! Snake oil? I'm not even sure. I tried to access their ipredator site, but the domain is currently up for sale.

So what is What Is Darkpsychology.co? I stand corrected, I have no fucking idea.

Propaganda

Not many of the articles on this site pertain to the site description under the title: "A site concerning language learning and the influence of language on non-linguistic behavior." I leave it there because... well what else would I put?

I figure that this article on American Propaganda by Noam Chomsky belongs here because it has a lot to do with that title description, sans learning:

"The Vietnam War is a classic example of America's propaganda system. In the mainstream media--the New York Times, CBS, and so on-- there was a lively debate about the war. It was between people called "doves" and people called "hawks." The hawks said, "If we keep at it we can win." The doves said, "Even if we keep at it, it would probably be too costly for use, and besides, maybe we're killing too many people." Both sides agreed on one thing. We had a right to carry out aggression against South Vietnam. Doves and hawks alike refused to admit that aggression was taking place..."

"During the Vietnam War, the U.S. propaganda system did its job partially but not entirely. Among educated people it worked very well. Studies show that among the more educated parts of the population, the government's propaganda about the war is now accepted unquestioningly. One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system--and they believe what the system expects them to believe..."

"Dark Psychology"

As far as I can tell there is no definition for the term "dark psychology". If I had to guess, I would say that it is something along the lines of; "the influence on people to do things they normally would not do in the first place through exploitation of irrational and unconscious fears". Does anyone else think this is also a fitting description for advertising? (Recently a new website popped up called "darkpsychology.co", but as far as I can tell it is a spam blog. How appropriate.) Quebec's ban on Fast-food advertising reduced fast-food expenditures by 13 percent per week in French-speaking households. Even the price of a product may affect your perceived quality of it.

Woman in particular have been assaulted with ads, informing them of problems they did not know they had until the they were told so:

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.
Link.

Another example: vaginal cleansing advertisements. I am certain your vagina is not supposed to smell like a fresh meadow.

There is a BBC documentary called The Century of The Self which touches upon all of this. It is about Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's American nephew that; helped tie smoking to the woman's rights movement, increased Betty Croker sales by adding an egg to their instant mix, worked for Woodrow Wilson, and established the idea that people needed objects to express their inner self to others. Simply put, he was able to influence large amounts of people through linking products with the unconscious fears of people.
This is the exploitative foundation that modern advertising has been built on top of.

Muzzy

Watching TV as a child in the U.S. , you were guaranteed to see this ad five thousand times in a row:

"Yes that's French these children are speaking, and no these children are not French, they're American." To this day I have no idea what that little girl is saying in French; but a part of me still hopes she is either wrong, or saying something really offensive in nature.


The commercials is right when it says that these cartoons were made by the BBC, but incidentally they were made to teach ESL (English as a second language) and then later the rights were bought by Early Advantage, the company you are sending your money to in the commercial. Incidentally they are still hawking the product  and it looks like they also market it to librarians. If you interested, you might be able to get some of these programs from you local library.  

I never knew anyone who had Muzzy. The product was marketed to a niche group of parents; those that wanted their children to learn another language, but were gullible enough to pay six easy payments of $28.08. Today the DVD sets will still cost you around one hundred dollars on Amazon, but you can get the VHS sets for around 20 bucks. Unfortunately it looks like you will have to pay over one hundred dollars for the German VHS set. There are torrents available online,  but it seems that some might be missing parts: certain videos, or workbooks. Still, thanks to the resources of the Internet, we can watch Muzzy right now!

From the commercials my impression always was that the cartoon was like Sesame Street, simply in another language. There actually seems to be a story line thought, with a royal family who has a princess. There is a guy who is in love with her, but there is also an evil green guy who is in love with her too. Muzzy is an alien that orbits around their little kingdom in his spaceship and hangs out with the other characters to practice their nouns, which is a pretty cool thing for a space alien to do. I can only imagine the role he plays later on.

I am interested to know if there in anyone who watched this as a child? How often did you watch it, did you like it or did your parents make you watch it? Was it helpful or educational to you in any way?

Advertisements

We have all seen TV advertisements that make us go "huh"? The end result of an ad is to get you to buy something and in order to do that, they (the advertisers) are supposed to get us (the audience) to notice the commercials. In the past few years more and more commercials have been getting absurd. Perhaps you have noticed?

It might also serve to explain why these commercials have been so successful for Old Spice:

Of course there is a reason for this, and that is humans pay attention to things that are odd and do not match up with our framework of what it normal or expected. This develops when children learn object permanence - that is that awareness that objects continue to exists when not perceived.. At the age of eight months, infants are able to utilize this skill. This is something that is usually covered in early psychology classes.

Kicking ass at cognitive tasks!

In the study an infant is placed in front of an object, perhaps a couch. A small toy then disappears behind the couch. A child who does not have object permanence will not look for it. This can also be done with a screen. A child who has object permanence will stare at an object or toy that disappears behind a screen, children without this ability will not. You can get the same result by changing the number of toys or objects as well. The fact the the children stare mean that they are paying attention and thinking. It is the same effect as when people are shown a magic trick for example.

What does this mean about advertising? I would suggest that advertisers are trying to get us to look at their ads, holding our attention by altering permanence of objects, and breaking the rules and schemas we have developed about the world around us by showing us pigs in cars with pinwheels and things turning suddenly into diamonds.

Now you're playing with power!
(image from UGR)

One way to study this would be through an ERP (event related potential) experiment. Basically you cap somebody with a bunch of little electrodes. Then you present the subject with some stimuli, in this case perhaps one of the commercials from above. A computer hooked up to your ERP machine then measures electrical signals being set off by the subject's brain due to neurons firing. If you're lucky you will get some sort of significant waveform.

There have already been other waveforms linked with attention and there are many others. It would be a cool study to try out, if it has not already been done. I personally, would guess that people are going to look at these ads longer. The only problem is that you would need some sort of appropriate control stimuli. Maybe the control could be averaged waveforms of "unabsurd" commercials which would be matched against the averaged waveforms of the "absurd" commercials.

Nonetheless the point I am getting at is that advertisers want you to go "what the hell was that all about?" when you watch their commercials. By doing so they make you pay attention to their ad, and therefore more likely to get you to start thinking and talking about their products.