They asked subjects a series of questions about controversial moral issues, such as the death penalty and abortion, and also asked them about beliefs on those issues of famous people and of God. Not surprisingly, subjects’ own beliefs mirrored the beliefs they attributed to God.

These two lines of evidence both suggest that people tend to project onto God their own moral beliefs. This … does imply that people can change their moral beliefs first, and then attribute those changing beliefs to God after the fact.

Stepping back, the study draws the following conclusion, which I fully agree with:

This is why questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief.

The full article is located here.

Edward Louis Bernays was a US pioneer in the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious.

Basically he realized that in order to control the masses, you need to connect to their irrational being, not their rational or logical side. He also changed Western society from a needs-based society to a want-based one. Being a dabbler of psychology, I thought that’s pretty damn cool.

Checkout this introductory clip: