[wutbrodo]

Honest question: have you considered that some people are less susceptible to advertising? I used to think comments like yours were just absurd hyperbole, until I noticed them popping up enough that I considered the possibility that some people really do consider themselves utterly helpless in the face of advertising, and perhaps accurately so.

This isn't really an attack on your comment specifically; I just wonder to what extent this differential response drives much of the disagreement I've seen on the topic.

(you could perhaps say the same thing about the legalization of certain drugs).

[bun_at_work]

Not OP, but the truth is that everyone is highly susceptible to advertising and other methods of mental priming. It is probably true that people are susceptible at different levels, though. However, the brain and our environment interact in highly complex ways that affect our behavior a great deal, and this is what advertising is designed to target. That's why a predominant advertising strategy is to equate the product being advertised with social status, something humans have evolved to be very sensitive to (and other social organisms too).

If you're interested in this stuff, I'd recommend the following books:

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

and

Media Literacy by W. James Potter

[Pharmakon]

People like that are the intellectual equivalent of people who think they can win at three-cars monte; a gift to crooks and a bane to the rest of us. The old saw about looking around the table for the sucker, not finding one, and realizing that you’re the sucker applies. We’re all the same species of primate, and only accepting that along with associated weaknesses puts us in a position to maybe overcome them to a degree.

[wutbrodo]

So I guess the answer is no, you haven't considered it.

My purchase decisions are and always have been pretty simple and articulable: for small-ticket items (eg bath soap), I buy the cheapest thing that I haven't already tried and found under par. For big-ticket items whose value affects my utility significantly (eg smartphones), I spend time doing research and if necessary asking friends who have experience with the products.

I'm not confidently asserting that it doesn't _feel_ like ads don't affect my purchase decision; I'm saying that I don't see anywhere for their first-order effects to affect my purchase process[1].

I'm very aware of the risk of overconfidence here, but this is something I've noticed and wondered about for years. I was pretty unsure of it given the strong prior everyone else seemed to have that ads are all-powerful brainwashing devices. But for years, whenever I have brought it up to people convinced of the ultimate power of ads, I've never gotten anything but lazy dismissals like yours that it's simply hopeless and you're at the mercy of any ad you see.

The two possibilities here are 1) I'm being overconfident and 2) you're not just generalizing your weakness to ads, but universalizing it and unable to admit the possibility of someone who's not as affected. Given everything the above, over all the times I've asked this question over the years, I'm a lot more confident in 2 than I am in 1.

[1] Second-order effects of course exist: the brands stocked by my local Walgreens and those that have visibility in review roundups will of course be skewed somewhat by advertising budgets. This seems inevitable though, and is a substantially different topic than the GP's mention of cognitive sovereignty.

[Pharmakon]

So I guess the answer is no, you haven't considered it.

That definitely isn’t what I said or meant, and it makes it hard to talk to someone who insists on responding to what they’d rather I’d have said in place of what I did say. The only thing I’d add to what I did say, is what darkpuma said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324558

Furthermore, people who believe themselves immune to being duped are less likely to admit when they've been duped, because for them to admit they were duped means they must first overcome their ego and admit to themselves they can be duped. For this reason and others, con artists love people who think no con artist could ever trick them.

[nacho2sweet]

There is a difference in advertising when it is like some "BUY THIS TSHIRT" sidebar thing and the more pernicious "promoted" story that shows up in your feed you are consuming all times a day.

Also listed in this article is an app called Muslim-Pro which apparently helps with prayer times etc. As someone who is not American, I wouldn't trust this as much as everyone is freaking about Huawei being part of 5G.

[ruricolist]

Just because all the other reactions are so hostile: even granted that some people are less susceptible to advertising, our susceptibility will vary. There will be times when we are tired, preoccupied, upset, distracted. Advertisers can afford to blanket us with advertisements, to lie in wait for our moments of weakness.

[darkpuma]

People who have the hubris to think themselves immune to advertising and other underhanded methods of persuasion are in fact the most vulnerable.

[Macross8299]

To add my own take on this, I think the reason that people who consider themselves "immune to advertising" are the most vulnerable is because they suffer from some sort of cognitive bias where they neatly classify things into "ads" and "non-ads" and never think to question if an instance of the latter is actually the former.

They see the "HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead" low-rent ads and glossy big budget car commercials that associate a sports car with sex appeal or freedom or whatever and think "that's stupid, who would ever be so gullible as to fall for that?" while classifying more insidious things like undisclosed paid reviewers or a subtle product placement as non-ads or even more dangerously, as genuinely informative material. They see effective ads as something else entirely and are thus less likely to resist!

[darkpuma]

Furthermore, people who believe themselves immune to being duped are less likely to admit when they've been duped, because for them to admit they were duped means they must first overcome their ego and admit to themselves they can be duped. For this reason and others, con artists love people who think no con artist could ever trick them.

Another example: somebody who believes themselves immune to advertisement may casually allow themselves to consume an advertisement (for instance, by failing to use an adblocker.) They may later be in the market for a product in some category for which they saw advertisements, look up facts about various competing products, and make their decision in a way they believe to be a rational appraisal of the product facts, missing the very real possibility that were it not for the ads they casually consumed, they wouldn't be in the market for this sort of product in the first place.

Somebody who is aware of their own weaknesses is more likely to exercise caution than somebody who believes themselves invincible.

[wutbrodo]

This is a perfect example of the hysterical, emotional responses I always see around this topic, where people turn off their reading comprehension and critical thinking skills and turn into shitty pattern-matching buzzword machines. Nobody in this thread said anything about immunity; there's no reason to assume that the hypothetical person I'm talking about has lower susceptibility precisely _because_ he's aware of the effects of advertising and takes steps to control their effects on his purchase decisions.

[darkpuma]

If you've not taken steps to limit your exposure, then you're too naive to honestly claim you have lower susceptibility. Ad avoidance is the most effective method of ad resistance.

[z3t4]

Think of your last (purchase) decision. How much research did you do ? And are you an expert in the field? How did you learn about it ? Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?

[wutbrodo]

I hesitate to post any thoughts on HN that don't toe the party line, since these days the modal commenter seems to be little more than a pattern-matching and buzzword machine, particularly for topics for which the community has a collectively strong opinion. Commenters like you with some level of reading comprehension and cognitive skills are the reason I still hang around, so thanks for the response!

Your point is well-taken, and I'm definitely aware that ads' effects are a lot more insidious than seeing an ad and consciously deciding to go buy the product. Like many new grad Googlers, I started my career paying my dues for a couple years as an ads engineer and have had plenty of time to think about and hear a hundred different perspectives on advertising's utility and dangers. So rest assured, this isn't based on low-effort theorizing like "I don't _feel_ like ads affect my purchases". My purchases take one of two forms: small-ticket items (eg bath soap) where I buy the cheapest one that meets my constraints, and big-ticket items where it's worth spending at least a couple/few hours researching the options. I just don't see how first-order effects of advertising would creep into this process[1], beyond hand-wavy, unfalsifiable effects on the ultimate purchase decision (subjectively, I don't notice this either: I end up with the low-brand-recognition contrarian choice as often as I do the front-running brand).

Given the strong belief most people have in advertising's irresistibility, I started out with the hypothesis that ads may negligibly affect my purchases as very low-confidence, given the strong priors from others' beliefs. Over the last decade or so, I've 1) periodically (non-rigorously) thought about random purchases I've made and whether ads may have had any effect, and 2) brought this up to people who seem confident that ads are irresistible (both online and in-person), in the hopes that I'd get a good counterargument. The quality of response has been about the same as the dumpster fire the rest of this thread is: not only do people fail to offer any defense of the contrary view, they're emotionally incontinent about someone having the audacity to wonder whether ads don't wield ultimate power over every person. I still don't consider any hypothesis high-confidence until I've heard a high-quality defense of the counterargument, but the fact that I've tried a couple dozen times over the years and gotten only hysterical emotional responses obviously increases my confidence in my hypothesis over time.

Anyway, thanks for reading all that, assuming you got this far. In your opinion, what could I be missing? People with the consistent purchase process explained above seem like the violation of their "cognitive sovereignty" would, at worst, be negligible enough that the phrase would apply to any of a million uncontroversially benign things about society.

EDIT: I forgot to address this in my already too-long comment: "being an expert" on the products in question seems like a non sequitur, since in a world with zero advertising, the information gap would still exist. The salient question is whether ads _fill_ that gap at all, and it seems to me that they don't in this case. Also, inre "Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?": yes, generally, excluding small-ticket items where pricing drives my purchase decision.

[1] The second-order effect of advertising coloring what's stocked at Walgreens and the discoverability and reviews of a product is unavoidable, but that's an information discoverability problem, not a "cognitive sovereignty" one, and as such is a substantially different topic from the one the GP comment brought up.

[z3t4]

My product example was not very good. I'll try another angle. We humans are very biased towards what we know. Even professionals can fall for it, for example judges reading about a crime in the newspaper before the hearing.

[sixothree]

Who are these people you speak of? I don't think they exist.

[asdffdsa]

Its not just advertising, its curating your impression of the digital world

[rootusrootus]

Do you recall the discussion last week about Facebook moderators turning from rational people into conspiracy theorists because they are exposed to that crap all day every day?

I would suspect that it is the folks who think they are less susceptible who are most at risk. In a way it makes me think of the misunderstanding around Dunning-Kruger (i.e. it's not an observation about dumb people, it is a warning to people who think they are smart).

[takeda]

A lot of people think they are not susceptible, then close their MacBook, put on their Beats connected to their iPhone put on their Nike shoes go to nearby grocery store and buy a Coca Cola and pay with their Apple Watch.

Yes you might not use any of these products, but highly likely majority that you do is branded. Also you are more susceptible to purchase certain brans that others, that's why advertisers want to target items that you are more likely to purchase.

This is not necessarily bad, but we learned recently that this mechanism was weaponized and things like Brexit and 2016 election is prime example how dangerous this is.