The Happiness Industry Read Online Free PDF

purity. He is also credited with identifying celebrity endorsements as an effective route to achieving consumer attachments to brands.
    These were exactly the sort of messages and methods that Resor was hoping to receive. In 1924, Watson was made a vice president of JWT. Looking down on Lexington Avenue, from his office high up in JWT’s headquarters near Grand Central Station, he had far outstripped the fame and fortune of any psychologist who had remained in the academy.
    But Watson’s hubris was problematic. Business had bought into the notion that psychology could reveal everything that managers needed to know in order to sell their products effectively. Watson was content to stoke up this optimism further. ‘Love, fear, and rage are the same in Italy, Abyssinia and Canada,’ he bragged. He was confident that he knew how to trigger any emotion in any situation, purely through designing the ‘stimulus’ in the right way. From the perspective of the advertiser and the marketer, this was a hugely seductive way of understanding their task. But it was all one-way traffic: psychological stimuli would be chucked at the public, and they would respond accordingly in the supermarket aisles. What if they didn’t? What if Watson’s own understanding of ‘love, fear and rage’ wasn’t the same as other people’s? How would businesses find out?
    To complete the science of advertising, it was necessary that some form of feedback was also built into the system that would bring information back to the marketer. This could also be understood in behavioural terms, that is, whether a given ad directly prompted a certain response. For instance, discount coupons could be included in newspaper advertisements, to be cut out and used to purchase the product in question. This feedback mechanism would allow the marketer to discover which adsstimulated the best response. Seventy years later, the rise of online advertising and e-commerce would make such behavioural analysis of marketing effectiveness far more widespread: the response of the person viewing an ad is that much easier to assess, in terms of click-throughs and purchases.
    In the 1920s, the risk of Resor and Watson’s scientific exuberance was that they overlooked what members of the public actually thought and felt, so confident were they that they could dictate emotional responses from scratch. Corporate America could not depend on this leap of faith alone. Behaviourism’s radically scientific view of the mind suggested there was nothing to fear here. There was nothing lurking, hidden, in the dark recesses of the mind that actually existed beyond what could be observed by psychologists. In fact, the very idea of the ‘mind’ was just a philosophical distraction.
    The worry this generates is that a brand (or, for that matter, a politician or ideology or policy) might have become unappealing in ways that are apparent to the public but not yet to scientists and elites. The science of desire also required discovering what people wanted, finding out what they hoped for, in addition to trying to shape it. Doing this required an unusual psychological technique that Watson had hoped to abandon: speaking to people.
    Glimpsing democracy
    Watson could not help but notice that humans have a tendency to speak. He referred to this as ‘verbal behaviour’. He was even prepared to accept that it could play a role in psychological research, though a deeply regrettable one. He ruefully reflected that:
We suffer in psychology today greatly because methods for observing what goes on in another individual’s internal mechanisms in general are lacking. This is the reason we have to depend in part at least upon his own report of what is taking place. We are gradually breaking away from this inexact method; we shall break away very rapidly when the need is more generally recognized. 22
    What Bentham called the ‘tyranny of