Beware the Biggest Lie in Advertising: The Halo Effect
Buying a certain company’s products won’t make you a better person. Don’t fall for a marketing gambit.
“Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman once asked before answering himself; “I contain multitudes.”
Whitman was quite right: Human beings are complicated creatures- individually and collectively.
Individual humans do things all the time that defy all rational thought. Societies of human beings often collectively do the same things on a larger scale. Human beings are so irrational, the writers of great fiction have had a heyday trying to reimagine that particular human foible out of existence. We can thank this corrective impulse for Spock and Sherlock Holmes.
In the real world, human psychology is complex, multifaceted, chimeric. Abnormal human psychology is a hydra, a many-headed monster of infinite variety. Mental illness, neuro-divergence, psychosis, chemical imbalance; each manifests different symptoms in every vulnerable mind it touches.
Then there’s the rest of us. We aren’t exactly all normal, all the time either.
Exhibit A-Z: Social media. People have laid their innermost thoughts bare to the algorithms of the internet, to the eager perusal of friend and foe alike. Whether or not this was a good idea, as some hoped…