Words are powerful. Words have the power to build up or tear down, the power to start movements and revolutions, the power to communicate ideas. In certain hands, words have the power to manipulate your audience any way you want. My early background is in psychology and counseling with ministry having come later. I often joke, “I know how to manipulate people. If I didn’t, I’d feel honor-bound to return my degrees to the university. But I choose to use my powers for good.” In other words, while I have the academic and practical knowledge to use words and tones to manipulate people’s feelings to make them do or think what I want, I realize that’s wrong and choose not to do it. Well, most of the time. There was that one time I manipulated my husband to follow through on a six-week promise to fix our oven, and it worked. My parents were at the house, and I remember looking at them wryly and saying, “Darn. I almost hate that that worked.” They laughed.
Good speakers and writers know how to use words to make us feel. They use words to make us feel exactly what they want us to feel, knowing that how we feel will impact how we respond. They try – and in many cases succeed – to control our emotions in search for a specific outcome. In the case above, I hit my husband in the wallet; I told him I was going to use part of our tax refund to buy a new oven since he refused to execute the $60 repair on our existing one. He didn’t want to spend the money on something so unnecessary, plus I dinged his manhood: He could fix that oven, dang it!
Think about the books you like to read and how they make you feel. Ever read some Stephen King and have trouble sleeping at night? How did you feel when you read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? You had flipped page after page, chapter after chapter, and Rowling did what??? Your breath was coming hard and your heart likely shattered inside of you. If you’re like me, you were probably hoping for that not to be the end, that she was going to – pardon the pun – work some literary magic to undo that scene (you know which one I’m talking about). Yet, it never happened, and we were left dealing with the emotional fallout. She wrote to get that emotional response. (I’ll also confess that I started Deathly Hallows hoping for that reversal. The denial was strong in this one.)
These writers are masters at putting words together in order to get emotional reactions. News pundits and politicians are also experts in using words to manipulate their audiences. They know that their readers and listeners will glom onto key words and ignore the rest. One alt-right yellow journalism source used to tout headlines like, “Envoy of Troops Spotted on Interstate as Obama Possibly Prepares for Martial Law!” They knew that readers would see “troops,” “interstate,” “Obama,” “Martial Law,” and the exclamation point. Cue sudden fear response of “Oh my gosh, Obama is going to enact martial law!” Every election year, there are reports from all sorts of sources digging into people’s fears of losing some right, losing government benefits, war, or any of a plethora of “other” people, people who are different racially, ethnically, sexually, or any of a number of adverbs that we can use to describe people who are not like us.
How do they do this? They use our bodies against us. Whether it’s for entertainment, such as with King or Rowling, or to impart dubious information to sway our opinions, these writers use words to create chemical responses inside of us. All day long, our bodies are producing chemicals, both hormones and neurotransmitters. They produce chemicals to make us feel hungry, sad, happy, scared, worried, sleepy, or excited, and every one of these chemicals serves a biological function.
One of these hormones is oxytocin (not to be confused with oxycodone, the narcotic drug). Oxytocin makes us feel sad or sentimental. It’s the chemical that our bodies release when we feel that tug on our heartstrings. Think about how you may feel when you see a pair of big milk chocolate eyes staring out of an adorable puppy face on the humane society’s website. (Chances are, just thinking about that puppy made you melt a little.) That’s oxytocin. You see oxytocin-producing commercials a lot, especially around the holidays with themes of giving and family. Those commercials make us feel, and when we feel, we remember. There’s a commercial put out by a British grocery chain that produces all the feels, and though I live on the other side of the pond from Britain, I still go back and watch that commercial every year, just for the feels.
Another of the chemicals our bodies produce is dopamine. This neurotransmitter is fascinating to me. When our bodies are in balance, all is well. Too little dopamine in the brain causes schizophrenia, while too much causes Parkinson’s Disease. Yet, it’s so vital to our brains, again, in balance. Dopamine is the “hook.” When you read the first sentence in a book or story, if it produces enough dopamine in your brain, you’ll continue reading. Dopamine makes us want to read the next chapter and the next book. It makes us tune in when the dreaded “to be continued” flashes across the screen at the end of your favorite TV show. Both J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown are two great examples of writers who can get the dope going.
Finally, we have a pairing of hormones that the aforementioned news sources and politicians love to use: Cortisol and adrenaline. I call cortisol “the worry hormone.” Our bodies produce this hormone when we’re worried. Whether it’s a big exam, a looming bill when funds are tight, or anxiety over the future, our brains produce cortisol. Cortisol production disrupts our sleep, leading us to find other ways of staying awake during the day – copious amounts of caffeine, carb loading, or drugs – all of which have adverse affects on our health and can lead to strokes, heart disease, or diabetes.
Adrenaline is a necessary hormone. Adrenaline fires when we have a “fight or flight” response, diverting energy to our muscles and firing up our heart rate and respirations, ensuring our bodies have what we need when we need it. Adrenaline has an evolutionary purpose; it helps us survive. Given that adrenaline causes our heart rate and blood pressure to soar, it’s unhealthy to stay in this state for a long period, and, in fact, being here can be tiring, leading to an “adrenaline crash.” When cortisol and adrenaline are firing in our bodies, we make poor decisions. Think about the chick running through the woods while the serial killer is chasing her. She’s scared – her adrenaline is up – and she turns back to see how close he is and trips over a tree root, at which point the serial killer catches up with her. On any given day, sans homicidal maniac, she’d likely tell you that’s it’s not wise to look behind you when you’re running through the woods because you can trip and fall.
Stephen King is expert at writing in such a way that these hormones flood our systems. He also brings his readers back down, giving them a resolution and not keeping them in that heightened state. The media isn’t nearly so compassionate. They will use own bodies against us to drive an agenda. For example, in 2012, North Carolinians were called upon to vote on Amendment 1. This amendment would recognize all domestic partnerships for the sake of child custody, health care decision making (only health care powers of attorney or spouses can make decisions for someone in North Carolina, not domestic partners, friends, etc.), and provide laws protecting people in non-married domestic relationships from abuse, heterosexual and homosexual alike. In short, this law would provide some much-needed protections to women, children, and other vulnerable segments of the state’s population. What this law would not do was override the existing prohibition against homosexual marriages that would later be overturned at the federal level. In the weeks leading up to the vote, the news outlets were calling Amendment 1 the “gay marriage bill.” The media worded their news coverage in such a way to tweak the insecurities and prejudices of the citizens.
Politicians are also known for using words to manipulate people’s opinions. Also in the great state of North Carolina, a few years later the governor called a special session of the General Assembly to vote on and pass HB2, aka, “the bathroom bill.” This law requires transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificate. The law also created room for discrimination based on sexual orientation state-wide, but that article didn’t get the coverage the rest of the bill did. The lawmakers’ argument behind passing this bill was to “protect women and children” from these transgender sexual predators. They argued that transgenders would go into women’s bathrooms to sexually assault innocent women and children. In fact, when the former governor was running for re-election, he ran as a hero of women’s safety. It doesn’t matter that transgender people are more likely themselves to be assaulted than to assault anyone. Nor does it matter that, if I see someone who appears to be a man in the women’s bathroom, I’m likely to go on the defensive, regardless of whether that “man” has a vagina under his trousers; I’m not going to wait around to find out. So, in fact, the law allows for men dressed as men to go into women’s bathrooms under the guise of being unaltered transgender. The politicians cloaked their behavior in terms of protecting vulnerable women and children, feeding the citizens of the state this lie that there actually was a problem the lawmakers needed to solve with a discriminatory bill. In the aftermath of this law passing, transgender people no longer felt safe in the towns and communities they’d called home and felt it prudent to leave for other states. One reported feeling scared when she went into places she’d frequented many times before, and this lady is a total bad-ass.
In phrasing their news stories the way they did, the media played on the fears of conservatives who were afraid that allowing homosexuals to marry would destroy the institute of the American family – that “textbook” model of mom, dad, and two-point-two kids. They created the threat of the “other” in order to get support for shutting down this amendment that provided protections for some of our most vulnerable citizens. Likewise, the politicians used words to convince the citizenry that there was a problem they needed to fix, creating a problem when one didn’t exist and causing many more problems as a result. Again, they used fear of the ubiquitous “other” to gain support for their agenda. They played on fear, driving up the cortisol and adrenaline, making people seek for a “savior” to protect them, and delivering that. In a calm state, most people probably would be pretty blase’ about the idea of transgender people using the bathroom of the gender they identify with, realizing it’s happened many times and they didn’t even know. However, with the manipulative messages and their playing with the hormones of North Carolinians, the media and lawmakers had the citizens of North Carolina convinced that a real danger existed. It does, but not in members of the LGBT+ community.
As you listen to debates, speeches, and news blurbs and read the same, beware of the messages these sources are conveying. Ask yourself, “What are they really telling me? Are they suggesting I should be afraid of something or someone?” Now try it yourself. Practice writing sentences or paragraphs – you may get carried away – to generate dopamine, oxytocin, cortisol, and adrenaline in your readers. Share your creations below in the comments.
