The Persuaders: The hidden industry that wants to change your mind

In almost every hour of every day, people will try to change your mind - but none of it consists in giving you good reasons.

Instead, you’ll experience product placement, infoganda, sock puppeteering, psychological pricing, viral marketing, crowd manipulation, framing, spinning, propagandising. Loyalty cards, death panels, airport toilets, think tank reports, search algorithms and weapons dossiers are all symptoms of this. You are nudged, anchored, and incentivized.

It’s a profound shift in the way human beings interact with one another.

Philosopher James Garvey - described by the Guardian as having ‘a delicious style, often very funny, and a trick of ushering the reader right inside his thought experiments’ - writes clearly and entertainingly about the dangers we face when we lose our grip on persuasion by rational means.

But Easily Swayed isn’t just a requiem for rationality. It’s a call to think again about the way we think now.