What are the dangers in our ability to control and manipulate behavior?
The danger is not in the research findings but in their potential misuse. A few years ago, a physicist, Dr. A. R. Oppenheimer, in addressing members of the American Psychological Association, gave a similar warning. “The psychologist can hardly do anything without realizing that for him the acquisition of knowledge opens up the most terrifying prospects of controlling what people do and how they think and bow they behave and how they feel” (1956, p. 128). As was suggested at the beginning of this paper, sometimes we avoid using the words “control” and “manipulation” because we don’t want to face the moral, ethical, and legal implications of the fact that our techniques could he used to enslave people, depersonalize them, and control them by a means so subtle that they would never realize that they were being manipulated. When faced with this possibility we must remember two things. First, in our complex society some control of human behavior is inevitable. The government, the economy,
