How Others Trigger Our Emotions

Yet, when anyone — whether an advertiser, our child, our mother or our pet cat — wants us to do something for them, intuitively, they do precisely the same things as that house insurer’s advertisement in a previous example or as Russia promoting the idea that Bucha was a ‘provocation’ by Ukraine:

They purposefully use means to induce in us an experience that is, given what they know about our particular personality or the knowledge of our cultural embedding, or of the archetypes that people the deep structure of our minds, highly likely to provoke in us an experience of feeling a specific emotion.

Source: Incoming Troll Radar!

TER is universal. The same mechanism that makes a house insurance ad work makes Russian genocide denial work. An advertiser, a child, a mother, a pet cat — all intuitively exploit TER: they know what triggers us and use that knowledge to shape our reactions. Russia calling Bucha a ‘provocation’ uses the same emotional architecture as your toddler crying for ice cream. The scale differs. The mechanism is identical.

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