I found this book - The Hidden Persuaders by Vince Packard - in my parent's conservatory. It was published in 1957, though this is a later printing. It's about the early forays by advertisers in the realm of social science and psychology - essentially the same thread of research that yielded the Orwellian practices of Facebook/Meta et al, in [current year].
I am only a few chapters in. Highlights so far are Dr Dichter's 'psycho panel' - a forum of several hundred families, living in the vicinity of his Institute for Motivational Research, whose personalities have been meticulously analysed in a bid to accurately predict their responses to different stimuli.
The other thing worth mentioning is the Szondi test where a subject is:
"shown a series of cards bearing the portraits of people and is asked to pick out of them the one person he would most like to sit beside if he were on a train trip, and the person pictured that he would least like to sit beside. What he is not told is that the people shown on the cards are all thoroughly disordered. Each suffers severely from one of eight psychiatric disorders (is homosexual, sadist, epileptic, hysterical, catatonic, paranoid, depressed, or manic). It is assumed that we will sense a rapport with some more than others, and that in choosing a riding companion we will choose the person suffering from the same emotional state that effects us mildly."
This test, which seems to have been developed by the Hungarian, Léopold Szondi, as a means of using psychology to call people gay, was used by one advertising agency on whiskey drinkers. I am beginning to suspect that the Kiwi Farms might be a giant Szondi Test designed to corral and then categorize a vast array of Internet deviants. Null obviously works for Coca Cola.
