Advertising and Behavior Control by Robert Arrington

Arrington on Advertising

Robert Arrington's "Advertising and Behavior Control" attempts to defend the advertising industry, and the practice of a company's exaggerated verbal claims, from the charge of "manipulation, exploitation or downright control" (283). Arrington contends that approaching this issue depends upon the philosophical concept of autonomy, a "complex, multifaceted concept" which requires an understanding of four things: "autonomous desire," "rational desire and choice," "free choice," and "control or manipulation." (285). The first of these is apparently a concept Arrington has derived from Friedrich von Hayek, who "argued plausibly that we should not equate nonautonomous desires…with those which are culturally induced." (286). In other words, suggestion is not compulsion. The second anticipates a line of criticism which states that it "leads us to act on irrational desires or make irrational choices" but he concludes that this leads to no "infringement of autonomy" in the sense derived from Hayek (286). The third concept of "free choice" asks about situations in which one might have an instinctive or compulsive reaction to advertising, and concludes that on some occasions advertising "may" impinge upon autonomy by playing upon "subsciousness," (288). By the time Arrington reaches the discussion of his final concept, "control or manipulation," his own subconsciouness slips into open revolt with his sneer directed at "teachers (at least those of the liberal persuasion)" who attempt to "influence" their students, which is not stigmatized as a form of "control." (289). He then wraps up with a hasty conclusion in which he notes that the concept of autonomy, which he has used to set the terms of his inquiry into whether advertising is in any way a form of "manipulation, exploitation or downright control," to decide that advertising is none of those things.

Arrington's analysis overall is shallow and tendentious. The problem with "culturally induced" desires is not so much that they impinge upon autonomy as that they may have other unintended consequences by affecting culture as much as they reflect it. Take the question of body image issues in young women. These are clearly culturally induced, as there are plenty of societies in which being rail-thin like a runway model is hardly a cultural ideal of beauty. So the ideal of beauty must be learned from somewhere, and that is culture. If we could safely lay the disorders of all anorexics and bulimics to some extent on an exaggerated standard of taste which is promoted in advertising's images of women (admittedly a big if), then does this not give a very different picture of what kind of impingement upon "autonomy" might be entailed in advertising? The worst effect that Arrington can imagine from an extremely persuasive advertisement would be a "subliminal technique which drove us all to purchase Lear jets" instead of food, essentially living beyond our means.