Selling Feelings

I recently suggested that in any interpersonal interaction there is a superficial socially-driven interaction, and a deeper more subconscious conversation that can only be understood by reading non-verbal cues and thinking about what is not said. I mentioned that this is a skill practised not just by psychiatrists but by other professionals, and that people working in these roles can sometimes come across as manipulative.

There are some professions where manipulation is absolutely the name of the game. For example, Advertising. Advertising is an industry that has achieved a recent resurgence of notoriety by being featured in the Mad Men TV series but good commercials have always exhibited far shrewder psychological insight than the TV programmes that surround them. The limited time of a TV spot means that advertisers work hard to first capture attention, and then ingrain a clear psychological impression of the brand on the viewer.

Good advertisers do this by manipulating social conventions and assumptions, and they apply a large dose of psychological pressure to ensure success. Let’s examine three very different recent adverts, united only by being at least partly set within airports:

First, T-Mobile:

It’s a follow-up to a similar ad earlier this year. The main challenge that telecommunications companies face is distinguishing themselves from their rivals. We all use them regularly, but tend to be very reluctant to change from one network to another. Their advertising tends to be more about cementing market share and making small incremental longer-term gains from competitors rather than stellar overnight gains in subscribers.

The advert implicitly acknowledges this. It does not try to directly tell you anything about the brand, it doesn’t try to give you a rational argument as to why its product is different from other networks. This advert is all about brand management: it tries to give an overall emotional impression of what it means to be a T-mobile user: spontaneous, fun, connected and adaptable. The vehicle used – an apparently spontaneous interactive exciting event in a location that we associate with making connections with others – reflects precisely those personality traits, making the advert highly effective and memorable.

Here’s another recent one:

While I love it primarily for the use of a specially recorded version of Only You by Alison Moyet (based on the original hit she sang as part of Yazoo in the 80s) it also hits a clever psychological note by applying a gentle twist to the theme of lovers being reunited. The advert is not trying to manage a well-known brand, but instead works hard to get viewers unfamiliar with the company to acknowledge it exists. The engagingly simple music track, combined with the mildly humorous twist, serve to create a warm and romantic mindset that disarms our more jaded nature, and so allows the commercial message to be driven home strongly at the end.

Humour is used frequently for this purpose in advertising. Get someone laughing and their psychic defences are shattered. The advertising message can then be inserted without resistance. When allied with nostalgia – another way of undermining resistance with warmth – it can be a very powerful tool. Time to jet off again…

Virgin is a well-known international brand, but has always prided itself on being an underdog offering something unique to the airline market. This advert is designed to reflect that pride, while including a couple of subtle little digs at its biggest competitor in the transatlantic market, British Airways. The most obvious BA gag would be the snooty staff in dull blue uniforms with their hair done up in buns (an image associated more with librarians than the excitement of going on holiday) but there’s also a cute little dig at Maurice Saatchi when his doppelganger near the end says he needs a new job. Maurice Saatchi founded the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi… which was responsible for British Airways advertising in the 1980s.

That last visual gag is unlikely to have been noticed by those without a passing familiarity with the advertising industry, but the more general effect of the advert is to emotionally disarm the viewer with nostalgia and humour, allowing Virgin to remind them of their individuality.

Three very different adverts, but all examples of how a strong psychological message can be delivered within a minimal timeframe if music, images and other non-verbal cues are combined together to manipulate the viewer’s preconceptions. Advertisers understand that rational argument is rarely the most effective way to sell a product; managing emotional responses is far more effective. They do this by going beneath a superficial conversation to identify the emotional dynamic that underpins it, and so effect a change in behaviour.

Just think about how much more effective your interactions might be if you started looking at the world in this way.

Trust and Sorrow

Psychiatrists fall into two camps: those that are happy to tell others what they do and those that try very hard to keep it secret.

It is remarkable just how rapidly people’s perception changes once they know that you’re a shrink. The profession carries with it so much social symbolism that the label can overwhelm the person. You stop being thought of as a relative stranger that they’ve just met, but instead as a psychiatrist first and foremost. I suppose everyone with a socially-loaded role has a similar experience when others discover what they do – the policeman, the judge, the prostitute must all know something of what I mean – but society’s ambiguity about psychiatry means there’s something at least moderately unique about the way people react to us.

For some, we’re seen as wise mentors or good listeners. Others view us as arrogant manipulators or affirmers of false science. In some ways, it doesn’t really matter which identity is conferred upon me by them; the point is that they do so without any real knowledge me as a person and that can lead to some pretty bizarre and incongruous situations.

I don’t volunteer my speciality to others, preferring to answer most questions about what I do with a simple “I’m a doctor” and giving vague answers to follow-on questions. But if someone directly asks me about my speciality, I’m happy to tell them. And that’s how I ended up listening to a stranger’s relationship difficulties over lunch today, and being told secrets they wouldn’t dream of telling their closest friends.

I respect the trust offered to me by such free sharing of their sorrow and hope that my few non-committal general words of advice helped. But what if I’d been lying, and wasn’t actually a psychiatrist and so not as likely to treat the situation in a respectful yet boundaried manner?

Do not place your trust blindly in others, even if society authorises you to do so by dint of their profession. Even more so, be wary of sharing sorrow too freely, lest more pain result from the sharing. Respect and trust people who earn it, and not just by the social roles they play.

Halloween Zombies infect entire UK population

Growing up, almost nobody I knew celebrated Halloween.

At most, you might have seen a carved pumpkin or two, and a cursory noting of the date by attempting to eat a tooth-destroying toffee apple. But the big event we all looked forward to around this time of year were the fireworks of Guy Fawkes Night. I remember getting excited about buying Catherine Wheels, Sparklers, Roman Candles and Rockets.

About 10 to 15 years ago, things started to change. Small groups of trick-or-treaters started appearing. Since then the UK has increasingly taken Halloween to its heart. It’s always difficult to tell which comes first, popularity or commercial merchandising, but the graph below (taken from this article) shows just how big the Halloween business has become.

The big point to note is that the absolute figures are still quite modest and the growth is still very much in the early exponential phase, suggesting big further increases to come. Halloween has now reached an inflection point where there’s a substantial future synergy between the public’s awareness of the day, their desire to mark it, and the ability of business to enhance this desire with advertising and then profit from it with increased sales.

Not having any emotional connection to Halloween from my childhood, I feel a little sorry to see Guy Fawkes Night pale into relative insignificance. Zombies may be cool, but they’d burn up nicely if you fired a few Rockets into them.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles

• Hallowe’en now bigger than Valentine’s Day (telegraph.co.uk)

(Aid) Money makes the world go round

One of the smaller budgets reviewed in last week’s Comprehensive Spending Review to reduce the  deficit was that of the Department for International Development. It’s the only departmental budget to have escaped real-terms spending restrictions and will instead benefit from funding increases. By 2015 it will spend about £12bn, up from the current approximately £7bn, which will drive the share of GDP spent on overseas aid up to 0.7% from the current 0.5%.

The idea of increasing the amount of money we send to other countries while restricting the amount we spend on our own population has led to some raised eyebrows, and I suspect the average man on the street feels the burden of spending cuts should fall on this budget as much as (if not more than) other departments.

This is to seriously misjudge the value of the DfID. Moral advocates of the aid will doubtless use heart-wrenching individual stories of poverty to justify the spending. This is always a shaky argument, as there are heart-wrenching individual stories of poverty closer to home as well. I have a rather more realpolitik reason to support increasing the international aid budget.

This money is not Bleeding Heart Charity Spending. It is the UK’s Venture Capital & Advertising Slush Fund. Money buys influence and opens doors, and this century will see a range of developing countries industrialise rapidly, with concomitant increases in the wealth of their populations. That economic development makes them important and growing markets for UK businesses. Spending money now on their populations and governments buys goodwill for years to come and those embedded interests will then enable the UK to profit further down the line.

Other countries understand the vital importance of greasing the right palms to secure economic and political influence. Only this week we heard how Iran directly supplies the office of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai with “bags of money”. As well as Iran, Russia and China pour money into Central Asia, in a modern incarnation of The Great Game.

This all leads to much concerned tut-tutting in the West, but it’s worth noting that the DfID will be increasing its spend on Afghanistan by at least 40%. Naturally, the UK government would claim that this is an entirely different form of spending; that it is more open, transparent and targeted towards the needs of the Afghan population. That’s probably true. But the effect of the spending is not dissimilar. Like all good advertising, it catches the eye. The UK’s brand is enhanced, which buys political capital and thus opportunities for British businesses. It’s telling in this regard that the British Council (effectively the UK’s international PR agency) has had its funding shifted from the Foreign Office to the DfID.

In the past, the UK spent far more of its money on the oiling of the gears of international commerce, and was not shy about it. It’s possible to plausibly argue that the British Empire was founded on judicious bribery, and the Napoleonic Wars won by financially supporting other countries. Free-flowing British Gold was responsible for shaping much of the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and secured revenue streams for decades to come.

Today, our populations prefer that we be a bit more subtle in how we fund other countries. Rather than direct bribes from the Foreign Office, we like to cleanse our consciences by having the spin-off DfID targeting the spend towards impoverished populations instead of their rulers. How much this noble aspiration translates into practical improvements on the ground is probably somewhat questionable, but that’s not the point. Like most VC funds, there will be a lot of failed investments and few winners, and spectacular profits may take time to materialise.

But in the long-term, for the UK govenrnment to speculatively invest a mere 0.7% of its spending towards the high-risk, high-reward developing world makes a lot of economic sense.

How are you today?

Image via Wikipedia

What makes people tick?

That’s what drew me to medicine and to psychiatry in particular. I love trying to read people, figuring out their patterns, extrapolating their behaviour forwards and generally learning how to adjust and contain these shifting mental sands.

Most people operate linearly, most of the time. Their lives are routinised, and so are their responses. A basic illustration of this is the narrow, fixed repertoire of responses to the common question: “how are you today?”

Regardless of how they are actually feeling – even if actively feeling unwell – the initial response to that question is still often an automatic “I’m fine; you?” or similar well-rehearsed blandishment.

These pre-programmed stereotyped responses are on one level just a superficial societal pleasantry. But they are also the tip of the iceberg of how moulded people are by the society they live in, and by the role they have been trained to play within that society.

Readers of Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes will be familiar with his uncanny ability to read a person just by looking at them and noting specific details about their appearance or manner. In fact, although the ability is exaggerated in the books, there is nothing magical about the skill. Doctors are trained to perform an “end of bed examination” to take in physical details about a patient before even talking to them, to obtain potential clues as to diagnosis. A good psychiatrist draws on that basic medical skill and allies it to a more subtle understanding of human behaviour to develop deeper hypotheses.

The skill isn’t unique to medicine, being shared by good detectives, politicians, negotiators and salespersons. What is interesting about these professions is not just that they require an ability to read people, but a subsequent need to modify human behaviour. The detective has to interview and break suspects, the politician must win votes, and the negotiator and salesperson need to close sales. The psychiatrist uses knowledge of human behaviour to encourage the development of insight in the insightless.

Sometimes the initial calculation is incorrect and needs to be modified in light of subsequent fresh data. But more often than not, and despite how unique people believe themselves to be, similar underlying patterns can be recognised and ways of handling those patterns can be developed. This casual familiarity with human nature can make members of all those professions I mentioned above occasionally seem highly manipulative. When you get used to figuring out situations, you also tend to spot “angles of attack” very quickly and then it’s up to your individual conscience as to how much to use them to generate a desired outcome.

Automatic responses are necessary to function without thinking continuously, which would be exhausting. But don’t let the automaticity prevent you from actively thinking when the need arises.

Searching for answers: the internet and evolution

Blogging is its own reward in many respects: it allows one to process and express opinions in a deeper way than might be achieved without the necessity of having to write them out. And it’s nice to get interesting comments from others that further the discussion. But I have to admit that the darker underbelly of blogging is monitoring the “site stats” page to see how many views one’s had and, perhaps more intriguingly, how they found they found my blog.

I’ve learnt that more people than you might realise are interested in “the symbolism of squirrels”, “berluti shoes”, “biomechanical arms”, “suicide” and “transhumanism”. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s a clear unifying theme to all those search terms (although my more whimsical side might suggest there’s some kind of bizarre chronological progression to the terms) but it makes me think about the very act of searching for answers.

Active searching is a remarkably high-level complex cognitive process. It’s also quite unique to humans; many other lifeforms may seek out food, mates or other assorted environmental assets but the process by which they do so is a series of instinctive responses rather than intelligent design. Active searching requires defining a problem in an insightful manner, and then generating a series of questions that progressively draw us closer to a solution. Searching therefore requires insight, imagination, determination and being able to integrate new data into a conceptual framework.

Our ancestors certainly used these problem-solving skills, but they lacked access to the vast swathes of data we have today. I don’t just mean the internet (though obviously that is a large part of it) but also the exponential growth of information we’ve generated out in the non-digital world: books, advertising, procedures, protocols, manuals and so on. The need to be able to search intelligently is now more important than it ever has been.

Entire industries exist around developing algorithms for more efficient and targeted searching but in the final analysis our ability to search (and therefore function effectively in this new world of data) is limited by our ability to generate appropriate search terms. This is about being able to define the problem adequately enough to start the process of whittling the wheat from the chaff to generate useful solutions.

I suspect that increasing exposure to data will gradually improve our skill in searching, not just as individuals but also as a species. This is the next big challenge we face, because generating data is simple whereas interpreting and understanding it is not. The very fact that everyone with a computer is now overtly exposed to the need to search from a young age has potential to improve our problem-solving ability as a species.

By requiring us to think about the search terms we use, the internet trains us all to start thinking thematically and conceptually rather than literally. Like the improved reflexes and hand/eye co-ordination of children who play a lot of video games, exposure to internet searching may improve conceptual analysis and problem-solving ability. It may therefore be that the internet’s greatest long-term benefit will not be the provision of  widespread access to vast amounts of data, but its ability to subtly and continuously train us to approach problems as concepts to be tested rather than axioms to be followed.

Evolution requires the application of environmental pressure on a species. We’ve largely tamed our physical environments to the point that they no longer apply environmental pressure on our physical forms. But the environmental pressure we now face is psychological through exposure to data without meaning. It will be interesting to see how we evolve in response to that.

Mistress Fate vs Lady Luck

There is an eternal battle fought out across the entire gamut of human experience from quantum physics and abstruse philosophy right through to our daily lives.

The two players in this game compete under many guises: Destiny and Chance, Causality and Spontaneity, Order and Chaos, Linearity and Turbulence, Mistress Fate and Lady Luck. But the rules of the game are always the same: are we governed by a pre-destined pattern or are our lives merely a cumulation of dice rolls.

While most of us will hold an intellectual opinion on this, even if we haven’t thought about it much before, it’s interesting to observe just how quickly our preconceptions collapse in the face of adversity. I’ve seen atheists turn to fervent prayer in times of psychological crisis, and the zealously pious lose their faith. Pain – mental or physical – challenges our assumptions about the world, including the role of chance.

Most of us normally operate under a fundamental attribution error in our worldview: we tend to view others’ misfortune as deserved and our own as bad luck. Or conversely, we assume our success is down to hard work and that of others as the equivalent of a  fortunate lottery win. This has a corrosive effect on both our ability to read situations accurately and on our ability to understand ourselves. In short, it diminishes our insight. And poor insight causes us to make poor decisions, limiting our scope for happiness.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus has an elegant solution to the problem:

Some things happen by necessity, others as the result of chance. Other things are subject to our control.

… Necessity is not accountable to anyone [and] chance is unstable, but what lies in our control is subject to no master. It naturally follows then that blame or praise attend our decisions.

Understanding that chance is neither a god… nor an unstable cause of all things, the wise man does not think that either good or evil is furnished by chance to humankind for the purpose of living a happy life, but that the opportunity for great good or evil are bestowed by it. He thinks that it is preferable to remain prudent and suffer ill fortune, than it is to enjoy good luck while acting foolishly.

It is better in human actions that the sound decision fail than that the rash decision turn out well due to luck.

- Epicurus, on Prudence, from the Letter to Menoeceus.

Epicurus’ solution to the never-ending war between Mistress Fate and Lady Luck is thus deliciously simple: Ignore it.

If we cannot alter destiny and we cannot affect chance, then there isn’t any point worrying about which is true. All we can do is take decisions with as much information and insight as we can muster, to be prudent in our choices, and to accept the consequences with equanimity as they were the best decisions we could make at the time.

Think, but don’t stress.

Public spending cuts: bigger than you think

After all the hype and debate, today was finally George Osborne’s chance to stand up as Chancellor of the Exchequer and spell out how the UK intends to balance its books. £150 billion of borrowing every year, running at around 11% of GDP, was unsustainable and now the cuts have to be made.

I suspect he probably had mixed feelings as he stood up at the Dispatch Box to announce the detail. On one hand, no Chancellor of any party likes delivering bad news; it tends to result in lost votes, after all. And he must have felt frustrated to have been placed in this dire financial, and electorally unpopular, position immediately after the general election. It’s a very different position to the very benign macroeconomic landscape in 1997 when the reins of power last changed hands.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like being in control of the decision-making process, and the current environment does offer some rare opportunities as well as risks. The last 10+ years have seen ever-increasing public expenditure, with a corresponding enlargement of the public sector. To those who believe that the state should only do what the private sector cannot or will not, the massive and unsustainable budget deficit offers the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: rebalance the books, but also rebalance the role of the state.

It’s worth noting that the average cuts of 19% across the five-year Parliament are actually not that different – even a touch less – than the proposed 20% cuts hinted at by Labour back in March of this year, before they lost the General Election, despite the howls of protest from their benches today. The difference is not the headline figure, but the nature of the cuts and their presentation.

In this light, the Comprehensive Spending Review and today’s announcements may allow Osborne, and the coalition government the chance to alter the accepted paradigm of British political thinking, in a similar way to Attlee in the post-war period or Thatcher in the 1980s. It holds out the prospect of effecting not just an economic change, but a sociocultural one too.

The cuts are necessary to balance the books. But the method of cutting and its presentation is about rebranding the role of the state versus the role of the private sector. It is a bold attempt to redefine the social and cultural framework of the country. As President Sarkozy is finding out in France, whenever politicians attempt to alter cultural paradigms in this manner there is usually a significant backlash from entrenched vested interests in the status quo. If politicians are to succeed in their aims, they must acknowledge the resistance by consistently and clearly selling their message directly to the general public.

Politics is not all that different to advertising; those with the most effective and convincing message tend to gain market share. And the reward of gaining market share in this context is not just a few transient extra votes in one particular electoral cycle, but altering the terrain of the battleground for many cycles to come. The post-war Labour government created the welfare state, nationalised industries, and in doing so, set the terms of engagement for the next 30 years. Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, by taking on the unions and privatising industry, set the terms of engagement for the next 30 years. Tony Blair was forced to fight on her territory even while winning landslide Labour party victories in 1997 and 2001. Blair never fundamentally altered those terms of engagement during his time in office; he was too careful not to lose votes through risk-taking (with the sole exception of his military interventionism). Brown, being less attuned to the electorate’s sensitivities, may just have managed such a shift if he had won the 2010 election.

Instead, Osborne has the opportunity. It is a risky route to take; massive public unpopularity is almost guaranteed in the short-term, and if the budgetary medicine does not work to reverse the deficit by 2015, that unpopularity will be sustained, probably resulting in a change of government. But the potential reward is massive: restoring fiscal stability and a sustainable approach to government spending, and perhaps even more importantly, altering the basic sociopolitical cultural landscape for years to come.

Those on both sides of the political divide recognise this. Expect the fireworks from today’s announcements to last way beyond the 5th of November…

UK Defence: wounded, but able to fight again another day

Today, as result of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, the Prime Minister announced major cuts to the UK defence budget, of approximately 8% in real terms over 4 years.

As someone who strongly supports maintaining a healthy defence budget in order for the UK to maintain a disproportionately large influence over world events and politics, it’s a sad announcement. Sad but inevitable, given the fact that the previous Labour government didn’t run a consistent budget surplus during better financial times and instead chose to run a modest but persistent deficit that exploded into a massive deficit during the recession. If we as a country had run a surplus during good times, rather than spending right up to and beyond our limits, we would have been able to absorb the cost of stimulus and bailout expenditure much more easily.

Still, while it’s important to remember the root cause of why these cuts are now happening, there’s no use crying over spilt milk. The main details of the defence cuts are interesting however:

Royal Navy: HMS Ark Royal to be decommissioned early, Harrier jets to be decommissioned, the two pre-ordered large new aircraft carriers will be built because the cost of cancelling them exceeds the cost of construction but the cost of filling them with fixed-wing aircraft will be postponed to later years. Manpower and surface fleet reductions also to take place.

Army: Afghanistan funding remains intact, longer-term manpower cuts and reductions in tank/heavy artillery numbers

Royal Air Force: manpower reductions

Nuclear deterrent: Decision on Trident’s replacement to be postponed, pending further review, and current Trident deterrent on Vanguard submarines remains intact

Ministry of Defence: significant personnel cuts in civilian staff

As we await the outcome of the wider Comprehensive Spending Review that will result in major cuts to wider public spending, it’s at least somewhat reassuring that the defence cuts so far, while very large, should not cripple the UK’s abilities.

The UK will retain an appropriately reconfigured and sized Army and Royal Air Force despite the cuts. The Royal Navy, which has probably been cut the most, will have a few years of sub-optimal functioning due to the lack of fixed-wing carrier wings. During this time which we will have to rely on overfly rights to maintain our ability to deploy effectively anywhere in the world but those arrangements are secure in the short-term and in the medium-term, the gap will be closed by being able to order the relevant aircraft when economic times are better.

If the other wider public spending cuts are similarly reasonably well-thought through, we may just get through the next tight few years successfully. Fingers crossed!

The painting is JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, painted in 1838. It depicts the HMS Temeraire, which fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed to its final berth to await decommissioning. The topic seemed an appropriate choice for today’s post.

Related Articles

• LIVE: Cameron Confirms Defence Cuts (news.sky.com)

The Anti-hero

There are two kinds of anti-hero: the Everyman, and the character that contributors to the TV Tropes website would call the Magnificent Bastard. I’ve always loved reading and watching the exploits of the second kind of anti-hero.

The Everyman type is typically thrown into a difficult situation, fights against adversity and his baser nature and at the end of the piece, if not actually triumphant, at least survives in some way to fight another day. These are the Holden Caulfields, Arthur Dents, Winston Smiths and even Homer Simpsons of the world. They’re buffeted about, occasionally managing to stand up and make a difference, but rarely have full insight into what they’re doing and more usually get out of dangerous situations through a combination of luck and tenacity.

The Magnificent Bastard is entirely different. He is still a flawed character, but his flaw is not one of general mediocrity but that of a gaping mental chasm created by a deep psychological imbalance. These are the characters one loves to hate, the characters that are not all unsympathetic to the reader/viewer but those that society tells us we should not really be sympathising with. The sympathy is generated not so much because we approve of their actions, but because their actions reveal something of their flaw, and we – perhaps still undeservedly – admire them for their attempt to compensate for their flaw. Not for them a carefully planned course of therapy to find inner peace; these characters take revenge on the world that they feel made them this way.

Classics of the type would be Milton’s Lucifer (histrionic narcissist), Shakespeare’s Iago (morbidly jealous) and Macbeth (inferiority complex), Dorian Grey (another narcissist) and Machiavelli’s idealised Prince. Modern equivalents would be Patrick Bateman (narcissistic rage) and psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter, Gordon Gekko and James Bond. Not that they’re all men (though there tends to be preponderance of male characters), as women such as Becky Sharp, Miranda Frost and The White Witch also get in on the act.

I started thinking about this topic while chatting about the 80s supersoap Dallas elsewhere. You may have read recently that Larry Hagman (who of course played star of the show JR Ewing) recently won substantial damages against Citigroup for mismanagement of his investments. Naturally, that led to a slew of JR-related puns and quips, plus some nostalgic reminiscing of what a fun bit of escapist entertainment Dallas was. The character that made the show so watchable was JR Ewing, and he’s pretty much an archetypal example of the Magnificent Bastard antihero.

What stops him being a cartoon villain is that his character never acts out of pure evil, but always from a position that can be understood and, on a good day, sympathised with. He has a slew of what you might call “daddy issues”, and one could ascribe a good deal of his actions to a feeling that he could never quite measure up to Jock Ewing’s legacy, and a (probably failed) desire on his part for his son John Ross to never feel that way about him as a father figure. His extreme competitiveness with Jock and Bobby, his dismissive behaviour towards Gary and Ray, his general perception of people as dumb instruments to be manipulated, and his virgin madonna/whore dichotomous attitude towards women are all consistent with a theme of male inadequacy and arrested development due to an overbearing yet unloving father.

This is also probably what lets his character connect so brilliantly with the audience, especially men in the audience. By transposing the Jock Ewing father figure onto a patriachal and hierarchical society, we enjoy watching JR do all the things we, as individuals with a more rounded and mature personalities, could never do. He’s a classic anti-hero, collecting power and feeding off other people’s emotional distress, as a substitute for inner peace.

Characters are compelling because of their psychological reality, even when the that reality is stretched to an extreme caricature. We love reading about and watching anti-heros because they let us live out a few of our fantasies – even those we do not like to admit to ourselves – and this fantasy allows  us to stabilise our own psychological attitude to the world.

PS. if any of the characters mentioned above don’t instantly bring the source to mind, your reading/viewing list is, in order of appearance from the illustrating photo down: The Devil’s Advocate, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984, The Simpsons, Paradise Lost, Othello, Macbeth, Portrait of Dorian Grey, The Prince, American Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Wall Street, James Bond (any), Vanity Fair, The Devil Wears Prada, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, and, of course, Dallas. An eclectic list to keep you busy for a while!