Further Reading: Chapter 34

Essential Texts

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. (Revised and expanded edition, Penguin, 2021.) The foundational text of behavioral economics applied to policy design. Indispensable for understanding the libertarian paternalism framework and the case for nudging as an ethically acceptable form of influence. Students who engage seriously with Section 34.5 should read the original argument, not just the critiques.

Hausman, Daniel M., and Brynn Welch. "Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge." Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2010): 123–136. The most rigorous published philosophical critique of nudge theory's ethical claims. Hausman and Welch argue that nudges manipulate on the autonomy-based account by exploiting cognitive biases against the agent's rational evaluation — even when the outcomes are welfare-improving. Essential counterpoint to Thaler and Sunstein.

Raz, Joseph. The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. The most sophisticated philosophical treatment of autonomy and manipulation. Raz's account of autonomy as a positive value — not merely the absence of coercion but the presence of adequate conditions for self-directed life — provides the philosophical foundation for the autonomy-based critique of manipulation. Chapters 14 and 15 are most relevant.

On Manipulation: Philosophical Analysis

Wood, Allen W. "Coercion, Manipulation, Exploitation." In Manipulation: Theory and Practice, edited by Christian Coons and Michael Weber, 17–50. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. A careful conceptual analysis of manipulation distinguishing it from coercion and exploitation. Wood provides the philosophical vocabulary for distinguishing among the different ways in which one person's agency can be compromised by another's communication. More technically philosophical than most assigned reading but highly rewarding.

Noggle, Robert. "Manipulative Actions: A Conceptual and Moral Analysis." American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1996): 43–55. An influential early treatment of manipulation as a category. Noggle's definition — manipulation is the use of psychological techniques that cause the target to form beliefs or make decisions through processes that the target would object to if they were aware of them — anticipates the procedural account developed in Section 34.4.

Coons, Christian, and Michael Weber, eds. Manipulation: Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. An invaluable collection of philosophical essays on the ethics of manipulation. Covers the relationship between manipulation and deception, the consent-based account, manipulation in intimate relationships, and manipulation in commercial and political contexts.

On Platform Ethics and Research

Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–8790. The primary source for Case Study 34.2. Students should read the original paper alongside the published "Editorial Expression of Concern" and the authors' appended note. The combination gives a clear picture of both the research and the ethical controversy.

Grimmelmann, James. "The Virtues of Moderation." Yale Journal of Law and Technology 17, no. 1 (2015): 42–109. A comprehensive analysis of platform moderation as a form of governance. Grimmelmann's framework for thinking about platforms as choice architects with accountability obligations is the most thorough legal academic treatment of the issues raised by the emotional contagion study.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. The most comprehensive theoretical account of how behavioral data collected by platforms is used to predict and modify human behavior at scale. Zuboff's concept of "behavioral modification" provides a theoretical framework for understanding the ethical stakes of platform design. Essential reading for students who want to understand the larger context of the emotional contagion controversy.

On Professional Ethics of Persuasion

American Psychological Association. Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Washington, DC: APA, 2017. Available free online at apa.org/ethics/code. Section 5 (Advertising and Other Public Statements) is the primary source for Section 34.12. Students should read the full Section 5 and the associated examples. The full code is also useful context for how professional ethics frameworks handle the tension between advocacy and accuracy.

Society of Professional Journalists. SPJ Code of Ethics. Indianapolis: Society of Professional Journalists, 2014. Available at spj.org/ethicscode. The foundational document of journalism professional ethics. Students interested in the distinction between journalism, advocacy, and propaganda should engage with this code's provisions on independence, transparency, and the relationships between journalists and sources.

Baker, Lee W. The Credibility Factor: Putting Ethics to Work in Public Relations. Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1993. A practitioner's account of the tensions in PR ethics. More candid than most practitioner guides about the limits of "honest advocacy" when the interests of clients conflict with the interests of the public.

On the History of Propaganda Ethics

Breit, Arlen. "The Nuremberg Media Trial." International Journal of Communication 12 (2018): 2399–2420. A careful account of the prosecution of Julius Streicher at Nuremberg and its implications for the legal and ethical standards governing propagandists. Addresses both the Streicher verdict and the Fritzsche acquittal with careful attention to the tribunal's reasoning.

Doob, Leonard W. Propaganda: Its Psychology and Technique. New York: Henry Holt, 1935. An early systematic treatment of propaganda psychology that engages directly with the ethical question of whether social scientists who study propaganda techniques bear responsibility for their potential weaponization. Dated in many respects but still valuable for its direct engagement with the ethics of studying persuasion.

On Counter-Propaganda Ethics

Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee, eds. The Fine Art of Propaganda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. (Repr. San Francisco: International Society for General Semantics, 1972.) The Institute for Propaganda Analysis handbook, which laid out the first systematic framework for identifying propaganda techniques. The introduction's discussion of the ethics of teaching people to recognize propaganda — is education itself a form of counter-propaganda? — anticipates the debates in Chapter 34.

Compton, Josh. "Inoculation Theory." In The Sage Handbook of Persuasion: Developments in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed., edited by James Price Dillard and Lijiang Shen, 220–236. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013. The most comprehensive review of inoculation theory research in a handbook format. Includes discussion of the ethical considerations specific to inoculation interventions, including the question of whether pre-emptive persuasion raises different ethical concerns than persuasion after the fact.

Critical Perspectives

Lears, T. J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. A cultural history of American advertising that traces the development of advertising ethics — and the repeated failures of those ethics — over a century of practice. Lears is not primarily an ethicist but a cultural historian; his account of how the advertising industry constructed and reconstructed its self-justifications provides essential context for evaluating contemporary professional ethics codes.

Singer, Natasha. "How Google Took Over the Classroom." New York Times, May 13, 2017. An investigative account of how Google's educational technology platform, G Suite for Education, collected behavioral data on millions of students with consent frameworks that were arguably inadequate. A useful case study of the consent fiction problem in educational contexts, with direct connections to the question of consent in platform-mediated communication.