'WHAT THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!"

You may have heard or read that phrase from some pseudo-paranoid person or group or perhaps you heard a talk radio host say "You won't hear this in the mainstream media."  Both phrases are probably attempts to increase the plausibility of the statements that follow or precede these blurbs according to marketing research:

“People tend to think something is important if it’s secret,” says Michael Norton, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School. “Studies find that we give greater credence to information if we’ve been told it was once ‘classified.’ Ads like this often purport to be the work of one man, telling you something ‘they’ don’t want you to know.” The knocks on Big Pharma not only offered a tempting needle-free fantasy; they also had a whiff of secret knowledge, bolstering the ad’s credibility.

What makes this tactic particularly interesting to American conservative politics is it's usefulness for propaganda when coupled with so-called arguments for believing the scam:

“Research on persuasion shows the more arguments you list in favor of something, regardless of the quality of those arguments, the more that people tend to believe it,” Norton says. “Mainstream ads sometimes use long lists of bullet points—people don’t read them, but it’s persuasive to know there are so many reasons to buy.” OK, but if more is better, then why only one trick? “People want a simple solution that has a ton of support.”