Learn to Use the Power of Suggestion to Your Advantage
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
Dr. Moa Lundstrom is a Counselling Psychologist and Founding Director of The London Practice, one of London’s leading private therapy clinics. Her work integrates psychology, existential thought, and evidence-based approaches to explore well-being, meaning, and what it means to live well.
We are all brainwashed. Not me, I hear you say, I think for myself. Let me ask you, do your opinions reflect those of your culture? If you, like me, grew up in the Western world, chances are you believe that education is universally good. If you believe that physically chastising children is wrong, you were probably born after the mid-century. If you believe that eating a guinea pig is a horrific act of cruelty rather than a standard, nutritious Sunday dinner, chances are you are a European rather than a resident of the Peruvian Andes.
How we make sense of the world is completely intertwined with our environment. You are born into a certain family, in a specific place and time in history, in a certain socio-economic bracket, a certain race, with certain genetic makeup and immediate culture. These factors are entirely out of your control at the start of your life, but they have an immense effect on who you become as a person, what you value, and how you view and understand the world.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger called this concept “thrownness.” We are thrown into the world, and from this starting point, we are born with certain limitations and also certain possibilities.
From this original shape that we were moulded into, our environment continues to shape what we believe to be true and how we think about things. This is no less true with age, but we do have more ways to control which environments we find ourselves in, thus influencing what stories we are told by proxy.
It is a simple idea, yet easy to overlook when we go about our days, believing we are making conscious choices about what to do next, or believing our opinions are our own.
Parental influence is strongly linked to behaviour through modelling and norm setting. However, peers and the general environment also have a great effect, continuously shaping perception and behaviour. Implicit or explicit messages prime the mind to view one’s environment through certain norms. Unsurprisingly, if a child grows up in a violent home, they are more likely to become violent adults than those growing up in peaceful homes. Even exposure to violence through TV, movies, news, music videos, and both witnessing and participating in violent video games increases the odds of aggression soon after. Heavy exposure to this as children predicts higher levels of aggression when they are young adults. Psychologist Robert Sapolsky points out that this link is stronger than calcium intake and bone density, and asbestos and laryngeal cancer.
Even behaviour that appears to be deeply personal follows patterns of social influence. The phenomenon of social contagion illustrates just how profoundly our minds are shaped by the collective behaviour of those around us, even when it comes to the most private and monumental decisions of our lives. A landmark study by researchers Rose McDermott, James Fowler, and Nicholas Christakis analysed long-term data from the Framingham Heart Study to see how divorce ripples through social circles. They discovered that relationship breakdown acts like a behavioural virus, increasing a person's own risk of divorce by a staggering 75 percent if an immediate friend splits up. Remarkably, this psychological suggestibility extends well beyond our direct interactions, flowing down to three degrees of separation. A friend of a friend going through a separation elevates an individual's divorce risk by 33 percent, showing that our subconscious minds are constantly mapping and adapting to the social norms of people we may not even know.
This susceptibility occurs because our brains are highly attuned to social cues for validation and survival, meaning that when a peer divorces, it subtly reshapes our internal perception of marriage. Seeing a friend go through a divorce normalises an otherwise stigmatised event and provides a subconscious roadmap, demonstrating that life after a split is not only survivable but potentially happier. While certain factors like having children or a densely interconnected web of mutual friends can act as psychological buffers against this external pressure, the core takeaway remains clear. Our minds are incredibly impressionable to the actions of the collective, and our most intimate choices are at times not purely our own, but rather a reflection of the invisible, contagious currents flowing through our social networks.
This suggestibility of the human mind goes far deeper than our social habits or political views. It can quite literally shape the way we experience our own mental states. In his seminal book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Mind, journalist Ethan Watters argues that Western psychiatric categories are not universal biological truths, but cultural exports that the rest of the world subconsciously learns to mimic. For example, the sudden shift of anorexia in Hong Kong during the mid-1990s. Historically, the condition was rare there, and those who did suffer from it reported severe stomach bloating rather than a fear of gaining weight. However, following intense Western media coverage of a high-profile anorexia death in 1994, cases shifted into a standard Western presentation. Almost overnight, patients began reporting body image distortion as their primary complaint. Their minds had absorbed a new, imported script for how to express deep emotional distress.
We see this same psychological suggestibility when Western concepts are forced upon entirely different cultural landscapes, often with well-meaning but destabilising results. When Western trauma counsellors flooded Sri Lanka in the wake of the devastating 2004 tsunami, they arrived fully expecting to treat an epidemic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), focusing heavily on individual psychological trauma. Yet, local healing traditions had always prioritised community reintegration and practical rebuilding over inward-looking therapy. By pathologising the survivors' grief through a rigid Western lens, the influx of outside experts inadvertently altered how locals understood and expressed their own suffering. It is a sobering reminder of just how suggestible we are. When the culture hands us a diagnostic checklist, our minds, longing to make sense of pain, will reshape our very reality to fit the narrative.
It is not only norms and behaviour around us that influence our own actions. What we believe to be true is also easily manipulated by something as simple as repetition.
In the highly cited 1977 paper, Frequency and the Conference of Referral Validity, Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino established that statements which are repeated often are judged more valid than non-repeated ones. This has been referred to as the illusory truth effect. In other words, by hearing a message repeated often, we believe it to be more truthful than new information, a phenomenon deeply understood by marketeers and political campaigners.
Many things that we consider to be deeply personal, our mental states, relationship choices, and even how we experience distress, are in fact shaped by social context in measurable and sometimes dramatic ways. Diagnostic categories, symptom presentations, and life decisions all show patterns of social transmission.
Most people today understand that the type of content we consume through our smartphones influences us, thus the term “influencer.” If we could truly see the effect of social and cultural influence, there would be less radicalism, fewer cases of AI-encouraged suicides, and dare I say, less unnecessary suffering. Just being aware of the suggestibility of our minds is a form of protection. Understanding that our thoughts, and therefore feelings and how we perceive the world, are never, or at least rarely, truly our own allows us to approach them with a bit of caution. To not be quite so quick to jump all in. Paying attention to the narratives around you gives you more freedom to choose what you take on board.
In today’s world, we should treat our informational diet as seriously as we treat our physical one. We cannot live outside of culture, but we can cultivate agency within it.
I encourage you to become more mindful of the influences that currently surround you: the people you spend time with, the spaces you inhabit, and the media you consume, from social platforms and podcasts to books, news, and casual conversations. What messages are you repeatedly receiving about the world, about other people, and about how you should live? How do these messages make you feel? Do they expand you or contract you? Do they make you more curious, generous, and grounded, or more fearful, reactive, and closed?
If you surround yourself with negative messages, that becomes your reality. Hopeful, humane, and courageous narratives can also become part of the atmosphere we live inside. We can choose to place ourselves closer to kindness, to nuance, to people and ideas that make us more awake rather than more afraid. If we are all being brainwashed, then we may as well try to angle it towards something that makes us, and the world around us, a little better. I assure you, you will feel better in the process.
We cannot undo our thrownness, but we can absolutely alter the stream of influence that is constantly around us. We can notice the currents and, when possible, choose our stretch of the river. The power of suggestion will always be with us. Used unconsciously, it makes us easy to steer. Used deliberately, by curating inputs, slowing reflexes, and elevating healthier norms, it becomes an ally in helping us to live by our own lights.
Read more from Dr. Moa Lundstrom
Dr. Moa Lundstrom, Counselling Psychologist and Founding Director
Dr. Moa Lundstrom is a Counselling Psychologist and Founding Director of The London Practice. Interested in the intersection of psychology, philosophy and human experience, her work explores how people understand themselves beyond expectation, habit and the pull of the crowd. Through her writing, she examines wellbeing, meaning and what it means to live thoughtfully.
