But the discovery that people are actually rather easy to influence and predict (once we know the triggering environmental cues or prompts) is fact is today being exploited as a research tool because we know now that we can activate and study complex human psychological systems with very easy priming manipulations.  A quarter century ago the methods to activate (to then study) aggressive or cooperative tendencies were more expensive and difficult, involving elaborate deceptions, confederates, and staged theatrics.  It is said that the early cognitive dissonance theorists such as Eliot Aronson used to routinely have their graduate students take theater classes.  And other social psychologists of that generation, such as Richard Nisbett, have publicly complained (in a good-natured way) about 'rinky-dink' priming manipulations that somehow produce such strong effects. (This reminds me of Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic; here the belief that complex human outputs must require complex causes.)

It is because priming studies are so relatively easy to perform that this method has opened up research on the prediction and control of human judgment and behavior, 'democratized' it, basically, because studies can be done much more quickly and efficiently, and done well even by relatively untrained undergraduate and graduate students.  This has indeed produced (and is still producing) an explosion of knowledge of the IF-THEN contingencies of human responses to the physical and wocial environment.  And so I do worry with Schirrmacher on this score, because we so rapidly building a database or atlas of unconscious influences and effects that could well be exploited by ever-faster computing devices, as the knowledge is accumulating at an exponential rate.

More frightening to me still is Schirrmacher's postulated intelligent artificial agents who can, as in the Google Books example, search and access this knowledge base so quickly, and then integrate it to be used in real-time applications to manipulate the target individual to think or feel or behave in ways that suit the agent's (or its owner's) agenda of purposes. (Of course this is already being done in a crude way through advertising, both commercial and political; we have just shown for example that television snack food ads increase automatic consumption behavior in the viewer by nearly 50%, in children and adults alike.)