New PBS Series Looks at How Mind Hacking Works – and What You Can Do To Prevent It
PBS’ new four-part series Hacking Your Mind takes you inside the world of hackers — from presidential campaigns and social media companies to corporate marketers and governments — to reveal how they influence your behavior without your even being aware of it.
The series is hosted by Jake Ward, longtime editor of Popular Science and NBC’s science correspondent features best-selling author, Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short), Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”) and more. Hacking Your Mind is a fun and fast-paced adventure filled with discoveries that are incredibly relevant to your life, our nation and our world.
Throughout the program, viewers will discover how we evolved to make many of our decisions not based on what we “think,” but based on our feelings, intuition and habits. This enables us to make decisions almost instantly, as though we are operating on autopilot. Most of the time these autopilot processes serve us well, but they can also lead us to make predictable mistakes. Ward reveals how these common mistakes make us vulnerable to bias and misinformation. Even more important, Ward will show us how we can protect ourselves and fight back. See how learning to hack your own mind can make your life better and improve the lives of everyone around you.
Here are the four episodes:
Living on Auto-Pilot
Take a trip around the world to discover how you go through life on auto-pilot, and get an auto-pilot owner’s manual. This episode originally aired Wednesday, September 9 at 10pm, but due to the CET/ThinkTV Action Auction it did not air on the main CET or ThinkTV16 stations. Watch the first full episode above, either online or with the PBS App.
Weapons of Influence
Wednesday, September 16, at 10pm on CET and ThinkTV16
See how politicians, social media companies and corporate marketers use big data to hack your auto-pilot decision making system and learn how to defend yourself.
Us vs. Them
Wednesday, September 23, at 10pm on CET and ThinkTV16
Discover how the auto-pilot biases we all experience fuel our nation’s divisions, see how authoritarians can hack them and find out how to overcome them.
The Wings of Angels
Wednesday, September 30, at 10pm on CET and ThinkTV16
Find out why hacking for good may be the most important scientific discovery of this century, and learn how to hack your mind to improve your life and the lives of your family and friends.
