Whatever Happened to …

… brainwashing? Whatever happened to brain probes? Whatever happened to the psychological techniques that would supposedly enable totalitarian governments to compel voluntary obedience?

It looks like the phenomena that supposedly showed yesterday's social scientists that free will does not exist vanished with little trace. Why should we take similar stuff today seriously?

Maybe the the commonest type of “predictable irrationality” is the belief among social scientists (or, to be more exact, journalists covering psychological research) that they know better than the rest of us.