Perennially relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimu...

Also in comic form: https://stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

Took a quick look and I didn't agree with the findings. However it seemed clearly a poorly done study where the 'posing' was not controlled for.

I remember reading about researchers trying to understand what triggered baby birds to cry for food when the mother bird came back to the nest. They found they could make a red stick for the head and a yellow stick for the beak, amd the babies would yell just as loudly for food.

What stuck with me is that they found that by elongating the yellow stick, the baby birds would yell even harder than when their mother was there. In other words, are instincts amd impulses are imprecise and can be manipulated.

This is not a new thing, though. In some ways, this is something art has long manipulated - no love is more tragic than Romeo and Juliet's, for example.

In Ted Chiang Story of your life book, there was another story, Liking what you see [0]. I believe it was this story where in a background plot they developed AI enhanced emotional pitch for a voice, so you could put it in any human speech or ad read and make people instantly like what they hear regardless of their free will.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...

[dead]