pg144-145
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VI. Under What Conditions and by Which People Are Being-Values Chosen
    or Not Chosen?
...

Experiments with familiarization demonstrate that that people will continue
to choose and to prefer even the inefficient, the annoying, and the initially
nonpreferred if previously forced to choose them over a ten-day period.
General experience with human beings supports these findings, e.g., in the
area of good habits. Clinical experience indicates that this preference for
the habitual and familiar is greater and more rigid, compulsive, and neurotic
in people who are more anxious, timid, rigid, constricted, etc. Clinical
evidence and some experimental evidence indicate that ego-strength, courage,
health, and creativeness make more likley in adults and children the choice
of the new, the unfamiliar, the unhabitual.

Familiarization in the sense of adaptation also can cut the tendency to
choose the Being-Values. Bad smells cease to smell bad. The shocking
tends to cease shocking. Bad conditions are adapted to and not noticed
any more, i.e., cease to be conscious, even though their bad /effects/
may continue without conscious awareness, e.g., effects of continued
noise or of continued ugliness, or of chronically poor food.

Real choice implies equal and simultaneous presentation with the alternatives.
For instance, people used to a poorly reproducing phonograph preferred it to
a hi-fi phonograph. People used to the hi-fi preferred /that/. But when both
groups were exposed to /both/ poor and good music reproduction, both groups
finally chose the better reproduction of the hi-fi.

The preponderance of the experimental literature on discrimination shows
that it is more efficient when the alternatives are simultaneously present
and close together rather than far apart. We may expect that the selection
of the more beautiful of two paintings, or the more honest of two wines, or
the more alive of two human beings, will be more likely the closer together
they are in space and time.

...

Many experiments show that social suggestion, irrational advertising, social
pressure, propaganda, have considerable effect against freedom of choice
and even freedom of perception; i.e., the choices may be misperceived
and then mis-chosen. This deleterious effect is greater in conforming
rather than in independent, stronger people. There are clinical and
social-psychological reasons for predicting that this effect is greater in
younger than in older people. However, all of these effects, and similar
ones, from e.g., subliminal conditioning, propaganda, prestige
suggestion, or false advertising, subliminal stimuli, covert positive
reenforcement, etc., rest upon blindness, ignorance, lack of insight,
concealment, lying, and unawareness of the situation. Most of these
effects can be eliminated by making the ignorant chooser consciously
aware of the way in which he has been manipulated.

Really free choice - in which the inner, intrinsic nature of the chooser
is the main determinant - is therefore enhanced by freedom from social
pressure, by an independent rather than dependent personality, by
chronological maturity, by strength and courage rather than by weakness
and fear, and by truth, knowledge, and awareness. Satisfying each of
these conditions should increase the percentage of Being-choices.
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