Stroking

In his book Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser mentions “stroking” as one of the psychological techniques that managers at the fast food restaurants use to motivate their crew members. Schlosser defines it as “a form of positive reinforsment, deliberate praise, and recognition.” By this means the fast food chains try to keep the “team spirit” of their easy-to-control teenage workers in the absence of good wages and secure employment.

But this psychological strategy is being applied not only to the young crews of the chain restaurants. Stroking can also be used at the “success seminars”. Schlosser provides an example of the “Success Authority”  convention that is regularly organized by Peter Lowe, "the greatest superstar salesperson of all time", who  promotes and sells his "success" books and cassets to the members of the audience that come to listen to famous people sharing their success stories.

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Shock Doctrine

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism published in 2007, Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist, explores the subject of a free market economy practices at a different angle. Klein explains how governments used the power of shock to advance their agenda, defining this phenomena as shock doctrine.

Klein refers to the radical ideas of Milton Friedman, an American economist and a Nobel Laureate, who once wrote in one of his most influential essays "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". Friedman's main idea was to use natural or political disasters as market opportunities in order to achieve major administrative changes.

In the video Naomi Klein created in collaboration with Alfonso Cuaron, Klein draws a parallel between CIA experiments on psychiatric shock therapy, that proved to be partially successful in distorting patients’ original personality, and an economic shock therapy that historically proved to be effective in implementing aggressive free market reforms, applying her shock doctrine to coup in Chile, massacres in China, terrorist attacks in New York and a tsunami in Sri Lanka.