Psychological Operation, Language and Structure of Knowledge

Psychological operation is a pre-planned system used to alternate the perception and consequently the behavior of a target audience. The successful execution of such a scenario requires full appreciation of audience characteristics as well as the methods and tools by which they are trying to persuade and convince them. Thus, those who design psychological operations using the media should have some knowledge of the cultural and socio-political circumstances of their audiences. This in turn requires a profound understanding of the most complicated inter-relations between the structure of human knowledge and institutions which effect the creation and development of that knowledge. In other words, psychological operations through the media should concentrate on the nature of inter-relations between human’s normal, cognitive, instrumental and emotional structures. Through recognizing the elements that dominate these structures and by tapping into the values related to them, such as honesty, truth, effectiveness and aesthetics, the media has its hands on the right material for disturbing the balance between subjectivity and objectivity, therefore rebuilding structures which lead to awareness such as climate making, selection and homogenization. Since the nature of language is based on shared meaning, making a change in the structure of awareness leads to changes in the meaning of words and such a result provides the ground for language change (narrowing or broadening the meaning of the words). This article tries to show how the media affects language through the manipulation of cognitive structures and by using psychological operation.