The Institute for Propaganda Analysis operated in New York from 1937 to 1942, and its central insight is the one that makes this whole part of the guide possible: a technique that has been named is processed differently from one that has not.
Its seven devices are in chapter 62 and are worth restating as an instrument rather than as history.
Name-calling: attaching a negative label so that a person or idea is rejected without examination.
Glittering generality: attaching a virtue word — freedom, security, common sense, the people — so that it is accepted the same way.
Transfer: borrowing the authority of a respected symbol, a flag, a uniform, a laboratory coat, and carrying it to something unrelated.
Testimonial: an endorsement or condemnation from a respected or hated figure, whose relevance is not established.
Plain folks: the speaker establishing that they are one of us.
Card stacking: selective presentation, where the omissions do the work.
Bandwagon: everyone is doing this, and you are being left behind.
The mechanism the IPA identified without the vocabulary for it is what inoculation theory later formalized. An unnamed device is absorbed affectively — the adjective produces the feeling and the feeling is mistaken for a judgment. A named device is converted into a classification task, and classification is analytical. You cannot simultaneously be moved by a glittering generality and be identifying it as one.
The protocol is therefore a single habit: label the device before responding to the content.
The practical version takes about a minute and is the exercise from chapter 62. Take any political or commercial paragraph and strike out every evaluative adjective and adverb. Read what remains.
Very frequently nothing remains — the paragraph was a sequence of labels with grammar between them, and there is no proposition to agree or disagree with. Where something does remain, you now have a claim you can examine.
The second half of the protocol is the question card stacking is vulnerable to, and it is the hardest to remember because absences are not salient: what is missing? What would this argument look like if the strongest opposing evidence were included, and does the speaker acknowledge that it exists?
The IPA closed in 1942. The reason given at the time was the war — that teaching citizens to be skeptical of persuasion had become politically impossible when the government needed to persuade them. That is worth noticing, and it is the reason the material has to be maintained by individuals rather than by institutions.
This counters Law 18.