In October 1937 a group of American academics, journalists and educators founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in New York, funded by the Boston merchant Edward Filene. Their concern was specific and urgent: radio had put demagogues directly into American living rooms, Father Coughlin's broadcasts were reaching tens of millions, and Europe was demonstrating what mass persuasion could do. Their answer was to teach analysis in schools.
The Institute's most durable product was a list, published in its Bulletin in 1938, of seven common propaganda devices. It remains the most useful short taxonomy anyone has produced.
Name calling: attaching a negative label to an idea or person so the audience rejects it without examination. Glittering generality: attaching a virtue word — freedom, justice, truth, the people — so they accept it the same way. Transfer: borrowing the authority or prestige of a respected symbol, a flag, a cross, a scientist's coat, and carrying it over to something unrelated. Testimonial: having a respected or hated person endorse or condemn. Plain folks: the speaker establishing that they are one of us. Card stacking: selective presentation of evidence, the omissions doing the work. Band wagon: everybody's doing it, get on board.
Read that list against the rest of this guide and the overlap is nearly total. Transfer and testimonial are Cialdini's authority and liking. Plain folks is unity. Band wagon is social proof. Card stacking is what most of Part 9 is about.
The mechanism underlying the first two — the labels — has a name in modern terms. Robert Zajonc argued for the affective primacy of judgment: an affective reaction to a stimulus can be generated faster than, and independently of, the cognitive analysis of what the stimulus actually is. Kahneman later folded this into the affect heuristic, in which the feeling attached to a thing substitutes for an assessment of it.
That is why labels are propaganda's cheapest and most effective instrument. A glittering generality does not make a claim you could evaluate. Freedom, security, common sense, the will of the people, innovation — each triggers approach motivation before the listener can specify what is actually being proposed, and often no proposal exists at all. A name-calling label works identically in the opposite direction, and does so before any question of accuracy arises.
Which means the adjective is doing the work of the fact, and the sentence contains no fact.
The Institute did not last. It closed in 1942, partly because the United States had entered the war and the business of teaching citizens to be skeptical of their own government's messaging had become politically impossible — a fact worth noticing on its own.
Its method survives as the simplest analytic exercise in this guide, and it takes about a minute. Take any political or commercial paragraph, and strike out every evaluative adjective and adverb. Read what remains. If a proposition survives, you can now examine it. Very often nothing survives at all, and what looked like an argument turns out to have been a sequence of labels with grammar between them.
Cross-ref: Part 11 propaganda inoculation