My local supermarket has been transformed. Chocolate eggs and bunnies now dominate the entrance. The display is spectacular and gives me cause to pause for a moment.
I need to reorientate myself, I have kind of forgotten what I came in for now. This is a psychological phenomenon known as Gruen’s transfer, the intentional befuddlement of consumers, with the aim of extracting more cash from them.
The occasion for the excessive promotion of chocolate eggs and bunnies was, of course, Easter.
For the vast majority of Christian denominations, Easter is the oldest and most important of all celebrations: a commemoration of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These are events of central importance to Christian theology. But what have chocolate eggs and bunnies got to do with all that?
As a child, I remember asking this very question in Sunday school class. It was a sincere enquiry and the teacher had a great answer.
The stone that covered the entrance to Christ’s tomb, the teacher explained, was egg-shaped. It kind of made sense to me at the time, and for many years, chocolate eggs, as far as I was concerned, were actually egg-shaped chocolate stones.
But, in the Western Church at least, Easter is celebrated on the first full moon following the northern spring equinox (between March 21 and April 25). Surely the coincidence of the spring equinox with Easter has something to do with the predominant egg and bunny symbolism?
The spring equinox had been celebrated for millennia before the arrival of Christianity. Mythologists draw parallels to earlier traditions of the Sumerian deity Ishtar, as well as ancient Egypt’s Horus and the Greco-Roman Dionysus (or Bacchus) to name just three. We might also consider the celebration of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, whose festival was celebrated in the spring and whose symbol was a rabbit.
Today, however, the forces of commercialisation have hijacked the celebration. The commercialisation of Easter, just like the commercialisation of Christmas isn’t particularly resonant with the essence and meanings of those events.
Of course, it is not only faceless, profit-hungry, corporations who are capable of hijacking Jesus. The conflict in Syria has some people waxing eschatological about all sorts in an attempt to justify a particular narrative or other. The internet and social media greatly facilitate this type of demagoguery – perhaps one of the most negative aspects of our information age. For some warped preachers, the Syrian conflict is an opportunity to call for the destruction of Damascus in the belief that a ruined Syrian capital will usher in the second coming.
So, we have psychological master manipulators, bamboozling us with Gruen’s transfer in the name of profits, with little concern for prophets. While others preach poison from the pulpit, furthering nothing but their own dubious political agendas.
The solution, of course, is greater awareness and education.
Specifically, we need a global increase in psychological literacy. Greater understanding of social psychological concepts – conformity, cognitive dissonance and groupthink etc – would also certainly make us less vulnerable to manipulation.
Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States.