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Forewarned is Eight-Armed

Amusingly, today's article comes to us from Nautilus.

     The Octopus Propaganda Hidden in Modern Maps  
An old visual trick may promote conspiratorial thinking about global power

I say "amusingly" because octopuses are tentacled cephalopod molluscs, and so are nautiluses, which that site is named for.

Just to be clear, I did some digging and it seems that once a word is indisputably a part of English, it's acceptable and even stylistically proper to form a plural with it in the standard English manner. What's weird, though, isn't that they're occasionally pluralized with their ancient forms, but that, while both are words of Greek origin, the other proper plurals are "octopodes" and "nautili." The former is a Greek plural form; the latter, Latin.

Hence why I think I'm going to go with the "just use English and stop being pedantic" idea. The only awkward thing is that "octopuses" sounds way too close to "octopussies," but it would be far from the only word that would make middle-schoolers giggle knowingly, so... whatever.

In any case, I really don't want to make this a blog about etymology, so on to the article.

For centuries, an odd form of iconography has maintained a stranglehold over the globe: the octopus map.

Ho, I see what you did there. Octopus. Stranglehold.

Political cartoonists and mapmakers have long used the creature to illustrate a wide variety of forces threatening to throttle their foes: from empires, religious groups, and ideologies to financial systems—even abstract concepts such as the great unknown.

This is, of course, blatantly unfair to the entire octopus species. They're not trying to take over the world. I mean, I have no doubt that they could if they wanted to. But they're not trying to.

Map-dwelling military octopuses multiplied through the 20th century: They were commonly drawn during both World Wars, for instance, by satirists and cartoonists on both sides of these conflicts.

This iconography was adopted by Marvel, in which the symbol of Hydra was a stylized, but easily recognizable, octopus. With a human skull, which would probably annoy biologists to no end if they were still following Marvel comics and movies after the whole "radioactive spider," "gamma ray Hulk," "shrink down to subatomic size," and "superpowers from industrial waste" things, to name just a few.

I digress. The point is, that icon came from somewhere, and I think it was, in part, inspired by these octopus maps; the Hydra that the villainous organization was named for had multiple heads, not arms.

Michael Correll, a data visualization researcher, and his colleagues at Northeastern University wondered if these data-driven images were making subconscious appeals to audiences’ emotions, so they set out to assess how octopus iconography works on the mind.

We fear what we don't know, and we and octopuses inhabit vastly different ecosystems, so for a long time, they were largely unknown. Plus, they're alien-looking, hence scary.

What they found is that even subtle octopus imagery in maps can inspire conspiratorial thinking in viewers.

Ah! But that's what They want you to think!

There's some information in there about the methodology they used, but I'm not going to weigh in on it. Just my usual disclaimer: this is one study, not settled science.

Ultimately, their survey results indicated that even the more subtle maps “could still engender negative sentiments and attributions of ill-intent” on a similar scale to those with more overt octopus imagery.

I also have no idea how or even if they controlled for participants' preconceptions. For instance, I'm willing to wager that the result would be somewhat different if the octopus was on one's own country than on someone else's.

This suggests that it’s important to pay close attention to details in data visualizations, as they can have a major impact on audiences’ thinking.

What it suggests to me is that it's remarkably easy to use iconography to sway viewers' emotions. This power can, of course, be used for either good or evil. Or somewhere in the middle. Point is, it's a form of propaganda and mind control by itself, one potentially misleading the viewer into thinking that the Other is the evil one when, to paraphrase a famous horror movie line, sometimes the scary phone call is coming from inside the house.

But, as they say, knowledge is power. If you're aware of this sort of thing, perhaps you can be armed (pun absolutely intended. Octopus? Armed? I'll be here all week; try the veal) against their machinations. Or, like with the blatant psychological techniques employed by marketers and grocery stores, you could just shrug and get on with your shopping. Ooooh, Oreos!