Underdog or overlord?

Submitted by Rebecca Moulds (United States), Apr 1, 2009 at 19:43

The use of psychology seems to apply to the very clever use of the size of a region in determining who is the underdog, and who is the overlord, or more precisely, who is perceived by the viewer as underdog. But this can hardly be an honest assessment or a valid survey, if in both circumstances, merely changing the size of a region can change someone's opinion.

This proves that humans are subjective rather than objective, and can be easily tricked into believing one thing over another, regardless of facts or statistics. In the 1950's film, The King and I, Anna was teaching the royal children about the world. A map was produced which showed the correct size of Siam (Thailand) in regards to the rest of the world. The prince was livid, because the map they had previously used showed Siam to be at least twenty times larger, thus enabling the students to believe that Siam was indeed not only a great kingdom, but a very large one, too, that swallowed up the countries around it.

Fear or respect, dominion over submission--it seems that emotions play a much larger part in forming opinions than logic, knowledge and objectivity do.

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