A good profile of motivational researcher Ernest Dichter from the Economist. It looks at his ideas about American consumers’ emotional drive to shop and the backlash against his work in the late ’50s from, among others, Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders.

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In the case of soap, he found that bathing was a ritual that afforded rare moments of personal indulgence, particularly before a romantic date (“You never can tell,” explained one woman). He discerned an erotic element to bathing, observing that “one of the few occasions when the puritanical…