I was thinking about this with Edward Bernays recently. He is considered the 'father of Public Relations', and comes up in a lot of pseudo-sciency conversations, like Adam Curtis's documentary, "The Century of the Self." *

Bernays comes up a lot in counter-cultural circles, but it's always bugged me that I've never seen any validating evidence that his techniques were actually effective, beyond "he came up with the idea of 'freedom torches' and smoking went up among women."

His techniques sound interesting, and they feel like they'd be effective, but I had trouble finding any solid research that validated the idea that his techniques were effective at anything other than making himself famous.

(* Don't get me wrong – I love Curtis's films, as art. But it bugs me how they usually present a flood of information presented as fact, with little to know citation or corroboration. If they were just art, it wouldn't bug me, but a lot of people seem to swallow the films' conclusions wholesale.)