Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
Illustration: a dossier collage of a vintage television wall broadcasting archival news footage, surrounded by press clippings and film reels.

Techniques · Classical

Transfer

Transfer is a propaganda technique that borrows prestige or stigma from a respected or hated symbol. Flags, clergy, science-looking charts or enemy uniforms are pasted onto the message to do rhetorical work the argument cannot. It is one of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in 1937.

See 2570 transfer examples in the archive

Illustration, not an archive object

Also called Borrowed authority, Symbol transfer

Borrow prestige or stigma from a respected or hated symbol and paste it onto the message.

How to spot Transfer: the tell

Flags, clergy, science-looking charts, or enemy uniforms doing rhetorical work the argument cannot.

What Transfer is not

Relevant institutional affiliation stated as a fact.

History and effect of Transfer propaganda

IPA 1937; formalizes a move as old as religious and national iconography — pairing a message with a flag, a cross, or an enemy uniform to borrow standing the argument has not earned.

The audience's pre-existing feeling about the symbol (reverence, loyalty, fear) flows onto the message, doing work the message's own content cannot.

Lineage: IPA 1937

How Transfer propaganda works

Transfer works by adjacency. The sender places a message next to a symbol that the audience already feels strongly about: a flag, a cross or crescent, a national monument, a uniform, a laboratory coat, a university seal, a newspaper's masthead. Nothing in the message argues that the symbol's owner endorses the claim or that the symbol has anything to do with it. The link is visual or rhetorical placement. The audience's existing feeling toward the symbol (reverence, pride, trust, fear or disgust) is then available to be felt toward the message as well.

Explain moreShow less

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis described two directions (Lee and Lee 1939). Positive transfer borrows prestige: a war-bond appeal framed by a soldier's face, a fundraising stamp framed by houses of worship, a political speech delivered in front of warships. Negative transfer borrows stigma: an opponent is shown beside an enemy uniform, a hated flag or a symbol of disease, so that the disgust attached to the symbol lands on the opponent. In both cases the symbol is doing work that an argument would otherwise have to do. The sender is betting that the audience will not separate the two, and in a quick glance at a poster or a few seconds of video, most people do not.

Modern operations add a third form, institutional mimicry. Instead of borrowing a national symbol, the sender borrows the look of a trusted source: a news outlet's logo and typography, a think tank's report format, a government seal. The audience experiences the message as coming from that institution, or as belonging to its category, and extends the trust it would give the real thing. This form depends on the audience recognizing the brand but not checking where the item actually came from.

Why Transfer propaganda works

The closest laboratory analogue is evaluative conditioning: pairing a neutral stimulus with a liked or disliked one shifts attitudes toward the neutral one. Staats and Staats (1958) paired national names such as "Dutch" and "Swedish" with positive or negative words and found that ratings of the names moved in the direction of the pairing. Page (1969) argued that part of this effect came from participants guessing what the experimenter wanted, and the question of whether evaluative conditioning requires awareness of the pairing is still debated. Large reviews (De Houwer, Thomas and Baeyens 2001; Hofmann, De Houwer, Perugini, Baeyens and Crombez 2010) conclude that the effect is real but modest, and that it is stronger when people notice which things were paired.

Illustration: an empty speaker's podium with a cluster of vintage microphones and rows of empty chairs.
Illustration, not an archive object
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Applied studies have a mixed record. Gorn (1982) reported that students chose a pen color more often when it had been shown with music they liked, a widely cited demonstration of transfer in advertising, but Kellaris and Cox (1989) failed to reproduce it. Carter, Ferguson and Hassin (2011) reported that a single glimpse of an American flag shifted political attitudes months later, but the flag-priming effect did not replicate in the Many Labs project (Klein et al. 2014). The honest summary is that symbols reliably change how people feel about what sits beside them in the moment, while claims of large or lasting effects from brief exposure have not held up.

Two broader frameworks explain why transfer is persuasive when attention is low. In the elaboration likelihood model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), people who are distracted, uninvolved or rushed rely on peripheral cues rather than arguments, and a respected symbol is a classic peripheral cue. Research on source credibility, beginning with Hovland and Weiss (1951), shows that the same message is judged more believable when attributed to a trusted source, which is exactly the effect institutional mimicry exploits. The halo effect (Thorndike 1920), in which a positive impression in one respect spreads to unrelated judgments, describes the same spillover inside a single person's evaluation.

Transfer propaganda examples across eras and sides

  • Germany and the United States, 1917: war posters. The German war-loan poster Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe (Help Us Win! Subscribe to the War Loan) sets a helmeted soldier's steady gaze above the appeal to subscribe, so the viewer's respect for the soldier attaches to the bond. The U.S. Army recruiting poster Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist uses negative transfer: a rampaging ape wears a helmet labelled "militarism" and carries a club labelled "kultur", attaching disgust to the enemy nation. Both governments used the device at the same time for the same purpose. (Sources: Erler 1917; Hopps 1917)
  • Germany, 1934 to 1935: the Nuremberg rally film. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will surrounded Hitler and the party with massed flags, the eagle, marching formations and scenes of the historic city, so that the standing of the nation and its traditions was attached to one party and one leader. Historians of Nazi propaganda treat it as a central case of symbolic staging. (Sources: Welch 1993)
  • United States, 1950s: Crusade for Freedom. The fundraising campaign for Radio Free Europe, covertly funded mainly by the U.S. government through the CIA until 1971, sold stamps and mailers to the public. The 1951 stamp Give Freedom to the Captive Nations! Fight Communism! sets church spires, a synagogue, a minaret and a pagoda above a scene of soldiers attacking civilians, and the Freedom-Gram: Help Truth Fight Communism uses the Statue of Liberty. Religious and national symbols lend moral weight to the campaign. (Sources: Cummings 2010)
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  • Somalia, 1970s: the leader in the flag. A 1976 mural photographed in Mogadishu, Barre Cult of Personality Mural, sets the portrait of Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre inside the Somali flag, with soldiers and aircraft streaming out of it. The nation's symbol and the leader's face become one image, which also makes it an example of Identity fusion. (Sources: University of Wisconsin Libraries, Herbert S. Lewis collection)
  • United States, 1988 and 2003: military backdrops in both parties. Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis rode in an M1 tank for cameras in 1988 to borrow the image of military strength; the footage was widely mocked, and the opposing campaign reused it in an attack ad, which shows transfer can misfire. In 2003 President George W. Bush, a Republican, announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq aboard USS Abraham Lincoln under the "Mission Accomplished" banner shown in 'Mission Accomplished' banner on USS Abraham Lincoln, which lent the look of victory to a war that continued for years. (Sources: U.S. Navy 2003; the Dukakis tank episode is described in contemporary press and campaign histories and is not tied here to a single page-level source)
  • Russia and Israel, 2022 to 2026: borrowed institutional faces. The Russia-linked operation known as Doppelganger built clones of European news sites, with their logos and layouts, to carry pro-Kremlin articles, and the related Matryoshka clips described in Matryoshka's midterm clips: borrowed faces and a borrowed logo stamped a CNN logo on recut celebrity video. In a documented case involving a U.S. ally, Israel's government advertising agency paid through contractors for a site styled as a U.S. think tank, whose unsigned reports chatbots then cited, as described in The Hanover Institute: reports written for chatbots to cite; the foreign-agent filings for that work are public. The two differ: Doppelganger hid its sponsor entirely, while the Hanover site carried a legally required disclosure footer. (Sources: EU DisinfoLab 2022; U.S. Department of Justice FARA registration 7732)
  • United States, 1918: the Red Cross as Pietà. Alonzo Foringer's "The Greatest Mother in the World" seats a veiled nurse with a wounded soldier across her lap beside a large red cross, a composition that echoes the Pietà, so that the reverence owed to Mary and Christ flows to a charity's membership drive. See The Greatest Mother in the World: Red Cross Christmas Roll Call. (Sources: Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-10241)
  • United States, 1918: Pershing's Crusaders. A poster for a Committee on Public Information film shows General John J. Pershing leading troops under the flag while ghostly knights with red-cross shields ride behind him, so the American Expeditionary Forces are cast as heirs to a holy war. The poster carries the CPI seal. See Pershing's Crusaders. (Sources: Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-1539; Creel 1920)
  • Germany, 1914: Saint George and the Kaiser's address. A sheet sold for the Red Cross prints Wilhelm II's address of 31 July 1914, which presents the coming war as a defence against envious rivals, beneath an armoured Saint George spearing a dragon and ending with a call to kneel in church, so a religious sanction attaches to a political claim. See Unser Kaiser an sein Volk (Our Emperor to His People). (Sources: archive entry, citing the printed text)
  • England, 1588: the Armada Portrait. A court portrait of Elizabeth I, painted after the Spanish fleet's defeat, sets her between sea scenes of English ships and Spanish wrecks with her hand on a globe beside an imperial crown. Scholars read the globe, crown and sea scenes as attaching the victory and maritime empire to the queen's person. See The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I (Royal Museums Greenwich version), oil on panel. (Sources: Royal Museums Greenwich)
  • China, 1976: the founding site. A Shanghai poster shows crowds in minority-nationality dress and Pioneer scarves gathering at the building catalogued as the site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, with a Mao portrait in the upstairs room. The site's founding prestige is lent to the message that all peoples turn to the Party; it also uses Bandwagon. See "各族人民心向党" (The peoples of all nationalities turn their hearts to the Party), Shanghai poster. (Sources: Etnografiska museet, 1996.20.0003)
  • Soviet Union, 1986: Artek. A photograph of the Artek international Pioneer camp shows banners in Russian, Arabic, French and German with virtue words (peace, friendship, a happy childhood) beside a Lenin panel that pairs the Party's name with the children's loyalty. See Multilingual banners at the Artek international Pioneer camp, Gurzuf: "Für antiimperialistischen Frieden und Freundschaft". (Sources: Fortepan 84904)

The Greatest Mother in the World, Red Cross poster, 1918

Pershing's Crusaders, 1918 film poster

Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1588

All peoples turn their hearts to the Party, Shanghai poster, 1976

Explain moreShow less

Alonzo Foringer, "The Greatest Mother in the World," American Red Cross Christmas Roll Call, 1918. Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-10241. Public domain in the U.S.

"Pershing's Crusaders," Committee on Public Information, Division of Films, 1918. Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-1539. Public domain in the U.S.

Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, anonymous, c. 1588, Royal Museums Greenwich (Queen's House). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (PD-Art).

"The peoples of all nationalities turn their hearts to the Party," Shanghai, 1976. Etnografiska museet / Världskulturmuseerna, 1996.20.0003. CC BY 4.0.

Where it appears in this archive

Most of the tagged objects are First World War bond and recruiting posters from the United States, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia, such as Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe (Help Us Win! Subscribe to the War Loan), On les aura! 2e Emprunt de la Défense Nationale. Souscrivez (We'll get them! Second National Defence Loan. Subscribe), I Want You for U.S. Army and Remember Belgium — Enlist To-Day, where soldiers, flags and sacred imagery lend standing to a financial or recruiting appeal; Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist and This Is the Enemy use the negative form. Later objects range from Cold War radio fundraising (Give Freedom to the Captive Nations! Fight Communism!) and state leader imagery (Barre Cult of Personality Mural) to the one-party posters above. The method is the same on every side; what differs is who commissions it, from a charity and a ministry to a party that controls the whole media field.

How to spot Transfer propaganda

  • Cover the symbol. Remove the flag, the uniform, the logo or the religious image in your mind and ask whether the words alone still make a case.
  • Ask whether the owner of the symbol actually stands behind the claim. A flag does not endorse a product; a news logo on a clip is not proof the outlet made it.
  • Check the source directly. For anything wearing a known brand, find the item on the brand's own site or channel before trusting it.
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  • Look for symbols unrelated to the subject: religious imagery on a financial appeal, military hardware at a domestic policy speech, lab coats on a supplement ad.
  • Notice negative pairings. An opponent shown beside an enemy flag, a disease image or a criminal's mugshot format is being tarred by placement rather than by evidence.
  • Watch for the trappings of research (charts, footnotes, "Institute" names) with no named authors, address or funding disclosure.

Where Transfer propaganda ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

Transfer has close neighbors.
Illustration: a vintage broadcast microphone beside torn script pages.
Illustration, not an archive object

Transfer has close neighbors. Testimonial borrows the standing of a specific person who is presented as endorsing the message; transfer borrows from a symbol or institution that has not endorsed anything. Glittering generalities does with virtue words ("freedom," "honor") what transfer does with images, and the two usually travel together. Name-calling is the verbal twin of negative transfer. Identity fusion is transfer taken to its end point, where the leader or cause no longer borrows from the nation's symbols but claims to be them. Plain folks borrows the ordinary rather than the exalted. Institutional mimicry shades into Narrative laundering when the borrowed form is used to hide who is speaking, and into Disclosure theater when a required disclosure is present but placed where few will see it.

Not every symbol next to a message is transfer. A government seal on a document issued by that government, a flag at a state funeral, a university's logo on research its own faculty produced, and a uniform worn by a serving officer giving an official briefing all state a real affiliation. The FRAME definition excludes "relevant institutional affiliation stated as a fact." The line is crossed when the symbol implies an endorsement, a source or a moral standing that the facts do not support, or when it is chosen for its emotional charge rather than because it is relevant to the claim.

The reader's test has two questions. First, is the symbol relevant, meaning its owner actually produced, authorized or is the subject of the message? Second, if the symbol were removed, would the argument change? If the symbol is relevant and the argument stands without it, the symbol is decoration or attribution. If the symbol is irrelevant, or the case falls apart without it, the symbol is doing the persuading.

Sources and further reading

Sources

24 items · Carter, Travis J., Melissa J. Ferguson, and Ran R. Hassin. 2011. "A Single Exposure to…
  • Carter, Travis J., Melissa J. Ferguson, and Ran R. Hassin. 2011. "A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later." Psychological Science 22(8): 1011-1018.
  • Cummings, Richard H. 2010. Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom": Rallying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
  • Creel, George. 1920. Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, 1917: 1918: 1919. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
  • Foringer, Alonzo Earl. 1918. The Greatest Mother in the World. Poster. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-10241.
  • Royal Museums Greenwich. The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I (Queen's House collection).
  • Etnografiska museet / Världskulturmuseerna. Poster 1996.20.0003, "The peoples of all nationalities turn their hearts to the Party," Shanghai, 1976.
  • De Houwer, Jan, Sarah Thomas, and Frank Baeyens. 2001. "Associative Learning of Likes and Dislikes: A Review of 25 Years of Research on Human Evaluative Conditioning." Psychological Bulletin 127(6): 853-869.
  • Erler, Fritz. 1917. Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe. Poster. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-12475.
  • EU DisinfoLab. 2022. Doppelganger: Media Clones Serving Russian Propaganda. Brussels: EU DisinfoLab.
  • Gorn, Gerald J. 1982. "The Effects of Music in Advertising on Choice Behavior: A Classical Conditioning Approach." Journal of Marketing 46(1): 94-101.
  • Hofmann, Wilhelm, Jan De Houwer, Marco Perugini, Frank Baeyens, and Geert Crombez. 2010. "Evaluative Conditioning in Humans: A Meta-Analysis." Psychological Bulletin 136(3): 390-421.
  • Hopps, Harry Ryle. 1917. Destroy This Mad Brute: Enlist, U.S. Army. Poster. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-4696.
  • Hovland, Carl I., and Walter Weiss. 1951. "The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness." Public Opinion Quarterly 15(4): 635-650.
  • Kellaris, James J., and Anthony D. Cox. 1989. "The Effects of Background Music in Advertising: A Reassessment." Journal of Consumer Research 16(1): 113-118.
  • Klein, Richard A., et al. 2014. "Investigating Variation in Replicability: A 'Many Labs' Replication Project." Social Psychology 45(3): 142-152.
  • Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee (eds.). 1939. The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis.
  • Page, Monte M. 1969. "Social Psychology of a Classical Conditioning of Attitudes Experiment." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 11(2): 177-186.
  • Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. 1986. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
  • Staats, Arthur W., and Carolyn K. Staats. 1958. "Attitudes Established by Classical Conditioning." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 57(1): 37-40.
  • Thorndike, Edward L. 1920. "A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings." Journal of Applied Psychology 4(1): 25-29.
  • University of Wisconsin Libraries. Herbert S. Lewis Somalia photograph collection, photograph catalogued as "Barre cult personality," dated 8 March 1976.
  • U.S. Department of Justice. Foreign Agents Registration Act registration no. 7732 (Piro, Inc.), registration statement and informational-materials filings, 2026.
  • U.S. Navy. 2003. Photograph 030502-N-9214D-002, USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), by Photographer's Mate 3rd Class Juan E. Diaz, 2 May 2003.
  • Welch, David. 1993. The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda. London: Routledge.

Case studies

113 items · Managing the news: France's 'bourrage de crâne' and Austria-Hungary's War Press Office…

Transfer propaganda examples in the collection

All 2570 transfer examples
Fragments of the Abydos king list from Ramesses II's temple, in the British Museum: rows of royal cartouchesNew Kingdom EgyptFragments of the Abydos king list from Ramesses II's temple, in the British Museum: rows of royal cartouches0000 · Card stacking, TransferПозивъ към земледѣлското население (Appeal to the Farming Population)BulgariaПозивъ към земледѣлското население (Appeal to the Farming Population)Jun 7, 1917 · Transfer, Fear appealSulphuric Acid - Fire for the Enemy - Fertilizers for FoodUnited KingdomSulphuric Acid - Fire for the Enemy - Fertilizers for Food1939 · TransferI need your money to win this warUnited StatesI need your money to win this war1941 · TransferTelephone Line Time is Precious - Keep Your Talks ShortUnited KingdomTelephone Line Time is Precious - Keep Your Talks Short1942 · Transfer"Again the Springboard of Civilization!"United States"Again the Springboard of Civilization!"1943 · Glittering generalities, TransferGuard Your Freedom (Ilocano poster)United StatesGuard Your Freedom (Ilocano poster)Aug 8, 1952 · Glittering generalities, TransferHeraldo Grafico poster, September 1964 (Spanish poster distributed in San Salvador)United StatesHeraldo Grafico poster, September 1964 (Spanish poster distributed in San Salvador)Aug 18, 1964 · Card stacking, Transfer

Transfer in the watch briefs

All 63 briefs

Transfer in campaign dossiers

Propaganda techniques related to Transfer

TestimonialPlain folksName-callingCult of personality