For some people central route persuasion may seem to be a more honorable and honest approach to persuasion. You seek motivated receivers who want the best information before they reach a choice. You provide the strongest arguments for your case and let your opponents offer their arguments. Let the best side win.

Well, it may be more honorable, but it is not necessarily the most effective approach to persuasion. You don’t have to be a football fan to understand this when you consider an example from the National Football League.

This year the NFL conjured up a new way to make money. The owners held back a handful of late season games from the standard TV contract and created a new “NFL Network” that carries these eight Thanksgiving to Christmas games played on Thursdays and Saturdays. It’s a smart marketing move. During this time period college football is not active because the regular season is complete and most of the bowl games don’t start until Christmas. So, football junkies are down a pint for this month. Into the void steps the NFL Network with eight games to be available during the typical times when college games would air.

From a persuasion perspective I’d call this a scarcity move (when it is rare, it is good). Typically employed as a peripheral route strategy, scarcity operates on a low WATT processor who feels the pressure of the rare thing (like those home shopping channels that make a product available “only in this hour”) and without carefully looking at the merits of the thing makes a purchase. In this instance, I do not think that the NFL is using scarcity as a peripheral route tactic. Instead, the NFL is deliberately creating a scare item (football games available during a period when they are not usually available), and using that scarcity as an argument to support the consumer purchase of the product. The reasoning goes like this – “I’m a football fan and I love watching football on TV. From Thanksgiving to Christmas there is less football on TV. The NFL Network is now offering games during the dry spell. Yippee!!!” This is not a peripheral process. This is central route. The scarcity of the product is truly an argument that bears on the central merits of the purchase. In fact, this is just a nice illustration of economics and the relationship between supply and demand. When this is true, it is killer central route persuasion and the source is in line for a major gain.

So, this sounds like smart business . . . except, virtually no one is able to see the games.

See, since these games are outside of the standard TV contract, no one is contractually obligated to carry the games. Producers like NBC, ESPN, Fox, and CBS and cable operators like Time-Warner, Comcast, etc. agreed to deliver all NFL games – except these eight – as part of the contract. It looks like the NFL wanted more money for these eight games, but the usual gang of suspects didn’t want to pay the premium, so they declined the offer. The NFL is stuck with having these eight games, but can’t get them out to the public. Now, the NFL Network is trying to manipulate public opinion into pressuring these groups to deliver the NFL Network games at rates the producers and operators don’t like.

If you visit the NFL website they promeniently feature their concerns about the evil cable operators. They offer highly edited quotes that appear to offer some sympathy to the NFL and provide various strategies that outraged NFL fans can pursue to register discontent with cable operators. And if you are a real sports fan, you can see people like Tony Kornheiser make snide comments about the failure of his cable operator to offer these games on his ESPN cable sports show, “Pardon the Interruption.” The fact that Tony is a football analyst for ESPN and therefore paid by the NFL is not disclosed.

If you take the central route, you are thinking that you can make your case on the merits. You believe that your arguments are the best arguments and will lead to more favorable elaboration activity in your receivers. It is straight-up, head-on, me-against-you, let-the-best-one-win persuasion. You don’t need to play any persuasion games that exemplify the peripheral route – no CLARCCS cues – just straight out logos, classic Aristotle, and the best arguments for rational minds.

The persuasion problem for the NFL here is that their arguments are not clean, simple, and fundamental. They wanted more money for these eight games and in a fair marketplace, they couldn’t get any takers for their offer. The NFL is now trying to mobilize their fan base to attack the cable operators and get the operators to take an offer they’ve already refused. As long as the fan base does not realize this, the NFL might succeed in this persuasion strategy. However, we are now in the seventh week of the scarce resource and the cable operators have not changed their minds. It looks like the NFL brought a knife to a gun fight. We’ll see confirmation of this if the NFL Network disappears after this year.

Remember the Rules: Great persuaders don’t need rich uncles, kindness from strangers, or third party vote splitters.

Today we learn that a medical Expert proposes a new solution to the obesity epidemic. According to an article in the “Daily Mail” newspaper:

“Oversize clothes should have obesity helpline numbers sewn on them to try and reduce Britain’s fat crisis, a leading professor said today. And new urban roads should only be built if they have cycle lanes, according to Naveed Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow.”

There’s more . . .

“Prof Sattar also wants ads for slimming services without independent evaluation banned, TV ads for sweets and snacks stopped before 9 pm, higher tax on high fat and high sugar foods and tax breaks for genuine corporate social responsibility.” (You can read the article if you’d like.)

Where to begin?

A point about journalism first. If free speech falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Whether it makes a sound is debatable, but it certainly doesn’t make a profit. The first rule of journalism in any form is to attract the ears and eyes and today journalism clearly believes it can attract ears and eyes with experts, particularly health and safety experts.

Second, let’s realize that obesity is a health risk and that we’ve known about this not just in the past year, decade, or millenium, but since we’ve got recorded time. When you get seriously overweight, you will have health problems. No news here.

And, third, we know that while there are multiple causes of obesity, when there is a sudden and large increase in the percentage of obese people in a society, typically the largest cause is not medical, but rather lifestyle factors. That is, when you find a society that quickly goes from a lot of lean people to a lot of fat people, the cause is not a virus or bacteria or some other new ailment, but rather that the society has figured out a way to generate a lot of cheap, abundant, and safe food for all of its people and people are having trouble controlling their behavior.

Professor Sattar must be an Expert in metabolic medicine. That’s beyond dispute. He’s a professor at a university, he’s got the lab coat, a bar chart, and probably a pill. He knows all about the biochemistry of anabolic and catabolic functions and everything that makes our motors run faster and slower. No news here.

But what has the Professor’s expertise in metabolic medicine got to do with any expertise in the lifestyle problem of obesity? His CV online makes no mention of any training, experience, or skill in behavior change at either the individual or social level. Now, on a fairly common sense basis, if I was trying to create behavior change in people I don’t think I’d say, “hey, find me an Expert in metabolic medicine.” In much the same way if I was suffering from hyperthyroidism, I don’t think I’d say, “hey, find me an expert in Behavior Change.”

Yet, the Professor has no shame in making behavior change recommendations and the “Daily Mail” of Britian has no shame in printing those recommendations. Should we take any of this seriously from a Healthy Influence perspective?

Well, let’s see . . . what kind of behavior change theory supports his recommendations (helpline phone numbers in oversized clothing, higher taxes on various foods, requirements for cycling lanes)? The range of recommendations vary from information (helpline numbers, nutrition labeling) to regulation (taxation, required road building policy).

There’s good evidence and simple common sense to demonstrate that regulation does change behavior. Primary seat belt laws, for example, do create greater compliance and lower mortality and morbidity rates. It’s arguable that regulations in the form of taxes and road building, however, would not do much to change individual behavior because these regulations do not address the primary causes (cheap, tasty, safe, abundent, accessible food) of the problem. It’s also an argument of last resort for an expert to make. (”I can’t persuade these damn fools to keep from hurting themselves, dammit, pass a new law RIGHT NOW!” Gee whiz, any citizen can make this appeal. What’s the point of being an expert if you fall into magical thinking?)

Then what about the more persuasion orientated ideas from the Professor? While there’s again good evidence and good common sense that providing information and education does change behavior, the literature is pretty clear that there is one very serious limitation to the effect: If people already know or think they know about the problem, “new” information is not likely to be seen as new and will be discounted or ignored. In other words, “new” information had better be truly new information and not simply the pedantry of an untrained and ignorant expert. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in Britain or the Western World is uninformed about the link between overeating and obesity. Information ain’t the Special Sauce here.

I do not doubt for a moment the sincerity of Professor Sattar. He believes what he says and he says what he believes. And while this is true, no one should doubt that his sincerity can do no good for the problem he seeks to solve. Further, I’d argue that experts like Sattar make the problem worse. His bad persuasion attempts only serve to reinforce the existing beliefs and attitudes of the people he’d like to change. His recommendations are likely perceived as weak attacks that people can easily overcome. Thus, Sattar is running a bad inoculation experiment that does make existing attitudes and beliefs stronger, but the problem is that he wanted to change those attitudes and beliefs. Instead of taking one small step toward success, experts like Sattar make a giant leap into failure.

If you can’t succeed, don’t try. All bad persuasion is sincere. It’s about the other guy, stupid.

If you follow the NBA you know that the league is using a new basketball this season. David Stern, the commissioner of the league, made this decision as part of a marketing agreement with a basketball manufacturer, Spaulding. A new brand of ball will probably sell like hotcakes because who wants to play streetball with the “old” one when there’s a “new” one, right? You’d also assume that this marketing agreement brings benefits to the players as part of the overall profit sharing that goes on between the owners and the players. So, everyone is happy.

Except everyone isn’t happy. The players have been complaining all season about this lousy new ball. Early predictions were uniformly negative. Most people expected scoring to go down and turnovers to go up because the damn ball is no damn good.

Except a couple of months into the season, “. . . statistically there has been an improvement in shooting, scoring, and ball-related turnovers . . .” according to Commissioner Stern. Yet because the players remain unhappy about having this new ball forced upon them, the league is going back to the “old” ball.

What’s going on here? Listen to a player for a clue.

“For the league to be successful, obviously the players have to be happy. The basketball is the most important thing to us,” said LeBron James, one of several NBA All-Stars who criticized the new ball. “Like I said before, you can change the dress code, you can make our shorts shorter, but when you take our basketball away from us, that’s not a transition we handle.”

“. . . but when you take our basketball away from us . . .” Bingo! That sounds like players perceived an unfair restriction upon their behavior and responded with classic reactance. While this situation is clearly not a carefully controlled experiment, the combination of player resistance and statistics of better oncourt performance with the new ball leads me to see this as an entirely preventable circumstance. On a rational basis, the new ball functions at least as well if not better than the old ball on key criteria like scoring and turnovers. But players are still upset, so something else is going on.

Whatever Mr. Stern did during the development of the new ball and its use in the league, he clearly did not communicate with the players enough to make them believe they were truly consulted.

I do not believe for one minute that Mr. Stern arbitarily and autocratically jammed this new policy on the players. I’m sure that many of them knew about the coming change and participated in its development. However, their participation in their eyes at least was not sufficient to preclude that sense of unfair restriction.

This leads us to the art of persuasion. Even if you don’t know the term, “reactance,” you still realize that people will get ornery if they think you’re messing with their freedom. How do you get the new ball in play without starting a revolution? It would be interesting to know whether Mr. Stern received any formal public committment for the new ball from any players prior to implementing the new policy. My guess is that he did not. (Or if he did those players were perceived as willing confederates to the commissioner and hence were not perceived as “real” representatives.) When people participate in the planning of activities that affect their perceived freedom, they tend to accept restrictions as fair.

Of course, this tactic requires that you know how to manage the participation in a way that leads you to where you want to go rather than in some other direction. But, that’s a persuasion problem for another post.

I’ve made enough progress on the new website to feel confident about blogging on it. This week I’ll post up what I’ve got and see how it runs.

This major revision came about when Matt Martin asked me to teach persuasion courses for the WVU Communication Studies program. My academic persuasion website had been up since the mid-1990s, but hadn’t been updated since 1998 when I left WVU to join the Federal goverment. The www.HealthyInfluence.com consulting website has been up since 2002 and had not been significantly revised since 2004. Matt’s request motivated me to rethink my online persuasion work.

I’m now combining both websites and their academic and consulting functions into one unified site at www.HealthyInfluence.com. The whole thing is held together by “Steve’s Primer of Practical Persuasion.” That page has a Google page rank of 7 and has literally hundreds of external websites that link back to it. A good and free online textbook available since 1996 has clearly attracted some attention and support, so why not focus upon it?

This new website will also encourage me to develop an idea I’ve been thinking about since I was a little kid. Warning - Geek Alert! When I was a little kid my parents bought me an encyclopedia set that included a “teaching machine.” This was in 1966 so the technology was laughable by today’s standards, but it was an interesting, functional, and useful machine. It was essentially a view screen. You would load sheets of paper with lots of text on them in sequence. The view screen would block out key portions of the text that forced you to “fill in the blank.” If you were having trouble completing any section, you could bring up a different sheet of paper and receive new instruction. The thing was a kind of Skinner box for learning.

Every since then, I’ve been fascinated with how people learn and the best way to teach them. As a result, throughout my academic career I’ve always been encouraged to focus on research activities, but I contine to keep coming back to instruction. It’s just more fun and interesting to me than any research project I’ve done.

My long term goal, therefore, is to develop Healthy Influence as an online instructional source for all things persuasion. Right now the instructional value of the site is with the Primer. And the Primer is a pretty good instructional resource. It does not simply describe persuasion concepts and theories, it teaches them. If you’ve got any kind of experience with college level texts you know that most of them are good at explaining, but not necessarily at teaching. I wrote the Primer not as a state of the art review and analysis of the literature, but as a learning tool. Now, I’ll continue on that path, but add new learning tools to the Primer. My ultimate goal is to create an “instructional engine” a motor that drives learning.