One of the best ad campaigns ever was the Miller Lite Beer series in the 1980s that featured the ferocious fight:  Less Filling versus Tastes Great!  Ads mocked the point-counterpoint form of debate.  Each ad featured a celebrity who liked Miller Lite Beer because it was Less Filling followed by another celebrity who liked Miller Lite Beer because it Tastes Great.  The two celebrities might battle one another for argumentative supremacy in a hilarious irony that closed with both quaffing a bottle of beer in happy harmony.  Clearly the ads sold beer in a most subtle and funny way by pretending to take ad arguments seriously while treating the whole affair as a send up like a Monty Python skit. (For the infamous “cat fight” ad visit this YouTube link.)

The delightful irony of course is the false choice between the two attributes:  Great Taste and Less Filling.  The beer has both qualities and is best understood and appreciated with both and not as an either-or.  Yet, if you read the popular persuasion trade press, you often walk away feeling as if you have to choose among various approaches.  Without having to name any names, you know who I’m talking about.

Often times the choice presented is between:  Arguments or Cues.  Authors and readers seems to believe that there’s a primary principle, method, or concept that is the essential.

As the dual process models of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) or the Heuristic Systematic Model (HSM) make clear, you can’t get a good grip on persuasion without understanding both.  In other words, persuasion both Tastes Great and is Less Filling.  Fighting is funny, but ultimately misleading.  People are careful thinkers, the homo economus rational actor, motivated and able, high WATT processors and they are also simple minded, cue driven, mindless, low WATT processors.  They vary over time and across situations and move flexibly from arguments to cues and back again moving with the WATTage switch.

Don’t trap yourself into seeing persuasion as a particular path, as one real thing.  In this instance persuasion is not the porcupine, it is the fox.

Times are hard and you need every edge to compete in the job market.  The Interview is a crucial step in earning that new job and persuasion principles will help.  Here’s how to use persuasion during the interview.

First and always during the interview:  It’s about the other guy.  You don’t care what you want, you care what the other guy wants and you want the other guy to want you.  That means: get inside the other guy’s head.  It doesn’t matter how you think, feel, or behave.  It matters how the other guy thinks, feels, and behaves.  Got that?  A persuader constantly monitors the other guy and adjusts performance accordingly.  Get that.

Second, learn to use SOLER.  SOLER is an acronym for a set of nonverbal behaviors that indicate the cognitive and evaluative responding of the other guy.  Squarely face, Open posture, Lean in, Eye contact, and Relaxed body.  As people turn away, close up, lean out, look away, or tighten up, they are distracted and cold.  As they square up to you, open up, lean in, look at you, and relax, they are attentive and warm.  Observe the other guy’s SOLER to understand if they are listening to you and if they are liking what you are saying and doing.

Third, use your words to control three crucial persuasion functions:  WATTage, arguments, and cues.  WATTage means the other guy’s Willingness and Ability To Think.  Arguments means information of crucial importance for the job interview.  Finally, Cues means words that influence without requiring serious thinking.

WATTage is the key function you want to assess and adjust.  If the other guy is high WATT, then they will want job “arguments,” the crucial elements for the hire:  references, credential, experience, motivation, appearance, social skill.  If the other guy is low WATT, they lack the cognitive willingness and ability to think effortfully and instead will seek out “cues” like attractiveness, friendliness, fluency, glibness, stereotype fitness, or any other element that makes it easy and fast to make a judgment. WATTage varies over time, but during an interview you want as much high WATT time as possible.

Monitor WATTage with SOLER again and with question asking.  When the other guy is paying attention, you’ll see them lean in with good eye contact while squarely facing you with a relaxed body.  They’re getting it.  They’re tuned in.  That likely indicates high WATT processing.  They really want to understand you and are looking for key information about your fit for the job.  Follow up by asking questions of them to confirm that they have been listening.  As them if the qualifications you bring are what they are looking for.  You want to determine whether they are really tuned in as much as what they say.

Now, if the other guy is high WATT you’d better bring your best arguments.  The other guy is SOLER, answering your questions, and clearly shows that persuasion frame of mind that is looking for your best shot.  Now, pitch the arguments that support your hire.  Remember, it’s about the other guy, so a strong argument is not strong from your point of view, but from the other guy’s point of view.  You might be very impressed with your academic record (hey, the Dean’s List, hubba-hubba), but is the other guy impressed?  If you hit the other guy with your “strong” argument and they don’t look at you or turn away or if they respond with, “Gee, the Dean’s List is great, but we want someone with three years of experience” then you know you gave a weak argument.  Work harder and offer more arguments that get SOLER and positive evaluations.

If the other guy is low WATT, you have two options.  First and foremost, figure out why they’ve tuned you out and do something to flip the switch and make them high WATT.  Ask specific detail questions of the other guy.  Make them think and respond.  You’ve got to get that high WATT switch on so that you can play your arguments.  Strong arguments delivered to high WATT other guys get job offers.  Second, WATT can and will vary during an interview, especially one that lasts more than ten minutes.  Learn to ride the ebb and flow of WATTage and rather than fight the tide, throw out persuasion cues during some low WATT moments.  Point out superficial, but relevant points like clothing and style, prestige experiences, fun and funny moments.

Your persuasion goal is to get the other guy high WATT, then deliver strong arguments to them that make them go SOLER.

Key points for using persuasion on an interview.

1.  It’s about the other guy, stupid.
2.  SOLER shows the other guy’s attention and liking.
3.  Monitor and manipulate WATTage, arguments and cues.
4.  Provide strong arguments from the other guys perspective.
5.  Use SOLER to assess both WATTage and evaluative reactions.

In an earlier post, I noted the impact of the color red in one narrow application:  Men really liked a photo of a woman against a red background compared to many other colors tested.  So, color does make a difference.  But, the nature of that difference in this research is classic peripheral cue operation, specifically the classically conditioned Ding-Dong in Western culture of red and its associations with passion.  Red does not provide an “argument” for or against the woman, but rather simply cues the man to connect a stereotyped link between color and sex.

I think we see this kind of mindless, peripheral cue operation in the current rage over the color green and its symbolic associates (”eco-” prefixed to anything anyone wants to promote, sell, or hype).

Campbell’s Soup, maker of my beloved Chicken Noodle soup, has promoted its product line with a green label and touted its green credentials.  This action has generated positive blogging and little negative reporting. One wonders, however, at the main point:  Is the soup any better?  The only difference I’ve noted for myself is my feeling of mild anxiety over consuming “green” beef noodle soup.  Beef in the fridge with any green on it is not a good thing, and “green” food can be dangerous.  I don’t eat any less, but I do worry about food safety with “green” soup that contains chicken or beef.

Obviously, Campbell’s isn’t using green to persuade about the quality of its food, but rather to persuade about the quality of its corporate image and to head off serious attacks from environmental advocates.  So far, it appears to work.  Advocates show no obvious public signs that they’ve put Campbell’s in their gunsights.

Campbell’s has managed a risky Ding-Dong.  Green is not a color most people want to see on their food (hey, look at the labels in the supermarket next time – not a lot of green and for good reason), yet Campbell’s used that color to cue away Green attacks.

Consider the persuasion principles at play.  Color on the can in no way can be an argument for soup.  It has no bearing on the central qualities, the crucial characteristics of food.  It is also hard to claim that can color is a switch that controls WATTage.  Do people switch to high motivation and willingess to think because of color?  It may attract attention – it stands out in a crowd, but attention is not WATTage.  Unless the receiver has been specifically conditioned, color is not a WATTage switch.

Clearly color is a cue, a persuasion variable that requires no thinking to produce influence.  Some consumers and many advocates can apparently observes a “green” cue (either color or its word image – “eco”) and associate a Ding Dong in a positive fashion.

What surprises me about this single example is that it appears to work in two different ways.  First, the color green does not appear to generate negative customer response, despite the legitimate safety concern of green on food.  Second, the color green appears to distract or deflate advocacy attacks, despite its function as a cue.  Just assert you are green with a straight face and you will be okay until something changes.  To misprison Gordon Gekko, “Green is good.”

Just wait for the “green” cigarette!

If you diligently read the research literature, you’ll understand how this happened.  If you read selectively, this just sounds obsessive.  It’s both reasonable and strange.

See, a few days ago I picked up the RSS feed for a new psych journal that contained the new issue’s table of contents with abstracts.  One of the abstracts interested me, so I read the entire report and found a stray citation I didn’t remember.  I googled the author and concept and got several hits that were new to me.  I’m now in the lit maze where everything you read is new and leads you to something else and something else and pretty soon you’re deep in the rabbit hole.  I’m bouncing back between google hits on the internet and various proprietary websites like PsycNet and books on my shelf, just a rat in the maze looking for cheese the way a good scholar behaves in a literature.  You read until you doubleback on your original point, then reread everything until it coheres.

All this reopened my eyes and mind to old work that I now realize more fully is deeply foundational to modern persuasion theory and research.  I could have passed the True-False test on all of this yesterday, but today there’s a different significance to my basic knowledge.  And it goes back to Behaviorism.

My epiphany occurred while reading sections Fishbein and Ajzen’s 1975 text, “Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior.”  I finally and for the first time noticed a reference to work by a psychologist name Dulany who had taken fundamental concepts from behaviorism (Skinner and Watson, Clark Hull and Spence) and rewritten them for an early cognitive psychology.  Professor Fishbein took Dulany’s rewrites and refined them into his familliar expectancy value equation which, of course, lead to the Theory of Reasoned Action and later (from Icek Aizen) the Theory of Planned Behavior.

All of this occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s and forms in my mind that transition from early scientific psychology and behaviorism to its more modern form with cognition, the thinking organism, and the New Look.  People like Dulany and Fishbein began to push behaviorism into more domains with outstanding results.  Lost in transition for me at any rate were the modern roots of persuasion firmly grounded in behaviorism.

Right now, E.C. Tolman emerges as the key transitional and translational figure from the pure behaviorism of John Watson and B.F. Skinner into what I think of as modern persuasion theory with the dual process models built firmly on the Hovland model in turn built on behaviorism concepts.  If you’ve got any background in learning theory, you are familiar with Tolman if only for his departures from pure behaviorism during the full flower of that perspective at the turn of the 20th century.  Tolman pushed for “purposive behavior” and if you can’t see that as intention then you can’t see for the tree for the forest that would become the ELM.

Tolman in no way can be considered a persuasion theorist, but he struggled with symbol and significance or how organisms use symbols to create shared meanings that drive behavior.  The basis of attitude as psychology’s indispensible construct seems obvious to me now particularly in his early writings in Psychological Review.

For me, it’s now impossible to understand dual process persuasion models, the dominant contemporary theories of persuasion, without returning to behaviorism and the basic mechanisms of respondent and operant conditioning.  It’s a chain from Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner to Tolman, Hull, and Spence, then to translators like Dulany, Fishbein, and Hovland, to Petty and Cacioppo, and Shelly Chaiken.  Of course, there are huge distinction in each research line, but the big chain is there.

Say “hi,” to Dr. Susan Morgan, from Purdue University this year’s featured speaker for the McConnell series run by Dr. Melanie Booth-Butterfield of WVU.  Here’s Susan.

And Melanie.

And Melanie’s most able assistant Meagan Birmingham.

Susan spoke about her ten year research work in organ donation that has earned over eight million dollars in grant support and generated more research reports than ANY LIVING HUMAN IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!  Okay, that upppercase claim is a bit exaggerated, but it’s a lot.  Here’s Dr. Morgan in action.

And here, too.

Later several members of the WVU Communication Studies took Susan to dinner and a splendid time was had by all.  Susan had no problem with the banana pepper appetizer that always separates the sheep from the goats.  And I shared a chocolate cake with her after dinner just so she didn’t feel guilty.  Normally, it’s not safe to get between a woman and chocolate anything, but Dr. Morgan was most collegial.