Rocket looks unimpressed by my new book, but that’s just his way.  He’s a reserved gentleman.

Seinfeld, the popular TV comedy, is one of my favorite entertainment sources.  Melanie and I watch it frequently and still laugh like we’ve been drinking even after repeated viewings of the same episodes.  Past the zany humor, one element that always attracts me is the accurate unfolding of one daunting persuasion concept:  dissonance.  The writers clearly read my early persuasion work, understood it better than I, then employed these concepts in every episode with every character.

Each main character is an admitted failure.  They can’t keep jobs.  They can’t keep steady intimate relationships.  They can’t execute elaborate or simple plans.  They can’t master their domains.  Everything they do leads to a negative consequence.  Yet instead of falling into a dyfunctional pit of psychosis in the face of failure, all the characters possess a high functional psychology.  They observe.  They reason.  They compare.  They test.  They communicate.  They live.

In high comic relief, Seinfeld shows the outcome from dissonance:  I’m okay.  Despite the unbroken chain of failures and clear awareness of those failures, the Seinfeld crew rolls on in peaceful psychological unity.  Their psyches, collective or individual, never break, never change, never grow.  They’re all okay.

The way they stay okay is through dissonance.  Each persists in the things that cause suffering, embarassment, and loss rather than changing.  All will fail in intimate relationships because each in their own way must find one ridiculous flaw – man hands, a bad name, long sideburns.  Jerry will enjoy a successful career that provides a lot of work and money, but his friends and family will always consider him as a prophet without honor in his own land always on the verge of failure.  Kramer will never have a paying job or even a job he does without pay because he is incompetent, but he will always see himself as the Renaissance man.  George revels in each failure.  Elaine sees herself as the pretty girl with ambition when she is just a roundheels with a bad temper.

So, the next time you watch Seinfeld, remember part of their success is through the accurate and artful deployment of dissonance in daily life.

Who says persuasion isn’t popular?

Today, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times provides, ineluctably unaware of course, an illustration of a human on the dissonance path.  She decries the predations of Google and Craigslist on journalism and worries about the impending loss of journalism as a check and balance.  She wonders why Google doesn’t pay her for the content she provides to their search engine.  She realizes that Google is already looking for her replacement.  Through it all, she never considers the possibility that perhaps her own actions have contributed to the decline of journalism in general and of the New York Times in particular.

Thus, we have a human facing negative consequences, some of which must certainly be a direct function of her own prior decisions and actions.  But, accepting responsibility for the sorry and declining state of journalism (general and particular) would cost an enormous amount of psychic pain.  You would have to admit that “your” journalism is a failure and that the large scale, continuing, and unabated declines can be attributed to your flaws.

To avoid that responsibility (”I caused a failure”), Dowd demonstrates in her column the two most obvious coping mechanisms:  External attributions and self-bolstering.

The external attributions are easy to spot:  Google did it! and Craigslist helped!  Echoing Eve from Genesis, Maureen Dowd explains these bad outcomes simply:  The devil did it.

Lost from consideration, of course, is the many massive and obvious failures of journalism general and particular in the past 10 years.  Looking only at her Times, one might also see the roots of failure in:  the Jayson Blair scandal, the Judith Miller scandal, incompetent business practice from the family ownership, just for starters.

In the face of failure, Dowd engages in self-bolstering with the familiar assertion of “checks and balances” as if her job was described in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Dowd doesn’t write for the fame or the fortune, but rather to speak truth to power.  She stands between us and tryanny, you know.  She stood on the Pettus Bridge, caught John Dean redhanded, made Reagan confess Contra, found the blue dress, took the pictures at Abu Ghraib, and, . . . of course not.

And, she believes what she writes.

That’s what happens when you are on the dissonance path.  And, as long as Dowd and apparently most other journalists, stay on that path, journalism cannot change, adapt, and improve, but merely maintain its status as a Buggy Whip Industry. (And even that metaphor should be updated to the Detroit Auto Industry – another illustration of folks trapped on the dissonance path.)

It’s not easy being a human.

. . . he was puzzling over certain questions to which he would have liked to find an answer before it was too late.  They were rather naive questions; they concerned the meaning of suffering, or, more exactly, the difference between suffering which made sense and senseless suffering.”

p.206 “Darkness at Noon,” by Arthur Koestler.  Bantam Books paperback edition, 1966.

I have found no other work of fiction in a long lifetime of reading that explores and expresses cognitive dissonance better than Arthur Koestler’s classic novel about the Soviet Union.  Koestler describes the arrest, torture, trial, and execution of a famous, but aging Communist leader, Rubashov, who has fallen afoul of Number 1 and the Party.  The book describes in painful detail the psychological operation of beliefs, inconsistencies, and dissonance reduction.  Rubashov comes early to the Revolution as a teenager who fights against the repressive Monarchy in the Revolution, then continues the struggle as a missionary to other European countries, most notably Germany, where he suffers imprisionment and torture, then fortunate escape back to Russia.  Through it all he remains true, consistent, and untroubled in all his actions – his own physical suffering and the suffering he causes to others in the name of ideology.  He burns with the flame of true belief and gladly suffers anything in its name and glory.  He operates under this code:  A revolutionary should never think through the mind of another.

Then he becomes imprisoned, accused of plotting to kill Number 1 (they really did talk like that back then; and for you real James Bond fans, Koestler writes about SMERSH – and you thought it was just a fictional detail invented by Ian Fleming!).  Rubashov then begins to break the rule.  He begins to remember specific people he caused to be killed and he begins to empathize with them and think through their minds, their point of view.  Yet this introspection serves not to weaken Rubashov’s beliefs, but rather to strengthen them, just as dissonance theory explains and predicts.  Rubashov dies a believer with questions, but without shame, guilt, or conscience.

If you are under the age of 30 or thereabouts, we’re talking about Ancient History and Its Dustbin, but you can still read the novel as an outstanding artistic and, for our interests here, persuasion achievement even if you think the Cold War is just something that shows up on a True-False test.  Koestler, himself an early advocate and acolyte of Communism during his young student days in Europe, knew many of the early Russian Communists and followed their lives through the grim years after the euphoria of the 1917 Revolution.  (If you’re a postmodern political hipster, you need to read about Koestler – it should be a cautionary biography to anyone who thinks you can think an idea through to its consequences and live accordingly).  Like so many other intellectuals, Koestler became dissillusioned with Communism and wrote “Darkness at Noon” to express that broken faith.

[Sidebar:  For a modern update on dissonance and the political Left, watch the documentary, "The Weather Underground."  Consider these quotes from violent lefties of that day.  "When you feel that you have right on your side you can do some horrific things."  Brian Flanagan.  Or, another Weatherman, Mark Rudd, noting the "demented logic" . . .led to "a cherished hate worn as a badge of moral superiority."]

I who grew up with the Cold War conflict and it is now somewhat odd to reread Koestler’s book given the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 collapse of Communism.  The Cold War is as dated as Ramblers, crystal set radios, home farms, and typewriters.  Was it ever real?  Did it really happen?

Robert Cialdini does some of the best work in persuasion I’ve encountered.  He works in the hard part of research, the part between theory and practice.  He’s that rare talent who can move within, across, and between different worlds, offend neither and thrive in both.  His success is Shakespearian – he gets applause from both scientists and practitioners.  If you’ve never encountered his work, start with his book, “Influence.”  After that you’ll have to learn research methods, statistics, and join the frozen chosen of various professional associations to drill down to his details.  Today we’ll look at a new study he published with his colleagues in the Journal of Consumer Research, “A Room with a Viewpoint:  Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels,” with his coauthors Noah Goldstein and Vladas Griskevicius.

First, let me orient you to the Main Point:  Cues can produce fast changes at low cost.

Cialdini and colleagues cooperated with hotels to develop simple cues (a persuasion tool that changes people without requiring significant thinking) that would motivate hotel customers to reuse their towels during visits longer than one night.  The effect turns on the difference between these two messages.

JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT or

HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT

You don’t need a doctorate in persuasion to see what’s going on here.  Both messages make a prosocial appeal (”save the environment”) and allow a quick and easy way to follow your social conscience:  Reuse towels during your hotel stay.  The Special Sauce in Cialdini’s approach (the first message) takes the prosocial appeal an adds a normative comparison (”join your fellow guests”).

But, gee whiz, how much a difference can a few words make in a message hanging from the knob in your bathroom?  And, gee whiz, hotels are already doing this?  Can “Join your fellows guests” make anything happen?

Cialdini’s crew worked with hotel staff to carefully measure guest behavior to ensure an accurate count of which guests did reuse their towels over longer stays.  The interventions lasted several weeks (they did two different interventions with two different hotels).  In the first test, the Industry Standard message – Help Save the Environment – worked with . . . what do you think?  What percentage of guests recycle their towels?

The number was 36%.  So, that’s the baseline, the Standard Sauce, the Old Thing.  What happens when you add those few words – Join Your Fellow Guests?

The number was 45%.

A classic small effect, a 10 point (almost) difference.  Just by adding a few norm based words, we get more action.  Clearly those few words prompt an immediate, quick, and relatively thought-free response characteristic of the Comparison cue (if others are doing it, you should too!).

[Sidebar:  Cialdini's crew ran another intervention that varied the kind of norm appeal from a global "good citizen of the world" to more specific examples such as "men and women like you" or "75% of the people who stayed in your Room 373."  The Standard Sauce delivered a compliance rate of 37%, almost identical to the previous study - isn't it amazing how consistent people are?  The Special Sauce of the norm appeals produced an average compliance rate of 42% with the most specific norm language ("75% of the people in Room 373") produced a rate of 49%.  The main point is the norm language with just a few extra words produces that small effect gain.]

This study is just a classic illustration of cue-based persuasion riding on norms to produce change.  Notice how simple, direct, and cheap this persuasion tactic is.  Hotels already have signs, posters, and other messages all over the place, so there’s no additional costs here for a new device, machine, or person.  Do what you already do, just add these words:  Join your fellow guests.

Normally, peripheral route persuasion with a cue is a less effective approach because the central route with that “long conversation in your head” with arguments produces so much more change.  But realize that if you are smart and apply the right cue at the right moment you create a kind of persuasion gravity like falling off a log.  There you are in your hotel room, out of script, probably in a different time zone, a bit off, a bit disoriented or distracted, drying off after a shower and you see that card – Join Your Fellow Guest to Save the Environment – and all you have to do is hang the towel on a rack – and you’ve done a good deed.

This is the art of the nudge, persuasion as judo, where a well timed and placed move intersects with the motion of everyday life and boom, you’ve got change.

Persuasion is so cool when you do it right.