Read almost any daily news source and you’ll find a protest story.  A small group of dedicated advocates who see a better world than currently exists have taken to the streets to protest the evils in their corner of the world.  Today, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at one particular protester and examines his technique.  The Journal does a good job at finding one person who seems to illustrate the main points of protest persuasion.

The Journal describes Xavier Renous, a world class protest consultant, who not only plans and leads events, but also trains and advises others on the fine points of the art.  He teaches people how to chain themselves to trees, damage genetically modified crops, and withstand police interrogations along with other subtleties like using black text against an orange background for posters (it stands out better on TV).  For example:

I’ll use this story to analyze from a scientific persuasion perspective, the manner and effectiveness of protest persuasion. Consider three large persuasion concepts:  the Communication Cascade, the Persuasion Toolbox, and the Rules.  Briefly, the Cascade holds that a persuasion source must take a persuasion receiver through a series of stages from Reception to Processing to Response before achieving the ultimate goal of Behavior Change.  Failure at any communication stages dooms the attempt.  The Toolbox classifies all persuasion variables into one of three categories:  WATTage, Arguments, and Cues.  The Rules are large guiding principles of effective persuasion in action.

Let’s start with the Cascade.  Overwhelmingly, protest and advocacy groups focus on the Reception stage of the Cascade.  Most of their persuasion moves aim at getting their presence and message in front of the largest audience possible.  Fewer persuasion moves are aimed at Processing, Response, and ultimate Behavior change.  It is as if protest persuaders believe in a communication gravity whereby if you get receivers to Reception then they will inevitably fall through Processing, Response, and voila, Behavior Change.  That’s a pretty metaphor and a more pleasing concept – communication gravity and the free fall from one state to an inexorable other – but there’s no evidence to support it.

Consider now the Persuasion Toolbox.  Overwhelmingly, protest and advocacy groups focus on peripheral route cues with little attention given to WATTage and arguments.  I say this not to deride anyone’s cause, but after a thoughtful consideration of the many different examples of protest persuasion I’ve seen through my life.  Consider the three elements of the Persuasion Toolbox and decide for yourself.  We have WATTage, Arguments (and the Central Route), and Cues (the Peripheral Route).  Think about the protest communication you’ve seen and how you would classify elements into the Toolbox.

The typical language and behavior of protest persuasion is large, extreme, out of range, attention getting, simple, obvious, bright, loud, dynamic, energetic.  What Toolbox element is this:  WATTage, Argument, or Cue?

Such dominant characteristics are rarely key elements of Arguments, those crucial pieces of evidence, reasoning, and thoughtfulness.  How much elaboration can one do with street puppets, a sea of red t-shirts, rhythmic chants, or someone chained to a tree?  Thus, it is difficult to see how most protest persuasion functions as an Argument (information that bears on crucial elements of the persuasion issue).

Further, while these features attract attention, it does not seem to be the kind of attention that moves the WATTage switch from low to high.  An observer seeing protest persuasion (think of a film clip from an event) is not likely to shift processing modes.  Thus, it is hard to see most protest persuasion as something that functions as that mental switch for WATTage.

That pretty much leaves Cues as the default function for most protest persuasion.  All of that large, colorful, and energetic action functions as a simple indicator to the “correct” attitude and thus behavior.  Cues are easy to spot, easy to process, and when well done point to, underline, and boldface the “correct” behavior.  They tend to produce immediate change that rarely lasts past the presentation of the cue.

A simple persuasion analysis of protest persuasion thus points to a receipe for failure.  We see two key points:  1) Focus on Reception with less regard for following Cascade stages and 2) reliance upon persuasion Cues with less regard for producing Central Route change with high WATT processing of strong Arguments and long term change.  This analysis predicts a failed persuasion attempt.

Assessing what is “success” for contemporary protest persuasion is a difficult task.  However, if one uses concrete, observable actions as the criterion, it’s apparent that the agenda of protest persuaders, especially from the “green” orientation, has largely failed over the past 50 years.  Population continues to grow and so does demand and consumption of energy.  One could argue that protest persuasion has slowed that growth, but in the absence of good empirical evidence, a “comparative advantages” argument is really quite a weak criterion.  Besides, protest persuasion does not aim at little changes, but seeks the Big One, baby.

And, finally, consider protest persuasion and the Rules.  Reflect on these two:  1) All bad persuasion is sincere and 2) It’s about the other guy.

At the top of the list of “sincere persuaders” one would have to put protest persuaders.  Talk about people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.  If you are chaining yourself to a tree, no one would ever doubt your sincerity.  Which is large persuasion problem.  Protest persuasion is more often an act of self expression rather than an act of persuasion.

Further, protest persuasion seems to be tone deaf to “the other guy.”  Hey, you’re trying to get other people to change what they are doing.  The world doesn’t change for the better simply because you believe what you believe, but because the other guy starts believing what you believe.

My analysis leads me to conclude that protest persuasion is a lot of protest, but little persuasion.  It is more about self expression than changing the other guy.

Holy Bull Market, Batman!

The sales rank has jumped to 85,394 today from a low of 422,653 just a few hours ago.  How many copies did my mom order?

What a hoot.

This is like watching the stock market during the past year.

Interesting to observe the effects here on the sales rank number.  Clearly it is relative to both the prior total of books sold, plus new sales.  My “sales rank” before today was held constant (I think) and with the release it is now free to vary.  And the rank drops as books below sell even one book today.  To a certain extent that rank number is imaginary.  There must be thousands of titles that have the same number of Amazon sales, but they have to have different rank numbers.

In the past I’ve observed the yelping of authors who try to ignore the Amazon sales rank number and simply can’t stop looking at the car wreck.  They let their identity get tied to that number even when they know it’s foolish.  It’s like being in a social psych experiment.  Sometimes, awareness doesn’t moderate the effect.

Can’t wait until strangers post comments or reviews on Amazon.  Sure, it won’t bother me.  I’ve been through zillions of evaluations whether the hundreds of student evaluations I got when professoring, through the annual promotion, retention, and tenure reviews in both the university and the government and even reviews from consulting.  And, all those peer reviews for publication.  Yet, this is a new angle.  I’ll be interested to see how I both react and cope.

I’m betting that a vodka martini makes for easy reading.

BTW, my mother just emailed me that she’d ordered a copy.  My first sale.  The more things change . . .

Melanie and I eat at I Ricci’s for lunch whenever we get to Washington.  Even after 25 years of marriage, she’s my girl, and I love the way she looks over white linen.  At every lunch and every dinner I’ve ever shared with her over white linen, I get a flash of that old feeling, that thunderbolt, of the first time I saw her.

They gave us a table by the window, just to the left of the maitre’d station.  Men tend to like Melanie at first look and they treat her well which makes her happy and that makes me happy and then the circle completes itself with the tip.  Today was no different as several men in the staff – manager, waiter, maitre’d – greeted us with their friendly formality.  Trailing just behind the party, I observed the room and could not help but notice a distinguished elderly man carefully watching Melanie as she passed by his table.  He aimed his face ever so slightly toward his lunch companions, two earnest men about my age, but his eyes slanted to the side as he watched my wife glide by.  He approved.

Now, this happens often and after 25 years I have acquired a measure of tolerance, learning to take these moments as tributes to my girl and my good fortune.  There’s more going on inside me, of course, as when Melanie and I stood beside a swirling rush of water flooding a street in a city after a sudden downpour.  As we considered how to cross the ankle deep water, a husky young guy appeared, said to Melanie, “May I?” then proceded to lift her, Rhett Butler style, and sprint her across the street, then depositing her gracefully on the other side.  The guy hustled off as if this was just standard operating procedure and I waded through the water to my girl.  There is either tolerance or the law of the jungle.

I looked at the elderly gentleman and tried to find something in him that I admired to make him more honorable and more similar to me.  Quite surprisingly, I noted a Borsalino fedora, brown and well worn, on the chair beside him.  He had a full head of bright white hair, so the man liked hats for hats and he had excellent taste to boot.  I own several hats, including a brown Boraslino fedora.  Here was the honorable similarity.  I approved of the man.

I sat down across from my wife, a stretch of white linen between us, and that old feeling came over me.  As my girl shined for me throughout our excellent lunch, I occasionally observed her elderly admirer continue his admiration.  It was never inappropriate, but it was persistent.  From his angle with his younger companions he could maintain the appearance of appropriate conversational eye contact with them yet still keep my wife within eyeshot.  His younger companions prattled on about current events and definitely sought his opinion but it appeared to me that the older man found Melanie more interesting than any line his companions could offer.

The older man continued tacking his attention between the narrow angle of his companions and my wife as I munched the bread and sipped some wine.  It continued over salad.  At some point as I finished the caprese I lost visible control of my temperance because Melanie asked me, “Steve, what’s making you angry?”

I hadn’t quite realized that my possessiveness was rising into public awareness, but she’d seen it and now I had to explain.  You know how you are in public when this happens.  You pretend to gesture at the ornate bar or that interesting painting when you’re really referencing someone sitting in the line of your gesture.  Melanie turned slightly away from me to look at the bar and caught the older man in the corner of her eye.  “Oh, him, yes, he’s been looking at me.”  She returned to her salad without another thought.

Someday I will demolish the man who thinks he is subtle.  It will cost me money or reputation or perhaps even health and mobility.  But I will do it.  And, why not this guy?  Hell, he’s gotta be well into his eighties.  I could take him.  And his younger friends, too.  The older guy actually looks to be in better shape than them, so once I get through with him if they’ve got a problem with it, I’ll deal with them.  And then I’ll crush that beautiful Borsalino hat.

Then I realized the gentleman admirer was Eugene McCarthy.

This provoked a 1960s flashback that nearly knocked me out of my seat.  As a teenager I had watched the Senator and his Clean for Gene student volunteers march toward the Democratic presidential nomination, the fight with Robert Kennedy, the assassination, the mayhem at the Chicago convention.  Even as a youngster I had been taken with the Senator’s sense of honor, ambition, and style.  He struck me then as a serious man.  And now he was seriously eyeing my wife.

“Eugene McCarthy is checking me out?” Melanie asked incredulously.  She glanced once more at the bar, continuing the Seinfeld routine.  “Are you sure that’s him?” she said as she delicately faked wiping her mouth with white linen.

I then preceded to tell her an overly long story about the sixties and my college experience and a paper I wrote comparing communication strategies of Democrat presidential contenders between 1968 and 1972.  I sounded bright, sad, and just a little wise the way some of us do when we talk about the sixties.

She looked at the bar again.  “Yeah, it does look like him.  What are you going to do about it?”

The Senator was rising with stiff grace.  The maitre’d glided over to assist him with his overcoat, but Mr. McCarthy needed no help with his Borsalino.  He pulled it on smoothly, then snapped the brim over his right eye.  Time, as it does for all men, had taken its toll on his gait, but even then, just a year before he died, Mr. McCarthy cut a fine figure of a man as he walked past my wife.

“Well,” I replied to her question, “I hope I’ll look as good in my Borsalino.”

Last night just before midnight and the publication release of the book, its Amazon sales rank was 365,512.  Today, following the release, the sales rank has FALLEN to 392,480.  This would not seem to auger well.  Offering my book for sale drops it 26,968 places.  I’m more “successful” in the future than I am in the present!  I’d hoped that 365,512 would be the floor, but it may be the ceiling.

I’m hesitant to tell Melanie about this because she’s already got a spending plan for the royalties.  I need to write a new book immediately and get a higher Amazon sales rank.  Live in the future!