Healthy Influence Blog

As everyone already knows, persuasion is a pretty obvious and simple thing:  It’s about using words to change the way freely choosing people think, feel, or act.  And, you research it by watching the world go by, then drawing the obvious inferences that arise from human interaction.  Anyone can, and in fact does, do persuasion research everyday.  Now, contrast that with the real science of economics, climate, and epidemiology.  Those guys do heavy lifting with observation, manipulation, complex math, and big grants.  They are the real scientists doing real science while persuasion is Mark Twain writing about Tom Sawyer convincing his buddies to whitewash a fence.

Go ahead.  Admit it.  Persuasion has no science behind it, it’s just a bunch of that “social science” voodoo.  You can say it in front of me and I won’t be offended.

Because, it is not true.  Persuasion has better, stronger, and more reliable science behind it than my three (carefully) chosen contrasts of economics, climate, and epidemiology.  Just think about it rather than give me that “everybody knows” wisdom.

The key defining feature of science is control.  When researchers have all the variables in hand and deploy those variables exactly as the researcher chooses, then you have control.  Researchers will test different configurations of variables and compare outcomes.  “I see, when I add yeast to this mixture, I get this tasty thing called ‘bread’ and when I leave the yeast out I get a matzo ball.”  It is through the control of all relevant variables, that you do science.

I have demonstrated in this blog and in my Persuasion Guide, that you can study persuasion with this type of control to derive your science.  In example after example, I provide you with information based on studies done with experimental control.  The researchers get a large group of people then randomly assign smaller samples to specific, varying, and controlled conditions.  One group gets a basic request – would you please volunteer to help?  Other groups get instead a persuasive message, “Would you please sign this petition in support of wildlife preservation in our county?”  followed by the basic request.  The researchers then compare outcomes and determine which condition produced more change.  Whether a simple t-test, treatment versus control design or much more complicated multivariate experiments, the key element of researcher control is always present in the persuasion principles I present.  Persuasion researchers do real science and have produced a real science.

Now, contrast wimpy persuasion research with the real science of economics, climate, and epidemiology.  All of these research domains typically operate at poor levels of researcher control.  Economists almost never have any control over the key variables in economics, but rather observe the natural outcomes of the real world, then construct math models to describe, predict, and explain those observations.  In other words, their science comes after Something Happens, it does not make Something Happen first.  (And when economists are able to do experiments, they are essentially doing persuasion experiments that use money as the dependent variable.  They then have to make huge inferential leaps from these micro studies to the macro scale economics really needs.  Hey, if they can make those leaps, why can’t persuasion researchers?)

The same limitation obviously applies with climate research.  No one can randomly assign different planets to different CO2 regimes then observe differences.  All climate researchers can do is watch natural outcomes and then create math models to describe, predict, and explain.  Again, they can’t make Something Happen first under their control and then observe.  They can only observe, then try to explain.  And where economists might have a wide variety of economic contexts to study (different nations with different systems at different eras), climate researchers are stuck with just one lovely blue, white, and green planet.

Finally, epidemiology is built as a research of observation rather than a science of control.  Epi researchers never have control over any variables, but instead construct simple measurements that they combine into complex models requiring sophisticated analytic methods.  They can track over long time periods.  They can measure in the doctor’s office or lab with high tech equipment.  But, no control.

The practical implications of this are painful.  Scientific Materialism, also known as Communism, was proposed by Karl Marx as a system of economics that would create Heaven on Earth.  We know how that worked out.  And, in the late 1980s and early 1990s epi researchers were absolutely, positively convinced that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for women was the greatest thing since sliced bread and L’Oreal Extra Light Ash Blonde hair coloring.  Except when the real scientists did a real experiment with real control, they discovered just how wrong the epi folks were and that HRT actually killed women.  There’s now some gnashing of teeth among the epi crowd over this black swan, but they’ll move on.  And, with the climate researchers, it’s hard to have much faith in a math model of global climate change when the Weather Channel can’t beat chance with its forecasts on temperature or precipitation.

And, if all these smart guys were really that smart, why wouldn’t they aim their smarts at a simpler and more profitable system like, say, the stock market?  None of these folks can pick three stocks that will outperform the market, but claim to understand climate change, international economics, and universal life.

Yet and still, people will still continue to see persuasion as a kind of folk wisdom and my Gang of Three as Something Special.  Please realize that I’m not claiming there is no science in economics, climate, or epidemiology, just that it is not strong science because these fields lack the key element of science:  Control.  Without control everyone needs to be considerablly more skeptical about claims coming from the Gang of Three.

And, of course, you can believe EVERYTHING I tell you about persuasion!