If you patronize this blog (and Lord knows I needs to be patronized) you know that I read widely, the unmistakable mark of either an open or unstable mind.  Persuasion is always in the air, you just have to stick your nose in some dark rooms to sense it.  Or in this case through open windows.

Like this.

Meet the hotel Standard in New York City.  Look at all the windows.  Look at the people in the windows.  Wave at them!  Watch them wave back . . . hmm . . . what are they waving, OMG.  Are they naked?  Are they doing THAT?

Yes.  They are doing IYFSH!  And the hotel is encouraging them!

On the hotel’s Facebook page, The Standard encourages patrons to let it all hang out, according to the paper.

“We encourage you to exercise your inner exhibitionist. Please share your intimate and explicit photos with us — those floor to ceiling windows aren’t just for the views,” read the post, which has since been changed, according to the Post.

Okay, pervs, here’s the hotel’s FB page.  I’ll wait while you check it out.  Geez, the things I do for instruction.

Back?

Apparently, guests at the Standard don’t need much encouragement to share their intimacies through an exterior window in their hotel.

“I’ve seen a few porn shoots — three dudes walking around a hotel room with cameras and lights filming a couple,” Joe, the manager of the nearby Brass Monkey bar told the Post. “I’ve seen at least 10 different people having sex. Saturday nights are the best time for the show.”

Okay, so what have we got here, besides your fevered imagination and an evolving plan for a quick trip to NYC?

Well, let’s be good persuasion boys and girls and do a dual process analysis (and, no, Beavis, “dual process” is not persuasion slang for bisexual and “analysis” is not about . . . that).

Persuasion variables may function in one of three ways:  WATTage, Arguments, or Cues.  So, a hotel offers as a persuasion claim – our guests have public sex – how does it work (not the public sex, you know how to do that, the claim of public sex)?

It certainly gets attention which is good for the Cascade, but does it make your dimmer switch zoom from low WATT to high WATT (down, big fella, didn’t mean it the way that came out)?  Does the idea of public sex make you think more carefully and effortfully about choosing a hotel?  That seems . . . limp.

And, assuming you are already high WATT for other reasons, would reading that “You’re encouraged to have public sex in the hotel” be an Argument that you would elaborate upon and engage in that long conversation in your head?  Sure, for some of you persuasion crazies, but for most folks I can’t imagine that they pick hotels because the hotel encourages you to have sex in their front windows.  “Gee, honey, look how clean those windows are.  We’ll look like we’re in High Def.  And, boy, that’s a wide window, too.  I’ll definitely fit in that frame.”

So, maybe public sex functions as a Cue, especially the Liking Cue:  When you have affection for the source, do what they request.

As we noted in an earlier Sex Sells! post, sex sells with men almost all the time, but such blatant appeals often offend women.  So, maybe the Hotel Standard is aiming at male guests?

Makes some sense in the short term.  I’m a guy and I’m guy enough to get this story.  Good grief, I’m blogging it, aren’t I?  So, hey, the next time I’m in NYC why not, huh?

Except if you think about it just a little bit other ideas might spring to mind.  Like . . . what do I tell Melanie?  (No, kids, she’s not going to want this booking.)  And, what kind of clientele might this attract?  (Maybe commercial sex workers and law enforcement personnel?)  How much will this cost?  (I grew up in the 1960s “free love” era, but have since learned that this kind of love is never free, cheap, or even cost effective.)

And besides the killjoy, bluenoses are on this.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told The Post she wants the peep show to come to an end. “The alleged actions of The Standard are unacceptable,” she said in a statement.

Of course, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so maybe the Standard will be hopping even with the City Council talking about it.  And, of course, the Standard is a relatively small hotel, so all this publicity could ferret out the small customer base that actually looks for exhibitionist outlets.

Maybe.

Let’s close with the Rules.

More is the enemy of less.

Persuaders can either be famous or effective, but not both.

There’s a difference between persuasion, and smoke and mirrors; with persuasion the illusion persists.

This blog focuses upon all things persuasion and to a casual reader it might seem that “all things persuasion” includes “everything.”  A great story illustrates that not all changes come from persuasion and highlight the difference between word-based change and other forms.

Hey, didja know that driving and texting is dangerous?

Of course, you did.  And, to a lesser extent, driving and using a cellphone.  And, just about anything that distracts your attention, especially visual, while driving.  Yet, people persist with distracted driving despite a lot of yada-yada talk-talk (some of it even persuasion) from all the Gang of Usual Suspects (see bottom of this post for a great bad example).  So, persuasion seems to have limited impact.

Any alternatives?

Consider this from two stories in the Wall Street Journal.

Key2SafeDriving, a Windows Mobile service that deactivates the cellphone screen when the car is in motion, was created after its inventor was run off the road by a cellphone-using teenager, said Mike Fahnert, chief executive of Safe Driving Systems, the company producing it.

Safe Driving Systems Corp. is building a system that takes over a cellphone’s display when its owner starts driving. Calls and text messages are received but can’t be accessed, though users can place emergency calls. The system includes an electronic “key” that is installed in the car and emits a Bluetooth signal that disables the keypad while the car is running.

Another start-up, Vancouver-based Aegis Mobility Inc., is developing DriveAssist, a software program that uses a phone’s GPS to detect when it is moving at driving speed and intercept incoming calls and texts. It also blocks outgoing messages, though the owner can override it to make emergency calls.

Notice that the change intervention does not use persuasion in the way I blog about it, but instead employs an engineering solution.  Put a kill switch on a key function and an automatic sensor that identifies a dangerous situation that automatically activates the kill switch.

I am wildly in favor of these engineered change solutions for a variety of reasons even though it replaces my beloved persuasion.  The point is the change, not the means of the change, right?

To illustrate, let me now mock foolish persuasion efforts to address the problem of distracted driving.

CBS News runs this dramatic story of a “terror on the highways” safety video shot in Britain, south Wales.

Its writer and director – who cast his own son Henry in the video – makes no apologies.

“Yes it is violent, but the reality of a fatal road accident is much more gruesome, is much more violent,” said writer-director Peter Watkins Hughes. “My position on this is that if you are old enough to drive, if you are old enough to want to drive, you are old enough to be aware of the real and serious risks one places yourself in every time you get behind the wheel.”

And, you ask, does this slasher film actually change people?  Here’s the proof!

“As you know, this video has been viewed around the world now by 1.5 million people, and we have had e-mail after e-mail after e-mail from people saying, ‘I will never ever text and drive again’ – from young people,” said Gwent police chief constable Mick Giannasi.

Yeah, right.  Gory shock films (fear appeals) sure are effective.  Everyone knows that.  Except if you look at anything remotely approaching a scientific standard of testing, you know that these persuasion tactics have little or no effect on actual behavior leading to fewer accidents and deaths.  They just make the folks doing the scolding feel good about themselves – “There, now I’ve scared the little buggers and THEY’LL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!”

Even without a zillion dollar outcome study, just consider the common sense evaluation between Katic Couric’s choice – fear appeals in Wales – versus the WSJ stories on engineered solutions.  Even if there was great evidence of a sustained, enduring, and large behavior change from those silly fear appeals, how could it compete with an app in the device that always senses speed in a vehicle and shuts itself off?  Which approach will always “remember” to work:  the device or the driver?

Not all change is the same and not all change is produced by the same method.  Work smarter.  Sometimes persuasion is the smart play and sometimes something like engineering is the smart play.

The new ISAF counterinsurgency guidance gets me going as a persuasion guy.  It’s getting blog attention at BlackFive and Abu Muqawama,  but does not appear to be attracting much mainstream comment.

Here are the key points:

Embrace the people, build connections with them and hold routine jirgas.

Partner with the ANSF, live with them as equals.

Build governance, confront corrupt officials.

Get better everyday through learning and sharing.

Through each key point runs one persuasion element:  people talking with people.  The primary means of accomplishing each key point begins with that social communication, people talking to people.  The better we are at that, the more likely it is we will achieve our goals.

As a nonmilitary guy I have to admit to being somewhat nonplussed with this document.  It looks like something a persuasion civilian like me could have written, not for military guys but for civilians going through a corporate merger between two wary companies.

I’m curious to understand how this guidance will play out operationally in the field.  Will there be a new set of training skills revolving around communication and persuasion?  Will new units (like IO or PSYOPS) get beefed up and added to the fundamental military mission?

I can see potentially useful persuasion applications here, but wonder how the soldiers on the ground would react.

You can read the guidance here at scribd (where you can also steal a copy of my Persuasion Guide!)

. . . a bit later . . . could the General be sandbagging the President?

We usually think of persuasion from the point of view of sources and what they do to produce change in receivers, but, of course, we can turn this around and consider persuasion from the point of view of receivers and what they do to resist persuasion.  One of the most powerful and effective techniques for resisting persuasion is also simple and easy:  Selective Exposure.

We aren’t dumb and we know that everyday out there in the world people will be trying to change us.  If we’re polite and let them do that, then we spend all day going all high WATT and having those long conversations in our heads about arguments.  Man, not only is it a lot of work, but heck, we might actually have to change our minds.  And, if we do that for one issue, we might have to do it with a lot of other related issues and now we’re up all night having a really long conversation.  Who can live like that?

So we engage in Selective Exposure.  It means pretty much what the words suggest: we select the information we choose to expose ourselves to.  Sure, the source can whip it out, but if we look away it doesn’t count.  No exposure, no processing, no response, no change.  We kill the Cascade right at the start.

But, sometimes issues, events, or people are so important that we know we should consider all the arguments, not just the ones that support what we already believe.  Like this.

So, what’s your stand on the US response to September 11 and waterboarding?

The Obama White House has released the 2004 CIA secret report on its interrogation techniques after September 11, 2001 through 2004.  While some portions of this long report are redacted (literally blacked out to hide information still deemed too secret to release), the report provides an enormous amount of detail regarding the interrogation techniques, who was interrogated, the command structure, legal arguments and analysis, and so on.

The report is available here as a PDF.  All you have to do is click it and read.  Find fundamental evidence on what happened and why.  And realize this report comes from the Bush Administration CIA, so this isn’t something the new team of President Obama cooked up.  This is what the Bush Administration knew and thought and did.

The interesting question now is whether you will read this.

Selective Exposure predicts that if you have strongly held beliefs, you will not read it because the report is so comprehensive and wide ranging it is guaranteed to present something you don’t want to know because it will cause you to rethink a strongly held position.  Sure, you may try to cope with Biased Processing and that will help, but some of it will hit you sideways and hard.

So, how’d you do on this test?

Hey, right now, August 24, 2009, if you Google . . .

30ish women nude

. . . my Healthy Influence blog will show up on the first page of hits.

I was scanning some traffic stats and stumbled over this and it left me bedazzled over the possibility I’d somehow added pornography to my website to either increase my traffic or just amuse myself.  So, I nervously scanned through my blog, hoping that Melanie wouldn’t wander by and ask me why I had dirty pictures on my blog and then getting mad at the thought that maybe I’d slipped some shots of her online and hey, jerk, didn’t you tell me you’d destroyed all that stuff and yes, honey, I did, I promise, I really did, I’m just checking my traffic stats and this search combination came up and I’m checking.  Really.

Then I found the page that Google hit and the reason Google hit it.  See, the page contains two posts.  One post talks about a winery that’s selling its product with Art Deco nudes and the following post talks about our travel and dining experience in Savannah GA where we observed a table of 30ish women near us having a good time.

But, no nude pictures of Melanie or any woman, 30ish or otherwise.

Whew.