Healthy Influence Blog

Contemporary military theorists have become much more interested in information and its effects over the past decade.  Kinetics still form a core area of thinking and execution, but indisputably, the military wants to understand how to change the Other Guy without force.  Thus, the attention to concepts like information, influence, soft power, and persuasion.

A good example of this interest and thinking is found in  Behavioural Conflict, From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence, a PDF report by Mackay and Tatham (from Small Wars Journal here).  The report outlines a rationale for the study and use of information then sketches out several influence concepts for consideration.  Most notably the authors draw from economics and more notably still from the more famous examples:  Writers who got a Nobel prize or who have popular pop press books in economics.

This report is right in and on the sweet spot of the majority of military theorists writing about persuasion (my generic term for trying to change the Other Guy with words rather than guns).  Some prefer a more anthropological or sociological approach while others, like Mackay and Tatham, prefer a more psychological approach (with the distinction resting on whether you think in terms of “groups” or “individuals.”).  The plurality, however, show a fundamental, abiding, and consistent lack of awareness and/or understanding of a huge, old, and accessible body of knowledge in persuasion from the fields of social psychology and communication.

I would like to recommend social psychology and communication to all military thinkers for three compelling reasons.

1.  Persuasion research is experimental.
2.  Persuasion research has been done with and on the military.
3.  Persuasion provably works better than everything else.

1.  Experimental research on human behavior is the best evidence you are going to get in this life.  Persuasion researchers consistently apply the experimental method (random selection and assignment of participants to conditions; carefully designed and executed conditions under experimenter control; hard comparison to competing explanations; counting and quantification of findings; survival in the peer review process; accumulation in an accessible literature) to using something other than Kinetics to change the Other Guy.  The other fields popular in military reading are largely observational sciences.  The nature of what they study and how they study does not permit random selection and assignment or experimenter control of conditions.  Observational sciences like economics, anthropology, and sociology cannot randomly assign qualities like political system, skin color, or language, for example, and therefore must always employ post hoc methods of conceptualization and analysis.  In this way, the study of economics is more like the study of global warming while persuasion is more like the study of physics.  Persuasion is an experimental science.

2.  Further, much persuasion work has been done with and on military units.  Most modern persuasion work flows from the original research done by Professor Carl Hovland at Yale University.  Hovland initial research on persuasion was done with funding from the US War Department during World War II to study attitude and attitude change of American soldiers.  Hovland’s pioneering work, Experiments on Mass Communication (with Professors Lumsdaine and Sheffield), grew directly out of the careful experimental study of persuasion with soldiers.

3.  Finally, persuasion concepts and approaches have been proven to work in a wide variety of settings on a wide variety of people on a wide variety of issues.  Persuasion is not limited to particular outcomes (like economics).  It is proven to apply with all faces, places, times, and rhymes.  It does not require a marketplace of buyer and sellers exchanging goods and services (which is an absolute necessity for economic and marketing theory and research).  Anytime people are with people, the principles of persuasion have been proven to work and we also have a strong understanding of how and why the principles work. And, we can apply these principles at any level of complexity of human interaction:  dyads, small groups, large audiences, or mass audiences at a city, state, region, nation, alliance, or globe.

Realize that I am a prophet for persuasion.   I offer a quick summary of major persuasion concepts on the top line of this blog.  I make it easy to order my book on persuasion as you read this post.  I blog on persuasion in everyday life.  I reek of bias.

So.  Don’t take my word for it.

Go read the original work by Hovland, whether the previously noted Experiments or his other classic, Communication and Persuasion.  Then read Eagly and Chaiken’s The Psychology of Attitudes, Petty and Cacioppo’s, Communication and Persuasion, or O’Keefe’s, Persuasion.  For pop press consider Cialdini’s classic, Influence, or if you can suffer prophets, my Complete Idiot’s Guide to Persuasion.

If you think you need more than kinetics for warfighting in the 21st Century, read persuasion.  You might actually change the Other Guy with words.