I recently read James English’s book, The Economy of Prestige, wherein English investigates the cultural phenomenon of awarding prizes.  He notes the huge expansion of prizes since Alfred Nobel and then explores the motives that drive both prize-giving and prize-receiving.  It is not an empirical examination, but rather a critical take on prizes.  English uses economics more as a metaphor than a scientific tool.

His rumination opens a window on how prize making and giving is a strong function of persuasion.  Rather than prizes as markers of achievement like merit badges, certificates, or standards, prizes can be seen as attempts to change the way other people think, feel, or act.  Thus, I create an award for Outstanding Persuasion every year, the Peitho, not to bring attention to the winner, but rather to myself.  And, if I seek to win the Peitho, I should consider using persuasion tactics to acquire it along with nominal persuasion achievement to put me in the running.

If you like critical narratives, I can recommend James English’s book.

And, maybe I’ll start giving out Peitho Awards.

Typically the biggest barrier to change is not in the receiver, but in the source.  Sources try to persuade with tactics that persuade them.  “Hey, if it works on me, it will work on you!”  This crashes into two Rules:  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid and All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.  Consider two illustrations of persuasion sources run amok.

Both share an abiding common sense theory of persuasion:  Information will change ‘em!  Just tell ‘em.  Give it to ‘em straight.  Once they know the Truth or the Science or the Facts, persuasion gravity will take over and they will fall into the change.  Except information alone rarely persuades.  If the information is completely novel, unknown, or strange to the receiver, information can persuade.  But in most avenues of human life, people already have a fair amount of knowledge about most things even if their knowledge is spotty, incomplete, or erratic.  Thus, your news rarely is news to most people most of the time.  Peruse these two information failures.

The first comes through the Small Wars Journal with notice of a post by LCol J.J. Malevich.  Malevich gleefully shares a rancid example of PowerPoint Persuasion with a copy of a briefing aimed at using COIN (right, counterinsurgency) in Afghanistan.  You have to download the brief to appreciate how painfully bad it is.  Each slide manages to become more complex, dense, and swirling than the one before it until the last slide looks like a parody of bad persuasion.  I have no doubt about the sincerity and smarts of the folks who made the presentation.  But, like I observed in the opening, usually the reason you don’t persuade the receiver is not because of the receiver, but because of you.

The second example comes from the research team led by Kelly Brownell at Yale University.  Brownell is a member in good standing with the Food Police and who thinks that his facts should persuade Congress to regulate and tax the food industry to its knees, then require warning labels on anything related to food to scare off, oops, educate people about the perils of eating processed foods.  Brownell’s latest effort is available at his website and tests the impact of caloric information on menus on food ordering and eating behavior.

The research team conducted a really good lab experiment that actually had randomization, control, comparison, and counting.  The team recruited adults to order fast food then eat it in the lab so that they could accurately count what people ordered and ate.  The Special Sauce in the experiment was Information in the form of caloric labeling on the menu.  One third of people got a plain menu with just the items, one third got a menu with items plus calorie counts for each dish, and one third got a menu with the items, plus calorie counts, plus the USDA 2,000 calories a day recommendation.

You’d predict a simple linear effect here if you are a smart Food Police scientist:  More calorie information, less ordering and eating.  But, if you’re a smart persuasion guy who doesn’t have a dog in the food fight, you’d predict a lot of nothing with a bit of little on the side.

You have to know about playing the guitar called statistical analysis to hear the tortured music Brownell’s team found in their data, but if you put it on PowerPoint it would look something like the COIN Afghan slides.  The simplest way to see their failure is to look at the effect sizes.  Expressed as windowpane effects the outcome for number of calories ordered is a 46.5% versus 53.5% difference, not even what we conventionally call a “small” effect of 45/55.  The effect on calories eaten, not ordered, but actually eaten, is even worse:  47.5% versus 52.5%.  Worser still, this piddling effect is not even statistically significant.  Thus, the Brownell crew finds that calorie labels have a less than small effect on ordering and no real effect on eating – just a side of a little with a lot of nothing as the main dish.  (Who reviewed this study at the American Journal of Public Health – those East Anglia weather guys?)

So, it’s still the same old story, you tripping all over yourself with piles and reams of data, information, facts, statistics, PowerPoint slides with boxes, arrows, and lateral arabesques, believing in Santa Claus, Bill Gates, and One More Post Hoc t-Test!  Chances are good that if you are smart, experienced, trained, one of those Cool Table guys, no matter how large or small the Table, you will kill yourself with your own facts.

As time goes by, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Our friend and colleague, Sergei Samoilenko, sent us a fabulous Christmas gift, a bottle of Putinka vodka.  I’m enjoying a chilled Martini with it now.  It reminds me of Death’s Door vodka with a smooth wheat-grainy taste and finish to it.  Very nice for sipping.  Melanie also likes it and she’s not a big vodka fan unless it is infused (like with black pepper or vanilla or cinnamon).

Putinka is a Russian vodka and the name is a marketing ploy by the maker.  It is a play on the name, Putin, and honors the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin.  It is one of the most popular selling vodkas in Russia, apparently in part due to the name.  (Although the thing sells itself after one sip.)

Thanks, Serge, for the treat and the fun in San Francisco.  And Russian Tea Time in Chicago.  And wherever the next time!

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

(I hope.)

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’s 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.

Over the past two days I’ve been in that special place you sometimes find when you are upgrading software.  GoDaddy is my hosting service and WordPress is my blog software provider.  They work together, just not always at the same time.  I somehow managed to get a newer version of WordPress working on my GoDaddy account that should not have been possible.  Then when I upgraded it to the New New Upgrade, I finally hit the wall with some GoDaddy settings.  I lost access to administrative control of the blog and the blog disappeared from the web at various times as I scrambled to fix problems.  I’ve had to do a WordPress upgrade through GoDaddy that installs an older version of WordPress.  Go figure.  I now have administrative control again and the blog is up on the web.

For now.

I will continue to upgrade, install, patch, repair, and diddle, so if you dial in this blog and something seems more weird than usual, don’t worry.  Just improving your web experience with better software!