Groupthink is a term that began with legitimate social science research and has evolved into a pop press Alice in Wonderland word that means whatever you want it to mean, usually depending upon your politics.  A Wall Street Journal article, written by a member of Parliament who notes training in physics at Cambridge, misuses groupthink this way in his commentary on global warming and its advocates.

Peter Lilly begins with an accurate quotation from the developer of the original groupthink research, Irving Janis.  Lilly noting Janis quotes:

Irving Janis defined this as “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.” The symptoms include:

“Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group; Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as evil, biased, etc.; Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group; Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus; Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.”  Campaigners against climate change show remarkably similar symptoms.

While Mr. Lilly quotes accurately, he does not quote completely.  Groupthink involves more than he says (the mark of a faux-it-all).  Check out the Wikipedia entry on groupthink or this academic summary page.  Note that groupthink applies to a small number of people meeting in a highly cohesive social context with decision making responsibilities.

Regardless of anyone’s position on climate change, please note that the term “group” as applied in groupthink does NOT include loose association of people who simply share one common belief.  A “group” is understood as a relatively small number of people (typically 7-15) who have sustained contact, regular interaction, work together on common problems, and often have assigned powers and relationships from an organization.  The concern with groupthink is that the social relationship element in such groups leads to poor decision making whereby people put “getting along” ahead of their objective duties and responsibilities.

Lilly, and all other like minded minds, makes a serious error when he takes this narrow definition of a group and broadens it to include large numbers of people who rarely if ever meet in face to face contact, rarely have interactions with each other in front of the rest of the “group,” and rarely decide together on a uniform decision and course of action.  What Lilly describes as a “group” is better understood as a “party” or “association.”  It is not a small, cohesive, decision-making group.

Again, anyone’s politics here are irrelevant to the correct, accurate, and proper application of a concept.  It doesn’t matter where you stand on climate change or even that the topic is climate change.  Groupthink is the outcome of a small, focused, highly cohesive group of decision makers.  It is not the label you should apply to the members of an assemblage who happen share the same beliefs and attitudes about one issue.

The peril of this kind of thinking is that it leads to the diminution of a valuable concept.  If Lilly can raise the charge of groupthink here, why cannot someone else raise the same charge of groupthink among the “Tea Party” conservatives, or NRA gun advocates or, of course, anti NRA gun advocates?  Anytime more than three people share a belief or attitude with which you disagree, you can throw a penalty flag and declare “groupthink.”  Essentially the label, “groupthink,” is just another epithet for prejudice, zealotry, or bigotry.

This misappropriation says more about the bias of the accuser than of the accused.  Mr. Lilly appears to read the work on groupthink just closely enough to find evidence that fits his preexisting position and is then off to the races.  He is a physician noting that you have a fever and diagnosing lung cancer.  Lilly ignores other key elements of the diagnosis, most particularly the definition of a group.  Thus, Mr. Lilly demonstrates a nice illustration of Biased Objective processing from the ELM.  You cut the argument to fit your conclusion.  Sure, the argument contains good evidence, factual evidence, and accurate quotation.  It’s just not the Whole Argument.

You’ll then miss the valuable practical and theoretical insights from groupthink research that shed some light on how groups can do either well or badly.  The lesson that groupthink research teaches is that well meaning and talented work groups can blunder into terrible decisions when social factors (cohesion, cooperation, harmony) suppress task factors (due diligence, examination of all evidence and lines of thinking).  To make “groupthink” nothing more than a term of miseducated insult diminishes our understanding of human behavior.

While I ran the Health Communication Research Branch in the Fed (okay, HHS/CDC/NIOSH/HELD/HCRB) I hit upon an idea I called a “persuasion engine.”  The web permits a different form of communication between source and receiver such that the source can monitor the real time behavior of receivers while they get the message.  Normally only face-to-face (f2f) interactions can do this and even that is difficult because of the cognitive load any interpersonal situation demands.  It’s hard to control yourself and accurately monitor the Other Guy.  With the web, you do not get as much information as from a live, interpersonal setting, but it is much easier to accurately monitor the Other Guy’s behavior.

My feral inspiration in 2000 with a Persuasion Engine was to capture receivers behavior as they process the message on a web page.  As you analyze this behavior, again in real time, you make adjustments to following web messages you show a particular receiver.  If properly done, this literally becomes an instance of self-persuasion as the engine provides more and more compelling persuasive messages with each click.  (You can also see this as an application of successive approximation from both For Me? reinforcement theory and an algorithm used to compute square roots.)

When I left the government two years later, I renewed my thinking on persuasion engines in websites and developed a couple of grant applications and hired a senior programmer to develop a new proof of concept program.  We never got funded.  Our scores were favorable, just not high enough to jump the cut line.  Then my writing work got more interesting and I stopped doing large project development.  The choices of life, you know.

I often read of other folks working on this problem, but not using the term, “persuasion engine.”  (Consider it mine.  Cite it as such or my team of lawyers will hit you like a pack of well dressed wolves.)  Today, for example, there’s a nice story about a research team targeting “thinking styles” of consumers as they visit web pages.  They’re in the ball park even without my really cool terminology.  I’ve seen others like this all aiming at modifying the message based on something the web user is doing.

However, I don’t think anyone is approaching the problem in quite the same way as a persuasion engine.

You need to do four things:

1.  Monitor the behavior of receivers.
2.  Classify it into persuasion functions.
3.  Provide new information consistent with your classification.
4.  Repeat.

What do you observe in the receiver?  Two elements.

First, monitor the mousing behavior of the user.  Everything that people do, everything, is a function of person and situation attributes.  How people mouse around a web page is a function of their personality and the situation.  Watch that and relate it to persuasion functions.

Second, provide choices on the same page that look different but lead to the same end point, then profile based on choice type.  For example, put a link to a new page on two locations, one as text, the other as an icon.  See whether the user prefers text or image.

How do you classify these observations?  How do you use the classification to design following web pages?

Everyone has their theory.  Try yours.  Relate mousing and choice preference to your theory variables in a large pretest sample of people like your target audience.  I’ve got my own theory preferences, but who knows?  There Are No Laws of Persuasion, right?

What applications are there for a persuasion engine?

Sell more stuff at EngulfandDevour.com.

Educate and train people.

Political advertising.

Just think about it.

This is likely to operate at the level of small effects (that 45/55 windowpane), so it is a long term, cumulative tactic, kinda like scraping kelp off of a sailboat during a long race.

You should be dubious of everything you read on this blog, almost everything on the Web, and in most popular press because there is no peer review of the content.  Sure, some human other than the writer looked over the content before somebody else hit the Publish button, but that is not peer review.  Indeed, if you think that peer review is just human review, you’re not thinking clearly about words and how people use them.  Tell me the other common, ordinary uses of the term, “peer review?”

No other fields beyond scientific, academic, and scholarly fields use the term or the process.  Thus, even though the phrase is composed of ordinary words that would simply denote “somebody else reads it,” the phrase is not in ordinary parlance and thus should alert you to a special meaning.

Peer review is a brutal process of anonymous content review from selected readers in your field of knowledge.  Before an editor even picks up a red pencil or that annoying red highlight function in Word, your paper is sent to several people with an obvious and well earned reputation in your field.  These proven, tough, and experienced researchers then anonymously read your work and provide comment to both you and the editor.

The first review is frequently fatal.  You receive a polite and unmistakable drop dead letter from the editor with an attachment of the anonymous reviews.  Sometimes, you are allowed to rewrite your paper in light of the anonymous review and resubmit for re-review.  Thus, you get to do the whole thing all over and hope you revised smartly into the criticisms of the anonymous reviewers.  Rarely, about ten percent of the time with better journals, you get your report accepted.  What then follows is the kind of “review” that occurs with most publication sources:  An editor red pencils the text, legal looks it over for lawsuit potential, and maybe marketing suggests how to position it.

Nothing like peer review happens at the New York Times or Newsweek magazine or CBS News or Huffington Post or Penguin Press.  The closest is that review by inhouse editors who read the paper largely for style and style sheet, but rarely for content accuracy.  Any content concerns usually go to a lawyer to discover copyright or libel issues.  But, a content review, a pure content review?  Nope.  Not an industry standard.

So what?  Big deal?  Who cares?  Peer review, bah humbug.

I’ve been in the peer review machine since 1984.  I’ve written for and reviewed for a wide variety of peer review journals in communication, psychology, and health and safety.  If you can trust just one guy’s experience, I assert that virtually every paper I reviewed and rejected for a peer review journal was better than most things I read in the popular press.  The quality of the writing and thinking was at least as good as every opinion column in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  And, these papers were the ones that got rejected and never saw the light of day in the peer review literature.

Now, is this to claim that peer review always insures the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth?  Of course not.  The peer review process publishes errors, lies, manipulations, mistakes, brilliant dead ends, and all manner of less than the Truth.  Look up the name “Cyril Burt.”  Go read the original epidemiological research on hormone replacement therapy.  Search on “bad blood” and the CDC.  Read now the East Anglia emails on climate change.  People do bad things, dumb things, harmful things and manage to get it through peer review.

Like anything made or done through human activity, it could be more efficient or more effective, not because the thing made or done is inherently inefficient or ineffective, but because people possess a human nature that is not perfect.  However, peer review can be nicely analogized with Winston Churchill’s line about democracy:  It is the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried.  Peer review is the worst form of scientific communication we’ve got except for all others.

The advantage to peer review is that eventually other voices are heard.  I would suggest that for almost any writer it would be easier to get published in a scientific journal than to get published in the New York Times or the Washington Post or any elite popular press outlet.  In both cases, you have to master a style sheet, a content area, and express yourself well, but with pop press, if you are not close to the Cool Table, you haven’t a ghost of a chance.  With peer review, you have more than a ghost of a chance.  It may require persistence, but virtually everything in life requires that.  Except getting published in popular press.

Peer review provides the best chance for True science.  Anyone who criticizes that process as a villain in any controversy is making an error in judgment.  No better replacement for peer review waits in the wings and no evidence points to an inherent weakness in peer review that caused the villainy.  That failure lies . . .  Shakespeare anticipates us:

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

As always, I carried Melanie’s purse to Washington DC where I did a presentation for the SC Network.  She finds I-270 photogenic.  Gee, I didn’t know that building was there.

We stayed at the Dupont Hotel, formerly Jury’s, on the Dupont Circle.  We first stayed at the Dupont when I was doing some work with Brookings and we continue to stay in the area because it is interesting and close to a convenient Metro stop.  The renovations at the hotel are nice like with these shutters that provide a backdrop for my deep thoughts preparation.

Melanie just has fun in the room, by contrast.

The SC presentation went well.  I talked about the Rules of Persuasion with a group of about 40 people in the room and another 20 online.  We had a good 90 minute session with excellent questions and perspectives.  I try to be provocative in these presentations because everyone typically has pretty tight constraints on their work and these sessions are great opportunities to get creative and just try new thoughts.  It permits anyone to push ideas around without penalties.

While I made the Fed safe for persuasion Melanie hit the streets and shops of DC.  While it was not teeming, it was commercial enough as this Adidas Tree at Union Station demonstrates.

We ate at Obelisk and a new place, the Bistrot du Coin.  For our date night at Obelisk we started with a drink in the Dupont Hotel bar.  Nice renovations here, too.  It’s a happening scene, man.

Obelisk remains All That.  We’ve eaten here for the past 10 or 15 years and never had anything but one of the best meals.  Tonight was no different.  Melanie enjoys the pasta.

The Bistrot du Coin is in the Dupont area, just a couple of blocks up from the Circle.  I have no idea how long it’s been there and I’m certain we must of walked by it a number of times, but this was our first visit.  It is a great value bistro with good service, nice ambiance, and good food.  We had an excellent time there and will visit it again.  Nice Martini, too.

We came over the mountain in a snowstorm ahead of the snow plows.  While I have no pictures to share, you might have heard me cursing that Saturday morning.  I put the Explorer in 4X4 all the way from Frostburg to Friendsville, just hoping that everyone else on the road was a better driver than I.  They were and we got home to play with Zeus on the loose in his first winter.

It’s always nice to come home.

Reason metaphorically with me.  Consider concepts and clichés, propositions and prepositions, images and imaginations, then cross the bridges.

The classic scientific cliché for discovery is Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, watching a falling apple, and experiencing a eureka moment that ends with gravity and the Laws of Physics.  Knowing as I do from my Rule that There Are No Laws of Persuasion and If There Were Why Would Anyone Tell You, this cliché and my vast knowledge of people standing around apple trees leads me to claim a new Rule:

You Don’t Persuade a Falling Apple

Given that Newton proved that apples fall Lawfully and given that Steve proved that there are No Laws of Persuasion, ergo, you cannot persuade a falling apple.  Taking this one step farther I will add now a preposition and create a corollary to my new Rule.  If you cannot (by the immutable Laws of Metaphorical Reasoning) persuade a falling apple,

You Should Not Persuade ABOUT A Falling Apple

My argument is that the apple will fall and nothing you say about it is going to change that Lawful fact.  Persuading falling apples is shouting at the wind, albeit a wind full of apples and even that image supports why you can’t persuade falling apples because if you are shouting into a wind full of apples, they will fall anyway and many of them likely on you and if they are young and green, that will hurt.  Thus, the apples will fall, you will bruise, and the event will prove my Rule and Corollary.

This also explains why no one stands under a Knife Tree and why you do not need to persuade people to avoid standing under Knife Trees.  People realize that Knives will fall like apples and that you can persuade neither to behave differently.

Do you see where this is headed?

Anyone who has a Law never needs to persuade.  The Law moots my Rules . . . or mutes them to quote a football player I once heard.

Consider the implications.

If you try to persuade while claiming a Law, the less other people will believe you, because why would anyone persuade with a Law?

Reasoning out the other side of this, people only persuade about the uncertain, ambiguous, unknown, likely or unlikely, possible, probable, or potential.

Just another persuasion crypticism!