People always have short attention spans and limited capacity for processing, so the better you are at Headlines, the more persuasive you can be.  Headlines can make it look like we’re on the Central Route with complex, scientific, multisyllable words, but when you look behind them, you find they are Cues for Peripheral Route processors.  Consider this health story.

Here’s the title of the research study:

Health Insurance and Mortality in Adults

Sounds like we’ve got three things:  Insurance, death, and adults.

Here’s the “headline” sentence from the research abstract:

Uninsurance Is Associated with Mortality.

Sounds like we’ve got two things:  Uninsurance and death.

You don’t need to read the paper, do you?  People without insurance are more likely to die than people with insurance.  Heck, that is so commonsensical that you don’t need to do research.    Sure, it’s more complicated than the Headline and if you want to read a report with a lot of unfamiliar words and worse still with a lot of numbers and those funny Greek symbols, you can Read More About It.  But, you know the Headline:

No Insurance?  You Die!

Okay, let’s check that Headline.

The report actually provides the information.  Using data collected as part of NHANES (Google it up; your tax dollars at work), the research team followed nearly 9,000 adults over a 3 year period.  Over that 3 year time,  6,655 insured people had a death rate of 3.0% while the 2,350 uninsured people had a death rate of 3.3%, a 0.3% difference.  Now, since these data come from a sampling procedure that involves randomization (Amen, brother, you don’t see that often enough in epidemiological health research), it means that the sampling procedure itself can cause numbers to vary against each other.   So, we need to test that 0.3 percentage point difference to see if it is inside or outside the range expected from sampling error.

The simplest test here is called the z-test for the difference between proportions and it compares 3.3% and 3.0% and adjusts for the differences in sample size (2,350 versus 6,655).  If you do that test the results are z = 1.15, p < .25, h = .02.

The key number is that “p < .25.”  The Industrial Standard is typically a value of .05 meaning that if your test is less than .05 (like .04 or .003 or .0001), then your results are different from sampling error and likely to be reliable, trustworthy, real.  Results greater than .05 (like .06 or .10 or .25!!!) are not different from sampling error and therefore unlikely to be reliable, trustworthy, real.

Thus, this research report finds that the test comparing death rates of 3.3% versus 3.0%  fails to cross the Industrial Standard for Truth, Justice, and the American Way and therefore should be rejected as False, UnJust, and UnAmerican!

Yet it wasn’t rejected.  It was accepted by the reviewers and editors of the American Journal of Public Health.

The Headline is No Insurance?  You Die!  And, that is not true, not even close.  And, even if we call it a “gimme,” it still is a piddling effect size, that h = .02.  In Windowpane terms, an h of .2 (not .02, but .2) is Small, 45/55 effect.  The effect here is almost 10 times smaller than Small!

What gives here?  How does a scientific, peer review, respectable and self-respecting journal publish this?  Well, you get out your statistics guitar and start playing in different keys.

What the researchers do is “adjust” the data.  In geekspeak, the problem they’ve got is a big error term and a small explained term.  It means their ignorance is wildly larger than their knowledge.  The trick, therefore, is to add variables to the test that reduce the error term making it appear that the small difference of 0.3% is actually a Small difference.

Gee, what factors besides lack of insurance kill people?

Age.   Smoking.  Drinking.  Exercise.   Self reported health.

Let me illustrate.  Let’s look at two big ones, smoking and age.  Compare smokers versus people who never smoked.  The death rates are 4.6% and 1.7%, respectively.  The comparison test shows that z = 10.003, p < .000001, and h = .17, a small Windowpane (45/55).

Compare people aged 17-24 (death rate 0.7%) versus people 55-64 (death rate 10.7%).  The comparison test shows that z = 17.37, p < .00001, and h = .50, a moderate Windowpane effect (35/65).

These are much more important factors in risk of mortality especially compared to insurance status.  Now, the researchers run all of these factors in front of insurance status, which reduces the error/ignorance term enormously, making that 0.3% difference look bigger and bigger and bigger until it finally crosses the magic number of p < .05 and baby, you’ve got a Headline!

And, of course, it is important to note that the authors are affiliated with Harvard University and their Medical School.  A little Crimson Veritas helps as another Cue here, obviating the need to read past the Headline.

Now, it is true that if you take their data set and run all the adjustments that you will find Lack of Insurance Is Associated with Mortality.  They did not make that up.

They just made up the Headline so you didn’t have to read the report and discover just how persuasive Harvard Medical School researchers are.

If you seek fiction that makes you think, read The Privileges by Jonathan Dee.

I did not like the book opening.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, that nemesis of modern novelists and his theme of aspiration without virtue, haunts this novel as it opens with a wedding and characters grasping for Gatsby’s lawn.  The Privileges opens like Dee’s assault on Mount Fitzgerald, the mark of a limited writer.

But, the book then began to address the same existential question that Cormac McCarthy addressed in The Road.  Where McCarthy stripped away everything to reveal character and virtue, Dee bequeaths everything to reveal character and virtue.  The Privileges is The Road, just traveled in style.  What happens when the world gives you everything?  How do you live your life when you have everything?

While this seems like a fantasy question, it is something more and more of us face.  What are the moral consequences of peace and prosperity?  Dee gets us there with financial masters of the universe who get everything yet you don’t need Everything to achieve Ease or Comfort.  Most of us live in an economy that provides material needs, but gives nothing to our quest for virtue, ethics, or character.  If you think the meaning of life would become more clear if you owned a jet rather than a car, you need to stop smoking weed whether real or metaphoric.

If you visit Amazon and read the reviews on The Privileges you will find several of the same comments that plague readers of The Great Gatsby – all these wealthy, over privileged people who don’t know how to live.  That is a problem.  This book requires a different kind of thinking and if you don’t like that kind of thinking then you probably won’t want to read The Privileges.  It is a strong work of fiction, so it is ironic and does not say what it means.  If you cannot break past the obvious trappings of setting, scene, and time you will miss the metaphor.

Now, since I blog on all things persuasion let me be a pedantic prole and note just one instance.

It involves the outcomes of dissonance reduction.  Adam, the primary protagonist of the novel, talks with Devon, his petty, junior partner in an illegal insider trading scheme that has earned great riches.  Devon claims that Adam does this just for the thrill, that he is just a player without a conscience.  Before Adam replies, he thinks about this observation and Jonathan Dee, the writer, makes those thoughts available to us.

Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fortitude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the noblest thing he had ever done in his life.  It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it. (page 144)

How does a man who rips off millions of dollars through illegal trading over many years get through the day?  Dissonance reduction.  “Hey, I’m providing for my family, baby, and I do what it takes without letting them know about it or worry about it.  Look at how beautiful and happy my wife and children are, baby.  And they live in the cocoon I built for them without them even knowing it exists.  I am great.  I am noble.  And I tell no one of this because I am humble.”

Of course this is just fiction and the boring fiction of people who have everything and aren’t happy, and the whole thing with dissonance is just that bad boy rationalization everyone does when they try to justify themselves when they get caught . . . except what goes on before they are caught and what if they never get caught and what if peace and prosperity actually makes virtue more difficult and does any of this connect with those of us who don’t have a jet, but only a car or a bike or are just sitting around wondering what to do next?

Motoko Rich blogs at the NYT about digital piracy of books.  She notes a recent study of illegal downloading that  . . .

. . . estimates that there were 9 million illegal downloads of copyrighted books in the final months of last year . . . It found, for example, that illegal copies of “Freakonomics,” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, were downloaded 1,082 times and “Angels & Demons,” by Dan Brown, 7,951 times.

Shootfire.  That’s nothing.  One website lists the following illegal activity for my book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Persuasion:

That’s a total of 26,471 illegal downloads from just this one source.  There are others not included in this list and you can easily find them with a quoted search at Google.  I might be on the Best Sellers Illegal Download List.

Hey, if you’re reading an illegal copy, it’s okay.  I forgive you.  All I ask is that you actually read the damn thing and don’t misquote me!

And, hey.  It’s a pretty good book, isn’t it?  Even without the dissonance reduction.

This is more than strange.  Nutrition advocates want restaurants to post up calorie information on their menus to reduce the amount of food people eat.  One would think that restaurants would naturally be against this because less eating means fewer sales and less profit.  Yet, here’s a story that shows large chain restaurants like Applebee’s and Starbucks are now putting this business-killing information on their menus.

What gives?  Are these hardheaded business people out of their minds?  Suffering a sudden attack of conscience?

No.  They understand the nutrition research better than the nutrition researchers and advocates do.

If you actually understand research methods 101, you can read the nutrition advocates own research – not Big Food research – on menu information to discover that it has no practical effect on ordering or eating behavior.  Please start on this blog with an earlier post on just this topic.  Research led by Kelly Brownell conducted a really good lab experimental study that they thought proved the effectiveness of menu labeling.

Except it doesn’t.  Brownell’s team tortured their data to make it scream “You’re Right!” and the hapless editors and reviewers at the American Journal of Public Health traded good sense for passion to accept the waterboarded data.

My ardent colleagues:  Open your ears and your eyes.  Nutrition labels do not work.  Why do you think that Big Food is cooperating?  Do you think you convinced them?

Read the details of the Brownell study and other labeling studies.  Read the Reactance literature on the effect of warning labels.

I am again reminded of ancient Greek nightmares:  You kill what you love or what you love kills you.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

You Can’t Persuade a Falling Apple.

Can you think from the Bible?

Some people find it a collection of ridiculous stories that rival fairy tales.  Some fear it so that they quiver just seeing the gold letters on black leather.  And, of course, there are many stops in between these extremes.

But, can you think from the Bible?

Researchers have determined that the text is among the oldest, authenticated records we have from ancient times.  Considered only as a text, pages of written words, the books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, are among the oldest artifacts of human cognition we possess.  Thousands of years ago, people wrote those words.

The books of the Bible are older than any manuscript we have from Plato or Aristotle.  If you believe the inestimable Ben Jowett wasn’t fooling with his translation of the Dialogs from Plato, then you can accept the Bible in the same way.    And, if you cannot do this,  you haven’t thought the thought through to its end.

So, if we can think about the Bible, what are we to think about persuasion from the Bible?  If there is any truth in persuasion science then it should be apparent in all Walks of life.  Shouldn’t it?

Consider persuasion in Genesis, there at the beginning . . . from the King James translation . . .

Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.  And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.  For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.  She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate . . .

. . . and the LORD said, “Who told you that you were naked?  Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”

Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”

And the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”  Genesis 3:1-6, 11-13.

This passage from Genesis illustrates five persuasion concepts.

1.  Reactance.  Observe the Serpent’s calculated observation of a unfair restriction on Eve’s thought and action with his line “You shall not eat!”

2.  Elaboration Likelihood Model.  The Reactance play stimulates Biased High WATT responding from Eve who is now fully engaged on the Central Route.  Satan then provides a series of Arguments to persuade Eve to break a Law of God.  Eve clearly thinks about the Serpent’s Arguments and elaborates upon them:  “Gee, the fruit of the tree is good for food (the first nutrition argument in recorded history, notify the folks in the Food Police that they’re on the same side as Satan here), the fruit of the tree is pleasant to behold, eating this fruit will make me wise, and finally, I’ll be like God.”  She gives voice to that long conversation in our heads and let’s us know that she is really thinking about Satan’s arguments.  No cues for this woman.

3.  CLARCCS Cues.  Observe Adam and see a classic illustration of Cues.  As detailed in a prior post, he goes for “if others are doing it, you should, too” and “if you like the source, do what she requests” from CLARCCS Cues.  He clearly is a Low WATT processor and took his Fall down the Peripheral Route.

4.  Attribution.  The fourth persuasion variable comes from Adam’s sorry performance.  When questioned by God about his actions, what does Adam come up with:  My wife made me do it.  Thus, we see the first record of external attribution deployed to escape the consequences of bad behavior.  And this is not just a guy thing: Eve blames her attitude change and behavioral choices on the Serpent.  Here we have the first recorded attribution of:  The Devil made me do it.

5.  Modeling.  While Eve used external attribution, where did she get it?  She apparently modeled it from Adam’s example.  There they both stood, naked and now ashamed.  God questions Adam and Adam blames Eve.  Eve watches this and observing Adam’s apparent success with this action, she imitates it herself:  the Serpent made me do it!

Genesis provides a demonstration of the major processes of persuasion in one compact example.  And, you should begin to realize that persuasion is a fundamental element of our eternal and evolved human nature.  Our ability to give and receive persuasive words marks us as human from the beginnings of our recorded history.