Consider this Figure from the IPCC (through the Wall Street Journal), the UN climate change panel that is driving the international conversation on policy.  If a problem can be fairly expressed in one Figure, this is it.

All you see are the colored lines in the middle of the Figure that meander like Old Man River until 1900 when they take off like a rifle shot with a couple of ricochets in 1950 and 1995, but then return to a trajectory that looks like escape velocity from Planet Earth.

Houston, we’ve got a problem!

A persuasive problem.  Those colored lines draw your eyeball, your attention, and your evaluation.  Zig-zag, zig-zag for thousands of years, then the rocket shot.  Just follow the colored lines . . . like Homer Simpson.

Now, let’s turn up the light a bit and make that gray background more noticeable.  Didn’t really see it, did you?  Of course not.  It’s designed to read like Background when it is actually Foreground.  That dull, plain, and unimportant gray contains the most important Numbers in this Figure, but the IPCC hid that from you to Simplify the data.

Notice two important perceptual qualities about the gray mass.  First notice how wide it is, especially compared to the range of the zig-zagging lines.  The lines essentially are the mid point of Old Man River while the gray background is the banks of the river.  Thus, the Old Man River of global temperature is wide and wanders mightily.

But, second, now note how no colored line at any time ever jumps the banks of the river’s width anywhere.  In scientific terms this means that the wandering of the lines across all points and all times is within the Random Variation or the banks of Old Man River; the lines never jump the banks of Old Man River and that means there is no scientific evidence of any temperature change in the last one thousand years this Figure displays.

Any one trained in statistics can see the mean variation of the colored lines never exceeds the 95% confidence band of the gray background.  Unless one chooses to be Fooled by Randomness and find meaning in the tea leaves, the best scientific data we have shows all that zig-zagging is just the normal variation of Old Man River.

And the IPCC hid that fact in plain sight which is always most persuasive.  Make the Favorable Argument Obvious and make the unFavorable Argument Plain.

I’ll give the IPCC credit as persuaders.  They understand the Rule:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.  There is an obvious lack of sincerity when you persuade with statistics like this.  However, since the IPCC bills itself as a scientific unit, I’d have to caution them on another rule:  All Insincere Science Is Bad.

Evgeny Morozov offers an excellent and insightful essay on the consequences of communication technology for changing people and societies.  Many people see a new communication device – radio, film, TV to computer, smartphone, iWhatever – and believe it contains a persuasion revolution.  Morozov looks at the love affair some smart people have with social media and their rosy expectations for political and social change.  He is not optimistic.

As a persuasion guy, I’m not either.

Realize that a communication device only carries messages.  To convey is not to convince.  Reach is not persuasion.  Speaking is not changing.  Interactivity is not change.  The device always carries the message and that is the message, Marshall McLuhan nonwithstanding.

And, this extends to how devices vary in their deployment.  Take the term Network.  Remember it as a collection of allied transmitters that create a TV broadcast Network.  Now see it as the PostModern collection of wired and wireless computers that creates a Network.  Neither Networks are inherently persuasive or inherently persuasive in a New Way.  They just combine different elements of human nature into new packages.

Consider the Rules.

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

If you know what you are doing you don’t need the New New Thing whether in the form of Ross Perot or Steve Jobs.  You just do it with your skill and make the change happen.  Hitler and Mussolini used, Zounds my Good Sir, radio and newspapers, posters and pamphlets, public speaking and cinema to conquer societies and rational restraints.  Imagine what more they could have done with an iPhone and twitter?  Not much.  They knew what they were doing as evil persuasion geniuses.  Sure, the devices helped, but only as a means of carrying their message.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Persuasion is not about devices; it is about changing the other guy.  Devices may help you segment your TACTs (gee, are iAcolytes different from the rest of us?) but that’s not persuasion.  You change the Other Guy with messages, not devices.

May he rest in peace, but Marshall McLuhan is dead and so is the Medium is the Message.

USA Today continues its current marketing campaign to increase readership with rancid health stories.  Today it is perils of hot dogs.  But, no!  Not for the usual reasons of sodium, meat, and mystery.

For shape.

Quoting CDC statistics, USA Today notes that 77 children die every year from choking on food with an expert estimate that 17% of those deaths are from hot dogs.  That’s tough math to do with fingers AND toes, so let me get out the calculator, 77, then the multiplication X sign, and then, yeah, .17 and that =’s 13.09 deaths attributable to hot dogs.

All by design.

“If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission requires labels on toys with small parts alerting people not to give them to kids under 3. Yet there are no required warnings on food, though more than half of non-fatal choking episodes involve food, Smith says.

“No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the time,” Smith says. “The best way to protect kids is to design these risks out of existence.”

Though Smith says he doesn’t know exactly how someone would redesign a hot dog, he’s certain that some savvy inventor will find a way.

I appreciate Dr. Smith’s and all pediatricians work with children and I’m glad they do it.   And, my heart goes out to parents and families who experience this tragedy.

But . . .

If we need to redesign hot dogs for 13.09 events, how shall we handle natural foods like bananas and grapes which share a shape similarity to hot dogs?  Or do they get a pass here because they are natural?  Perhaps, they kill fewer children, but isn’t one death one too many?  If design kills, why should natural or artificial matter?

I’m just asking as the persuasion guy, you know, since I’m the one who has to handle the communication side of your idea because I’m sure that Dr. Smith doesn’t believe it goes from his lips to their ears then to their mouths.  And people might wonder, if it is the design, then don’t we design everything?  I mean, following Socrates and the humanists, isn’t Man the Measure of All Things?  Designer Science.  No Limits, except Imagination!

And, again with the Warning Labels.  It’s a feature of a new Policy Statement that pediatricians are proposing.  I didn’t realize that Med Schools taught courses in Warning Labels since you can’t swing the latest issue of a medical journal without hitting a medical expert calling for Yet Another Warning Label.

Hey, if you’re a Smart Consultant with a high tolerance for arrogant stupidity, there’s an exciting new career path for you as a Warning Label Consultant to Meds and Feds!  Man, the charges you could make for all the “creative” work on label design – you’d make a lawyer at Boston Legal look like Mother Teresa.

And, then, at the end, the FDA and that new Policy Statement.

The Food and Drug Administration, which has authority to recall products it considers “unfit for food,” plans to review the new statement, spokeswoman Rita Chappelle says.

Might wanna run that by The Man.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Power Corrupts Persuasion . . .

. . . and on and on . . .

Thomas Friedman provides this persuasion advice for frustrated True Greens.

In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

Friedman also offers this name change for Global Warming.

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes.

The Rules.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple.

. . . so I come early from work and catch my best friend in bed with my wife and I says, “Lennie . . . I gotta . . . but you?

Get your swing ding-a-ling on . . .

. . . Machiavelli adheres forever with persuasion as both description and prescription.  To persuade is to be like Mach and to persuade well is to make Machiavelli proud.  Machs exhibit no ideological commitments, possess a cynical take on human nature, follow a heartless calculation toward other people, and display a marked disregard for conventional morality.  “Git ‘er done, baby” could be the popular homespun saying, properly twisted.

Academic studies of Machiavellianism paint a dark and dangerous portrait.  Those infected with Mach qualities find themselves classified as pathological and can read detailed descriptions of themselves in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of deviance for clinicians and insurance companies.  And, those who elude capture, but range free in the world like Hannibal Lector between incarcerations, can find themselves quantified in journal reports with Normal Machs who reveal their dark side in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, the Ten Dollar Game, and blasts of white noise.

Of course, it also helps when you invent a Machiavelli that does not exist.  If you read the original Mach IV scale that measures the contemporary meaning of Machiavellianism then compare it to to what Machiavelli wrote, you wonder whether the scale authors were academics or poets.  The Prince is much more subtle than hammers on the thumb like,

“One should take action only when sure it is morally right,”

“Most people are basically good and kind,”

“Honesty is the best policy in all cases,”

“There is no excuse for lying to someone else.”

Certainly anyone who scores High Bad on statements like this is someone to examine carefully for either poison or a bad sense of humor.  They might even be crazy.  But, persuasive?  Manipulative, even?

And while it is good to despise pathology – but, isn’t that a tautology – it is free riding to savage those who save the city from predators.  Machiavelli should not be acknowledged as a bastard, but our bastard, but as a deep thinker on the means of survival, success, and succor for all, including those who would carp, criticize, and cavil all the way to a death camp.

Consider from the Dark Source itself, The Prince, with Machiavelli describing the case of the notorious tyrant, Agathocles:

Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. . .  Nevertheless, his barbarous cruelty and inhumanity with infinite wickednesses do not permit him to be celebrated among the most excellent men. What he achieved cannot be attributed either to fortune or to genius.

And, now, a different source, but still Machiavelli’s thought:

“All cities that ever, at any time, have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats, or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them.  Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world.”

from “Words to be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money”, in Chief Works and Others [of Machiavelli], trans. Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), v. III, 1439.

Prudence operationalizes itself through power and persuasion.  This is pathology?  This is dangerous?  Even Jesus admonished the Disciples to spread the Gospel, but wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove . . .

. . . or blues out with Mr. Armstrong . . .

Feedback, information on the difference between your current situation and a desired outcome, is a powerful tool for change.  People are naturally equipped with the ability to make these comparisons and then make adjustments to thinking, feeling, or acting to move the current state toward the goal.  Here’s a great story in the Wall Street Journal that describes how power companies are using feedback through usage meters and pricing strategies to alter consumer efficiency.

Usage meters are more sophisticated meters that not only measure energy use, but also provide easy to access, real time, and understandable feedback to the consumer.  Smarter meters are also hooked into a control system where consumers can program energy devices in ways that make them more efficient RIGHT NOW.

Now, none of this is rocket science either to consumers or power companies.  The interesting wrinkle, however, is how much more complicated the system has become with the addition of feedback.  In persuasion terms, the TACT has gone from a fairly generic definition of the Who (any customer) to a much more segmented definition (customers who have health problems that require a constant energy usage; customers who have people at home all the time versus customers who don’t; and on and on).  With feedback meters, the great variety of individual difference comes into play.

In essence, the meters have created a massive persuasion system of interacting people all with individual needs and desires, responding on the basis of not only the meter usage (and price implications) but also thoughts and feelings about control, justice, the Good Life, community demands, and on and on.  We have a complex social system of interacting people with diverse needs and desires.  We’ve got Persuasion, baby!

Now, you need to keep your head on straight and all the concepts orderly.  Feedback is not a form of Reinforcement Theory.  Feedback does not provide Consequences, only Information that compares two States.  The Consequences come from the power company in the form of Price.  The power folks are testing combinations of Carrots (rebates) and Sticks (higher prices at peak times) to see what works because no simple Consequence pattern works with all these diverse TACTs.  So far, they appear to find that people are more sensitive to Loss (higher prices) than Gain (rebates) which is common, so expect pain from the power guys – it tends to work better.

Note, too, the Attribution plays in here.  Customers can only make internal attributions (I did it) for their energy consumption (assuming fair meters).  Thus, the feedback tends to keep people on an internal motivation track rather than an external motivation track.  This difference is important.  Internal motivated people will control themselves and find methods that they like while externally motivated people wait around for The Man to push the buttons and complain all the while about it.

Additionally, all this action will probably generate High WATT, Central Route processors who look for the Arguments (like Price, Convenience, and Comfort).  People really think about this so you’ll get all the positive outcomes of Central Route activity:  More persistence, resistance to counter arguments, and prediction of future behavior.

The really Good News here is that the average effect of meters across all TACTs is positive and appears to produce a small Windowpane effect size (about a 10% reduction in usage).  Larger effects in usage arise with combinations of TACTs and price (people who turned on everything all the time and left them running react quickly to use and price).  Furthermore, this effect occurs immediately, typically within the first billing cycle.  Thus, everyone starts recovering the investment cost of the meters almost from the starting gun as opposed to other Green tactics that can take years of use to break even (as in this foolish, but faddish application – scroll to near end of the post).

The most interesting news reported in the story is anecdotal evidence offered by the power companies:  They claim consumers have positive attitudes and affect toward the meters.  This positivity is not universal (why would you expect that?).  In one case, meters were installed in a large community just before an unusual heat wave hit.  When consumers got their bills which were unusually higher for the time of year because of that heat wave, they attributed the increase to the presence of the meters (”The damn things are miscalibrated to favor the power company!”).  Thus, barring unfortunate coincidences like this, people respond favorably to feedback.

To close the persuasion lesson here, please note that feedback is a special combination of information.  Everyone has to agree on the Goal State, what it means, what it looks like.  Everyone has to agree on the Current State.  When you provide fair information that accurately compares Where You Are to Where You Want To Be, you’ve got Feedback.  You could also add some fabulous persuasion plays to amplify effects, but that’s another post.  I also suspect that the Power boys and girls aren’t thinking Persuasion since they’ve got Price, but they could earn more Profit if they combined Persuasion with Price in this Feedback Play.

Please consider this etymology from EtymologyOnline.

hypocrisy:  from the Greek, hypokrisis, “acting on the stage, pretense,” from hypokrinesthai, “play a part, pretend.”

from hypo- “under” plus the middle voice of krinein “to sift, decide” (see crisis).

The sense evolution is from “separate gradually” to “answer” to “answer a fellow actor on stage” to “play a part.”

[Sidebar:  Actors also look for subtext, so they sift the meaning under the playwright's text, truly to sift under.  One can drift into this subtext sifting with readers, too, as some look for other meanings beyond the obvious.]

hypocrite
from Greek, hypokrites “stage actor, pretender, dissembler,”

hypocritical
from Greek, hypokritikos “acting a part”

crisis
from Greek, krisis, lit. “judgment,” from krinein “to separate, decide, judge,”

Persuasion can literally be hypocrisy.  It acquires its unsavory connotation from those who are sincere, realistic, and traditional watching those who offer many meanings.