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.

President Obama is selectively releasing his email, both personal and professional, to the press and hence the world at large.  You can read a sampling at the British newspaper website, the Guardian.  First, all the caveats that this is only a sampling and it’s selected and you don’t know the context, yada-yada.  But consider this reply to Secretary of Defense Gates on the issue of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military.

To: Robert Gates <secretary@defense.mil>
Subject: Re: New CBS poll on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell etc

Wait, wait, what? A much larger proportion of Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving openly in the military than “homosexuals” serving openly in the military? That’s ridiculous. Sometimes I think half the people in this country need to check their homes for low-level carbon monoxide leakages. So do you think we could push this through with 100% Republican support if we said it was about “confirmed bachelors” and “ladies with close female companions”? Jeez. BHO

I am surprised at the President’s reaction and that he would allow this out in the open.  It betrays a tone deafness to persuasion.  Can you imagine Bill Clinton releasing this?  Or even George W. Bush?  Consider the Rules.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

If the Other Guy feels one way about Gays ‘n Lesbians and another way about Homosexuals, go with it.  You’re not selling your soul to the Devil with this kind of wording preference.  You might recall a recent post where NPR and some of their audiences got touched off because the new Census form included the term, “Negro,” in its survey.  Words matter to the Other Guy and if you want to persuade them (which the Census bureau does not want to do with NPR, but what Mr. Obama does want to do with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy) then use the words the Other Guy gets.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Gee, it appears that President Obama has a low opinion of the intelligence of people who disagree with him over word preference.  How sincere.  How authentic.  How losing.  Where’s any kind of persuasion skill in this?

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

My best guess is that the American public would largely support a change in DoD policy on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  We’re a different country today than in 1993 when the policy first arose.  But, if the Persuader-in-Chief is going to blunder around like this, he might jam defeat into the jaws of victory.

This is a great example of awful persuasion.  It certainly does nothing to polish Obama’s image as a great persuader.

If:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere!

Then:  “You can’t get anything right,” he said, “unless you get the polar bear right.”

This from an environmental activist expressing his concerns over the lack of progress with the Obama administration.  Here’s more.

Mr. Snape said his group was particularly disappointed that the administration did not designate the polar bear as endangered by global warming and that it could not push a climate change bill through Congress.

No Peitho Award for Mr. Snape today!

When you do Science for any other reason than for the sake of doing science, you move yourself into the realm of persuasion.  My Rule observes:

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple

. . . which means you do not persuade when you’ve got science.  With science there is no ambiguity, uncertainty, or confusion (maybe error, but that’s something different).  Science is the pursuit of falling apples.

So, how are we to understand the work of some climate change researchers?  As Science for the sake of doing Science or as something beyond Falling Apples?  Consider this quotation from Dr. Phil Jones, a key scientist for the IPCC panel.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

To nonscientists that quoted phrase “statistically significant” sounds important, if unclear.  It is impossible to explain the concept briefly without over simplifying, but you can read more about it here.  If you can take my word for it, this admission is devastating to the claim that there’s been any practical change in global temperatures over the past 15 years.  In scientific parlance and reasoning, it means it is prudent to retain the null hypothesis of “no effect” and continue researching.  It also means, Don’t Cry Wolf!

Yet, this is exactly what Dr. Jones and his colleagues did.  They used their scientific credibility to hide the details behind a curtain as they cried, “Wolf!”  And, of course, we understand that crying “Wolf” means they were trying to persuade people.  They were not telling us about Falling Apples because the Apples were not Falling as the absence of statistical significance demonstrates.  And, they certainly were not doing Science simply for the sake of Doing Science.

And, this performance is not restricted to climate change researchers.  Recall Tiger Woods’ $12 billion tab on the dime of his various corporate sponsors?  Yeah, Tiger’s escapade in an Escalade caused a significant drop in the value of corporate stock for his sponsors.  Except if you actually read the report and go past the PR Headline, you discover an interesting repetition:  The results are not statistically significant.  Not even close.

If you read their badly formatted figure on page 8 that contains the individual stock prices over time, you see that the 95% confidence limit for each stock on 12 of 13 days includes values that show a loss, no change, or a gain.  To state this another way, each estimate for the effect of Tiger’s transgressions on each stock is statistically nonsignificant at the standard 0.05 alpha level.  It means that the estimates are not reliable.  The study authors artfully hid that flaw with an opaque admission that masked more than it exposed.

Finally, we should caution that our estimates are statistically `noisy,’ in that they could be significantly higher or lower than the numbers we report. One must make that caveat in any statistical study like this, and in our case the statistical margin of error is particularly large in part because Mr. Woods’ sponsors are (with the exception of Nike and EA) subsidiaries of larger parent companies.

When your results are scientifically worthless simply call them “noisy” and voila, you’ve got a Headline.  They, too, cried “Wolf,” but at a Tiger’s expense.  Ha-ha!  Great fun with science, isn’t it?  We get headlines and we admitted everything, but slipped it by everyone nonetheless and no one gets hurt.

Except if you are Dr. Phil Jones who had to resign his leadership position and is under continuing investigation by his university as if he were a rogue like Dr. Ward Churchill, noted Wolf Crier of all things Native American.  And, others in the climate change research community, too, are now feeling the consequence of trying to persuade with Falling Apples that, alas, are not Falling.  Most of the time Persuasive Science is merely a treat as with our UCal Davis economists free riding on Tiger’s misery.  But, the point of science is doing it for the sake of science and not for the sake of headlines, advocacy, or saving the world from itself.

Now, let’s consider Art for Art’s Sake!