The latest persuasion news in brief.  Things are going to start happening now!

Effect Sizes?  I Don’t Have To Show You No Stinkin’ Effect Sizes!

Sun, Pan, and Wang draw a random sample of research articles and analyze the use and understanding of effect sizes in psychology journals.  They find that about 50% of quantitative studies do not report effects sizes and of the 50% that do, most don’t provide any interpretation.  Sigh.  Who will slay the Significance Serpent?  I’ve been reading articles like one this since Cohen’s 1962 paper on power analysis and statistical significance and his infamous “The Earth Is Round (p < .05)” paper.  Hey kids:  Statistical Significance Is for Sissies, Posers, and Lamers.

A comprehensive review of effect size reporting and interpreting practices in academic journals in education and psychology.  Sun, Shuyan; Pan, Wei; Wang, Lihshing Leigh.  Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 102(4), Nov 2010, 989-1004.

doi: 10.1037/a0019507

How Bad Science Gets Worse

In 2007 Robinson, Levin, Thomas, Pituch, and Vaughn reported a literature review that demonstrated how researchers and editors often draw scientific inferences from nonscientific studies (i.e. making prescriptive claims based on observational, uncontrolled methods).  In this paper Shaw, Walls, Dacy, Levin, and Robinson report on a depressing, but enlightening followup to that 2007 study to see how other researchers and editors use this bad science.  Lo and behold they find it is common for new researchers and editors to quote and cite the prescription despite the bad science.  We have met the enemy and he is us.  Stated another way, all bad science only reads the Discussion section.

A follow-up note on prescriptive statements in nonintervention research studies.  Shaw, Shana M.; Walls, Stephen M.; Dacy, Breana Sylvester; Levin, Joel R.; Robinson, Daniel H. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 102(4), Nov 2010, 982-988.

doi: 10.1037/a0020924

Push Surveying with Implementation Intentions

How powerful is II?  Hey, just disguise an II question on a survey, and you get change (very small, but real).  Godin et al. randomly assigned a variety of “persuasion interventions” hidden in “push” survey tactics to generate more blood donors.  One survey item for II was, “If Héma-Québec phones me about a nearby blood drive, then I will write down the time, day and location of the blood drive in my diary or calendar!”  Just that generated a very small effect (d = .10).  Thus, mere measurement creates change.  Kinda the Schrodinger’s cat thing without the cat or Schrodinger.

Godin, G., Sheeran, P., Conner, M., Delage, G., Germain, M., Bélanger-Gravel, A., & Naccache, H. (2010). Which survey questions change behavior? Randomized controlled trial of mere measurement interventions. Health Psychology, 29(6), 636-644.

doi:10.1037/a0021131

Take a stroll with me down persuasion memory lane.  Remember this anti-drug masterpiece?

We might want to dust it off and redeploy it in the War Against iGizmos.  See, we’ve got a new epidemic of Fried Egg brains, not from drugs, but from iGizmos.

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

This Fried Eggs metaphor with kids on iGizmos is not new with this latest NYT foray into cutting edge science.  We’ve read that there before.  And, the metaphor won’t go away because we’ve got a new generation at the Cool Table who only reads enough to get tenure at Harvard and not enough to know anything else.  If Dr. Rich was actually a scientist he’d understand the implications of the Payne Fund studies for this problem.  And, he wouldn’t make such foolish statements to the NYT.

See, the Cool Table found Fried Eggs in 1933.  As I brilliantly recount in this post during the late 1920s, yes, the Jazz Age with flappers, flivvers, and bathtub gin, academic researchers received an enormous grant from the Payne Fund (think the Ford Foundation nowadays) to study the impact of the then Media Peril:  Movies!  Moving pictures were the New New Thing back then and folks were convinced it was pretty much the devil that would destroy our children and civilization as we know it.  Back then the Cool Table documented the harms in a multivolume series known as the Payne Fund Studies.  It’s really good work and if you study media, movies, or media effects it’s still worth reading today.

Which is what I’d recommend for Harvard MDs who appear to have no knowledge or, more frightening still, knowledge but no understanding of “media effects.”  These silly people stand in front of the latest research technology – today the fMRI – and declare, This Changes Everything!  Of course, it doesn’t.  It simply opens a new door into a room we’ve been exploring in the Great Chain of Science.

If you don’t want the pain and suffering of reading good science because it was done in 1933, you can think about Fried Eggs and media from common experience.  If you’re old enough you remember all the Cool Table warnings about watching too much TV and sitting too closely to the screen.  Not only were Fried Eggs in your future, but you were gonna go blind, too.  And without the pleasure of pleasuring yourself!  Yet, here we are, not yet deaf, dumb, or blind, but merely rewiring our brains with the latest iGizmo.

What a bad parody of that cowboy western moment where a grizzled old scout dismounts from his dusty horse, squats down in the dirt, and reads the signs.  Then he squints up into the setting sun.  “It’s going to be bad,” he thought, rising and slapping his dusty hands against his weathered chaps.  “Pie, it’s going to be bad and we need to warn the good townspeople.”

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive.

From Baudelaire‘s “Le spleen de Paris” we learn:

“Quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!”

Okay, my high school French fails here, so back to Google we trudge.

When you hear stories of progress, keep in mind that the devil’s greatest trick is to make you think that he does not exist.

Recall my Rule:  Persuaders Can Either Be Famous or Effective, But Not Both.

I highly recommend repeated and close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books, especially from “Gay Science” onward.  He inspires creative persuasion thinking for two reasons:  his act of misprison and his metaphor making.

To grasp Nietzsche’s act of misprision you need to see past his atheism.  Nietzsche offends some with his militancy:  Just try to get through “The Anti-Christ” without wiping your face of his venom, spit, and rage.  If you think that contemporary atheists like Christopher Hitchens have a fever over faith, you ain’t seen nothing.  Hitchens offers ideas that Nietzsche scorched on a first draft.

But, Nietzsche’s atheism is the wellspring of his creativity and the source of the first reason – the misprison – to read him.  Harold Bloom has a theory of poetry that he calls the anxiety of influence in which he believes that later poets have to clear creative space against earlier poets.  A primary tactic in this effort is misreading precursors in a way that allows the new poet to imagine and express new ideas without being overwhelmed by the achievements of earlier giants.

Now, if you don’t see how this applies to all creative work, not just poetry, but cooking and engineering and politics and, of course, persuasion, you need to think a bit more.  If you are always traveling in the path of earlier workers soon you will find yourself in the rut and mud of the well worn road of the masses.  If you want to invent new persuasion, you need to clear creative space for yourself, away and against your precursors.

Nietzsche did what no one had done – think Darwin through, spinning in a 360 degree rotation while riding time’s arrow from the beginning to the end.  God Is Dead was the least of the implication and many evolutionary hipsters today still don’t realize just how Christian their thinking remains even while blaspheming.  If Darwin Is Alive, then God never existed, yet human civilization and philosophy all rely upon some form of god in their thinking.

Nietzsche’s killing insight here was no God meant he could think beyond good and evil in his re-evaluation of all values.  He creatively misread scripture and combined it with the new science of his time – Darwin and evolution – to wipe away faith and its fellow travelers from the canvas of philosophy, leaving him a vast white space to write upon.    Read “The Gay Science,” “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” “Beyond Good and Evil,” “Twilight of the Idols,” or “Ecce Homo” to find Nietzsche’s creative picture.

You can see that Nietzsche misprisoned scripture and never quite shook the anxiety of influence it held on him most particularly in his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”  In structure and technique if you can’t see the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the words in red from the New Testament as you read Zarathustra, you need to open the eyes behind your eyes.  Nietzsche never writes like Plato or, God forbid, Aristotle, or any other classical humanist voice.  But Zarathustra is haunted by God, the Being Nietzsche wished dead.

Nietzsche’s atheism was more the creative act of a wildly inventive mind than it was a willful act of disobedience.  He took Darwin seriously, killed God, and asked now what does it mean to live?  Realize the enormous creative opening this misprison makes and learn to apply it for yourself.  Can you clear creative space away from the current dogma and practice and think new?

This creative act should be inspired by my second reason for reading Nietzsche, his metaphor making.  Metaphors are bridges between two concepts that create bonds of similarity or difference.  Here’s just a random sampling.

“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is a God shadowed essay that rides on metaphors like the Overman, tightropes, and the eternal recurrence.

Twilight of the Idols.  Sounding out idols with the Hammer of Philosophy.   Gee, philosophizing with a hammer.  The “evil eye” and the “evil ear.”

Maxims and Arrows.

8.  Out of life’s school of war:  What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

14.  What?  you are seeking?  you want to multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred?  you are seeking followers? – Seek noughts!

15.  Posthumous men – like me, for instance – are not so well understood as timely men, but they are listened to better.  More precisely:  we are never understood – hence our authority.

36.  Whether we immoralist do virtue any harm?  -  As little as anarchists do princes.  Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones.  Moral:  one must shoot at morals.

The Problem of Socrates

Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?

. . . That he discovered a new kind of agon, that he was the first fencing-master . . .

Expeditions of an Untimely Man

. . . This saint has a way of talking about love that makes even Parisiennes curious.

Emerson – . . . he has absolutely no idea how old he is or how young he will be – he could say of himself, in the words of Lope de Vega:  I am my own successor.

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy.

My conception of freedom. – The value of a thing sometimes lies not in have one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us.

Where Wagner Belongs: . . . the Germans have no fingers for us, they have no fingers altogether, they have only paws.

Beyond Good and Evil. . . a play on words, a grammatical seduction . . . the will to truth . . . It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘creation of the world’, to causa prima.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a thoroughly modern man even though he lived in the 19th century, before the Internet, air conditioning, and rap music.  If he were alive today, he’d be a columnist for the New York Times . . . until he realized they compromised his independence.  Obviously, he was not a persuasion theorist.  He was a critic in the postmodern sense of the word and a philosopher who thought well about Darwin and evolution.  He also failed badly.  I’ve sold more of my books in my lifetime than Nietzsche did in his, a fact that surely causes him to spin in his Eternal Recurrence with Satanic rage.

Ironic intellectuals note that you can take any position and find quotes from Nietzsche to attack or to defend it, often in the same book.  Uncharitably one might claim that Nietzsche loved nuance to the point of obscurity or one might observe that Nietzsche just kept an open mind.  Nietzsche’s truth may be a moving target, but he nonetheless shoots accurate arrows.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Welcome to our Thanksgiving celebration for 2010.  As you can see I have much to be grateful for.  For example, Melanie let’s me show off my hard won skills with a knife.  A year as a union butcher in a hog factory is still useful.

Count fingers before and after.  If ten, all is good.  If not, look in the pan.  Hey, survived another year with ‘em all!

Now, how about predinner champagne?  I can’t reveal the meaning behind Melanie’s flashing gang sign, but it’s all good.

Why an empty glass?  Still got some sharp work ahead.  Gotta stay focused.

Man, that girl can cook.  The dressing and gravy are fabulous.  Light, but incredibly flavorful.  We don’t get a whole turkey anymore, just the breast, but Melanie still gets the whole nine yards out of it.  Oh.  And oyster casserole.  And that cranberry relish.

A fabulous setting.  The champagne goes great with the turkey.  Nice compliment.  And there’s a girl on the other side of this camera who’s going to sit across the table from me for dinner.  No wonder we call it Thanksgiving.

Zeus sleeps it all off.  He’s just a year old and not skilled in handling a full day of festivities just yet.  I warned him after his second glass of the champagne, but you know how kids are about warnings.

Our best holiday wishes to all.  I appreciate my wife, my life, and your attention.  I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy the blessings of your life.