This was my Clapton phase and his Matthew McConaughey.  1979, Ace.  See the ring on my finger?

You’re still the best little brother.

Let’s take a jog past the last year and admire my insight, aplomb, and panache.  And, we’ll cheerfully ignore my errors, colossal or inconsequential.  That’s how to play the Man Behind the Curtain, isn’t it?  So, Steve speaks as Oz and Cassandra.

Mike Leach is still in court.  My money rides on him.  Too, while he is listed for every coaching vacancy that occurs, he’s still unemployed.  As a sign of respect, I’ll offer him, here and now, a regular, recurring Head Guest Blogger position with the Persuasion Blog.  Pay comensurate with Melanie’s approval.

I noted the School Marm as New Sheriff in DC with the FDA and everything they’ve done since has only confirmed that observation.

“Normal weight obesity” still hasn’t caught on in daily parlance.  Maybe this year.  Maybe.

Does Osama bin Laden still believe in Global Warming?  Maybe we can’t catch him because he’s working on a UN IPCC subcommittee?

The Internet ad guys almost have that new privacy icon ready for prime time.  Almost.  Any day now.  Soon.  Really.

Anyone know if the Dancing Disability Persuasion Campaign worked?  Great idea.  Fabulous execution.  Lottsa free publicity.

Pepsi has been giving money and getting publicity, but nothing official about the entire $20 million pledge by the end of 2010.

Oppressed people of the world are still waiting for the promised iGizmo revolution.

I’ve warned you about the persuasion peril with Web 2.0 and social media, but no one is listening.  Go ahead.  Jump.  You can fly.

A Federal court has ruled parts of Health Care reform are unconstitutional and other States have pending suits, so maybe my concerns about the Trillion Dollar Nudge won’t be realized after all.

Have we started winning the War on Obesity yet?

Remember NBC’s quiet campaign to encourage smarter and healthier living?  Using less plastic?  Walking more?  Yeah, right.

I’m usually awful at political predictions, but I got the midterm Election wipeout dead right and early to boot.  Sometimes persuasion past predicts persuasion future.

China grows.  What are the persuasion plays?

Seen the EcoIndex anywhere yet?  Must be a production meeting with the Internet privacy guys.  Great pair of legs in those green jeans, though.

No word on the latest Great Cocoa Caper.  With deals like this no news is . . . just no news.  But, man, it’s got to be twitchy sitting on that much chocolate this long.

Bang!  Got it right with Joe Manchin.  Helluva polispot.

So, the NFL knows how to handle FauxItAll science on concussions.  Got real quiet on that front, didn’t it?

Everyone in the NBA is on the Dress Code bus.  They read this blog!

Okay, it’s been less than a month, but the world is waiting for the new Homeland Security color blind alert system.

Who knew persuasion revealed so much?  Who realized that even a fool like myself could actually get so much so right so often?  Who doesn’t tremble in anticipation at what this Blog holds for 2011?

The latest persuasion news in brief from the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Things are going to start happening now!

Big Five Personality and Genetics

I’m killing two birds here and it may get both ugly and confusing.  First, most practical persuasion mavens use demographics and psychographics to slice people into categories.  May I suggest you learn about the Big Five (OCEAN) as a category system with a bit more science behind it than things like Hot Tub Boomer or Soccer Mom and on and on?  The Big Five describes the five primary personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, along with other facets (subtraits).  If you are into behavior change, you might want to look at Conscientiousness.  For example, it correlates with all cause mortality at near moderate (40/60 Windowpane) effect size.  Search on Howard Friedman.

Second, and here’s the ugly and confusing part unless you are cuckoo for Personality research, everyone knows that personality is a function of nature and nuture, but precisely how these two factors work is a bit shaky.  The Human Genome provides some guidance.  The research abstracted here addresses that very issue and offers this conclusion.

Across all five factors, chi-square values tended to increase and peak at the 50% cutoff, suggesting that the genetics of personality traits is characterized by an extraordinarily large number of very small effects.

Gee whiz.  Remember when the Human Genome Project was going to Change Everything?  It still provides great science as that quote attests, but the practical application part is lagging just a bit.  Not to mention the penetrating insight, the leap forward in scientific knowledge.  One of my most interesting professors used to call it the Gah-gnome Project with an emphasis upon the “gnome.”  At the time I thought he was simply losing his mind with age, but maybe he was smarter than we knew?

This brings to mind a joke about dementia and personality research.  A famous experimental psychologist was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and disclosed this to a graduate seminar.  He wistfully bemoaned the impending loss of cognitive skill, then brightened.  “I can always do trait research!”

Still, the Big Five has a lot of implications for practical persuasion even if our science on nature and nuture is more charming than explanatory.

An alternative to the search for single polymorphisms: Toward molecular personality scales for the five-factor model.  McCrae, Robert R.; Scally, Matthew; Terracciano, Antonio; Abecasis, Gonçalo R.; Costa, Paul T., Jr. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 99(6), Dec 2010, 1014-1024.

doi: 10.1037/a0020964

Abstract

There is growing evidence that personality traits are affected by many genes, all of which have very small effects. As an alternative to the largely unsuccessful search for individual polymorphisms associated with personality traits, the authors identified large sets of potentially related single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and summed them to form molecular personality scales (MPSs) with from 4 to 2,497 SNPs. Scales were derived from two thirds of a large (N = 3,972) sample of individuals from Sardinia who completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P. T. Costa, Jr., & R. R. McCrae, 1992) and were assessed in a genomewide association scan. When MPSs were correlated with the phenotype in the remaining one third of the sample, very small but significant associations were found for 4 of the 5e personality factors when the longest scales were examined. These data suggest that MPSs for Neuroticism, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness (but not Extraversion) contain genetic information that can be refined in future studies, and the procedures described here should be applicable to other quantitative traits.

P.S. Why aren’t Costa and McCrae on the list for a Nobel?  They’ve been doing some of the best work on basic personality for forty years.  Same thing with the late Martin Fishbein and Icek Aizen with TRA.  And the late B.F. Skinner.  Or John Anderson at Carnegie Mellon and his work on cognition.  Yeah, no science here.  Keep moving, Stockholm.  Nothing to see here.  Man, and you wonder why I’m cynical about scientists.

Nietzsche Rides Again

Hey, all you Live Longer zealots, consider a benefit to pain, suffering, and All That.  Nietzsche and Dissonance suggest that Bad is Good for You, something the Health and Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps march against every day . . . especially when Congress is in session and writing Appropriations or when the Executive is writing Regulations!  Consider, however, that unhealthiness may be healthy in the long run.

Or not.

Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience.  Seery, Mark D.; Holman, E. Alison; Silver, Roxane Cohen.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 99(6), Dec 2010, 1025-1041.

doi: 10.1037/a0021344

Abstract

Exposure to adverse life events typically predicts subsequent negative effects on mental health and well-being, such that more adversity predicts worse outcomes. However, adverse experiences may also foster subsequent resilience, with resulting advantages for mental health and well-being. In a multiyear longitudinal study of a national sample, people with a history of some lifetime adversity reported better mental health and well-being outcomes than not only people with a high history of adversity but also than people with no history of adversity. Specifically, U-shaped quadratic relationships indicated that a history of some but nonzero lifetime adversity predicted relatively lower global distress, lower self-rated functional impairment, fewer posttraumatic stress symptoms, and higher life satisfaction over time. Furthermore, people with some prior lifetime adversity were the least affected by recent adverse events. These results suggest that, in moderation, whatever does not kill us may indeed make us stronger.

Night, Sleep, Death, and the Stars

A core belief and motivational problem in all health and safety behaviors is fear of death.  One of the most interesting and productive psychological theories about this fear is Terror Management Theory (TMT).  TMT explains that when people think about death, they respond badly to it, but that enhancements to self concept and esteem, and to their cultural worldview will reduce the negative effects of mortality salience making it easier for people to consider death-related thoughts, feelings, and actions.  Thus, TMT explains why many people react badly to health and safety messages and points to tactics for overcoming resistance beyond traditional fear appeals models (most notably the Health Beliefs Model).  Of course, all most no one dealing with death topics (health and safety; insurance; risk management; security; military; etc.) has heard of TMT.

You might find it useful.

Adjusting to death: The effects of mortality salience and self-esteem on psychological well-being, growth motivation, and maladaptive behavior. Routledge, Clay; Ostafin, Brian; Juhl, Jacob; Sedikides, Constantine; Cathey, Christie; Liao, Jiangqun.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 99(6), Dec 2010, 897-916.

doi: 10.1037/a0021431

Abstract

This research builds on terror management theory to examine the relationships among self-esteem, death cognition, and psychological adjustment. Self-esteem was measured (Studies 1–2, 4–8) or manipulated (Study 3), and thoughts of death were manipulated (Studies 1–3, 5–8) or measured (Study 4). Subsequently, satisfaction with life (Study 1), subjective vitality (Study 2), meaning in life (Studies 3–5), positive and negative affect (Studies 1, 4, 5), exploration (Study 6), state anxiety (Study 7), and social avoidance (Study 8) were assessed. Death-related cognition (a) decreased satisfaction with life, subjective vitality, meaning in life, and exploration; (b) increased negative affect and state anxiety; and (c) exacerbated social avoidance for individuals with low self-esteem but not for those with high self-esteem. These effects occurred only when death thoughts were outside of focal attention. Parallel effects were found in American (Studies 1–4, 6–8) and Chinese (Study 5) samples.

I’m currently adding new software to the Persuasion Blog to improve performance on mobile devices, most notably the various iGizmos like Android, the various Apple iThings, and related products.  If you are viewing the Persuasion Blog on one of these devices you may notice sudden format changes in the content.  Please bear with me as I determine the optimal solution.

For you propeller heads, I’m using the WordPress plugin, WP Mobile Pack, from James Pearce and Friends.  It installs easily and runs well right out of the box.  I’m tweaking various options, most particularly the color, in an attempt to maintain color guidance across my three Blogs (orange for Persuasion, red for Faith, and purple for Leadership), but that’s going to require tearing apart code across several inter-related files.  Really bear with me on that.

So far, though, two thumbs up for James Pearce and Friends and the WP Mobile Pack.

If you care to share feedback with me about your mobile experience, please contact me with an email to drsbb at HealthyInfluence dot com.

Nedra Klein Weinreich of Social-Marketing.com sent me an email regarding yesterday’s post, Pornographic Persuasion.  She’s found a UK social marketing campaign on condom usage that applies the concepts I described in that post.  You can inspect this effort for yourself here.  I appreciate the information from Nedra and hope you find it interesting.

Let’s do a Comparison and Contrast between my Porno Persuasion and the intervention.  Sorry.  No pictures.  Use your imagination.  Isn’t that better?

Comparison . . . you can clearly see the POV manipulation in the intervention videos.  The images strike me as incredibly involving and certainly executions that should elicit that Long Conversation in the Head, characteristic of ELM Central Route processing.

I also like the audience analysis quality.  This intervention crew seems to have a good sense of the target receivers they wish to influence.

The “treatment” is also extended over many different “episodes” so you’re getting a bigger dose of the message that can be spread over many viewings (distributed versus mass learning for you Ed Psychers).

Looks like a sharp and thoughtful intervention.

Contrast . . . this is not an experimental test of persuasion theory, but clearly an applied intervention based on existing theory and research.  Science is not the goal of an intervention like this, so my gear head motivation remains.

I’m also concerned at how often the key condom usage behaviors are actually shown.  Most of the video I’ve seen conveys the social psychology of the scene, but the actual condom action appears in a quick flash.  My argument here is that people must elaborate extensively and exactly over all the actual condom action (buy, store, access, negotiate, use, dispose) and the videos leave much of that as inferential rather than a detailed portrayal of the action.

And, about that viewing:  With a YouTube placement, those videos are always available and that’s great, but the cost here is the receiver controls the viewing.  If you saw channel flipping with a TV remote control as a persuasion problem, then how people surf the Internet is a persuasion nightmare.  If the intervention crew is also doing something that controls access to the videos (like through a classroom, seminar, training, workshop, etc.) that would help greatly.  You can see a good count indicator on this problem with the number of views for the 12 videos.  It ranges from nearly 300,000 to less than 30,000.  That’s a lot of variability in the Exposure/Reception phase of the Cascade.

Outro . . . it will be interesting to hear about any evaluation study from this intervention.  That’s typically not a major element of these kind of public health attempts which is unfortunate.  As I’ve documented in various ways in the Primer and this Blog, applied persuasion does work, but it more often fails.  Often the government sponsored efforts are the worst at evaluation because no one wants to pay for it and assumes that it is easy to get something out there . . . which is true.  It’s just hard to get something out there that actually works.