Nothing is more to me than myself – Stirner, “The Ego and His Own”

The strongest dimmer switch is the Other Guy’s self concept. Make the situation touch that and you’ll dial up the dimmer switch to a High WATT setting in preparation for Argument Search, Scrutiny, and Embellishment – in other words, the Central Route processing. But, when that self interest becomes overheated, we move from Objective Processing – following data to conclusions, specifics to generalizations, small to large – and into Biased Processing – trimming facts to fit a conclusion. Such Bias must occur when the situation defines an element of our self concept because of the difficulty we have in changing our fundamental sense of self; we can change our beliefs about evolution or eternity much more easily than we can change our beliefs about our selves.

During the 2009 flu season Lee, Schwarz, Taubman, and Hou ran two Person-In-The-Street surveys with either UMichigan students (Study 1) or community adults at an Ann Arbor mall (Study 2) that asked for their risk perceptions regarding a series of health outcomes. In Study 1 just before the survey taker approached, a confederate passed by the participant and either Sneezed (Treatment) or did not (Control). In Study 2, the survey taker either Sneezed (Treatment) or did not (Control) at the beginning of the survey. All participants then responded to a one minute survey about perceptions of health risks. Here’s the table of results (click to enlarge).

The first column displays the risk perception and the next columns detail the obtained statistics for each group in each Study. Note in particular that last column with the d effect sizes which range from Medium (35/65) to Large (25/75). With all risk perceptions, participants exposed to a Sneeze Treatment expressed greater health risk compared to the No Sneeze Control. More interestingly, participants were debriefed after the study and asked about the sneezing and none expressed awareness of the manipulation; further most believed that the sneezing would only affect perceptions directly related to flu risks, but not to other health issues.

Let’s pull back from this and do a persuasion analysis. People are moving about in their normal life and approached by a stranger, clipboard in hand, who asks to conduct a one minute survey about health risk. This is an easy, familiar, and normal interaction. And, given that we know the results, it is wildly obvious that the participants were all ambling along the Peripheral Route, Cue-ing away the day. Merely a sneeze is enough persuasion stimulus to produce an obvious, practical, but certainly, ephemeral change in risk perception. And, when made to think about what just happened, participants thought logically enough to surmise that a sneeze might elicit more fear of flu, but certainly nothing else, despite the fact that everything else also changed with a sneeze.

Does this give you more insight into Low WATT processing?

This sweet little paper compactly demonstrates the persuasion psycho-logic of daily life. We move confidently through life thinking that we are thinking and we are thinking; just not thoughtful thinking. We are sailing on the surface of cognition, skipping over the sea, carried not by the force of our own motivation and ability, but by the Cue-y winds and currents in the world around us.

Now, before we go tripping all over ourselves with this nuanced insight into the foibles of human nature as revealed by the iron strength of persuasion science, realize how little change this Medium to Large Windowpane effect truly exposes. We cannot believe that the Sneezer participants beliefs endured more than moment after the survey ended. This is the Peripheral Route, pure and simple, which means a change that will not last. It is the One Night Stand and not Til Death Do Us Part.

Realize, too, that this effect is not constrained to sneezing and health. I would classify this as the Availability Cue, also known as Recency and as the Top of the Head. The trace of the sneeze is in active memory and thus easily available when the participant starts thinking about the survey questions related to health risk. Jeepers, there are sick people all around and sick people means risk, baby. Note how scientific this thinking is. Thoughtful. Empirical. Theory and research in an instant!

Yet, we see the Cue in the Low WATT light. Sneezer Participants merely respond to the last thought available in memory – AhhChoo! – and are off like a track dog chasing those fake rabbits.

Think about it next time you fear the Reaper (YouTube).

Sneezing in times of a flu pandemic: Public sneezing increases perception of unrelated risks and shifts preferences for federal spending. By Lee, Spike W.S.; Schwarz, Norbert; Taubman, Danielle; Mengyuan Hou. Psychological Science, Vol 21(3), Mar 2010, 375-377.

doi: 10.1177/0956797609359876

I have posted before on the Orwellian dangers of the web.  Combine an always on communication network that observes and monitors everyone’s twitch, tweet, and tap with a massive and living database, scoured instantly with self-learning algorithms, and, finally, mix in a nefarious source aimed at bad politics and you’ve got the UnThinkable:  1984.

Yet, being the facile persuasion maven who thinks through all angles and speaks from all sides, I have also posted on the limitations of Web 2.0, especially for making money or making behavior change.  Too shallow, too facile, too abstract.  No impact.

So which is it?

Recall my Rule:  If You Cannot Count It, You Cannot Change It.

Count, now, the recurring financial stories about the Web 2.0 giants like Facebook, twitter, or Foursquare.  You read stories that each is valued in the billions and that they are seeking new vehicles to get investors.  Facebook has been talking about some kind of IPO for a year.  Others have been talking about deals where one of Your Father’s Oldsmobile Websters, like Microsoft, will buy them out for billions.  And, here’s only this instant’s example:

In the latest sign of the Internet gold rush, location-based service Foursquare Labs Inc. is looking to raise fresh funds at a price that would value the three-year-old start-up at as much as $500 million, people familiar with the matter said.

But, here’s the twist.

That valuation could be a stretch for Foursquare, which gives users the ability to get deals or connect with friends by “checking in” wherever they are, but so far pulls in little revenue, the people said.

Always with these fabulous deals you always encounter the ugly fact that kills the beautiful theory: there’s no money in it.  They are not going public, even after several years of tremendous buzz.  All of these Killer App 2.0 transformational platforms float on venture capital and a meager income stream.  As long as somebody like Marc Andreessen is behind you, the venture floats.

If Web 2.0 is the Future and the Future is Here, then where’s the money?  I cite as an illustration a baroque infomatics study (pdf) linking tweets with the daily Dow Jones Industrial Average that claims to find a statistical relationship that is 87.6% accurate – SIX DAYS IN ADVANCE!  That is exactly what the Queen of Tomorrow knows about the Future which is why She controls the world.  If anyone has a math model that is 87.6% accurate at predicting the stock market, you don’t publish it; you corner the market, own the world, and then confront immortal combat with the Queen Herself.

These daily inconsistencies between the buzz and the cut, the propaganda and the persuasion, augur against the UnThinkable.  Orwell remains fiction.

We are left with the wisdom of Smith Barney.  You must make money or behavior change the old fashioned way:  You earn it.

P.S.  You remember Marc Andreessen.  He invented the first and best web browser, Netscape, while an undergrad of UIllinois.  He famously fought the Law, aka Microsoft, and lost the browser battle but won the wealth war.  If you look closely, you see Andreesen as a major player behind all the famous Web 2.0 ideas.  It appears that Andreesen is the ultimate marketing and financing source and without him, it collapses.  Web 2.0 can be seen simply as Marc’s vision of the Queen of Tomorrow.  Just Marc, Marc’s money, and Marc’s marketing skill.  Occam’s Razor, baby.

P.P.S.  You remember Smith Barney.  Once a great Wall Street investment house, it ran a fab ad campaign featuring the redoubtable John Houseman (cf. The Paper Chase, YouTube clip) with the memorable line:  they make money the old fashioned way; they earn it.  Smith Barney disappeared in the 2008 collapse.  Mr. Houseman passed away in 1988.

Jay Gatsby is the fictionalized embodiment of my Persuasion Rules as applied to relationships in everyday life. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows in the novel that Gatsby may also use the Rules in his work, but his Rule actions more clearly illuminate how he begins and develops relationships. Consider a summary of Gatsby.

Set in the American 1920s at the height of a stock market boom in the Roaring Twenties, this novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a wealthy, young Ivy League graduate who’s learning the bond business on Wall Street. Nick tells us about his life at the time as it connects with a second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, from Louisville, who is married to the fabulously and formidably wealthy Tom Buchanan. Tom and Nick schooled together at Yale where Nick had an uneasy relationship with the larger, wealthier, and crueler Tom Buchanan. The story unfolds with Nick, Daisy, Tom, and an attractive female golf pro, Jordan Baker, out on the glistening lawns of the wealthy sections of Long Island. Fold in Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson and her clueless, but devoted husband, George, and we have a strong story, but nothing about this Gatsby guy. Only when we are well into the story do we hear about the title character, Jay Gatsby, and he is slowly brought into plot and character development. Gatsby has been driving this novel from the beginning, but we don’t know that. We learn in subtle, indirect fashion that Daisy and Gatsby have a mutual past that neither our narrator, Nick, nor her husband, Tom, discern or know. And in that past connection we grasp the proximate, animating force of the novel: Gatsby loved Daisy then and loves her now. The novel unfolds as Daisy learns that Gatsby owns a mansion across the bay from her estate. The old lovers cross paths again – one forcing the reunion, the other gliding into it – and we have all the action that will drive the remainder of the novel. I reveal nothing more and observe: The novel is simple and obvious, a story of wealthy, sophisticated people in boom times, with a narrator watching a married couple that has romantic rivals.

As briefly as possible: Gatsby will do anything for Daisy’s love.

Now, the Rules.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him–he had never been in such a beautiful house before, but what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that Daisy lived there . . . It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy–it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

Daisy Buchanan is the Other Guy for Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s love for her is so intense that he will change himself and become the man a woman like Daisy will desire. And what is his key to Daisy?

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . .

That voice guides Gatsby’s life. Gatsby pursues money, then, both acquiring it and demonstrating it, all to please the Other Guy, Daisy. The life of money unfolds in particular places, speaks with a dialect and accent, gestures in unique ways. Gatsby changes himself to demonstrate that he lives in the culture of money.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Everything that Jay Gatsby does in his quest for Daisy is insincere and inauthentic. The Jay Gatsby of Daisy is not the James Gatz of his family and background. Jay Gatsby wraps his true self in the appearance and style of another man, a wealthy and powerful man, a man of money. He does not let other people see the true self and hides details of his past that might clue others into his authentic self.

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously– eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself–that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact, he had no such facilities–he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.

Persuasion Is Strategic or It Is Not.

Jay’s first meeting with Daisy sets his life course. Whatever he was or could have been before he met her, Gatsby puts aside to get Daisy. Everything that then follows, answers one question: Will this get me closer to Daisy? If Gatsby judges a future action as one that will move Daisy closer to him, he follows it. If not, then not. And, see that this goal would not be obvious to those around him. His criminal and quasi-criminal friends never suspect that Gatsby ran as a bootlegger to get Daisy Buchanan.

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

Gatsby came from simple beginnings. He was not born on third base believing he’d hit a triple. He was born on deck, waiting for his chance. He had only himself. He constructed an ideal image of himself as reflected in Daisy’s laugh, then devoted himself to realizing that ideal. Along the way he acquired instruction and assistance, but only in the pursuit of money. No one helped him get Daisy.

There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.

The novel turns on the distinction this Rule illuminates. Successful persuasion maintains the change in the Other Guy. When the change fails and Daisy sees Gatsby for who he truly is, the illusions of the past seem like a trick from smoke and mirrors. When Gatsby persuades, Daisy loves him. When he stops persuading, Daisy sees through what is now smoke and mirrors and the persuasion of Jay Gatsby ends.

In the climatic exchange in the stifling heat of a room in the Plaza Hotel, as Daisy, Nick, and Jordan observe in fascinated horror, as Tom Buchanan declares to Gatsby,

“I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”

Smoke and mirrors fill the room as Gatsby earnestly tries to maintain the illusions of persuasion.

“. . . he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”

And, finally.

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

When I was working in the CDC I encountered a practice I’d never seen as a professor whether as a teacher or a researcher. Often the CDC ran communication interventions that were aimed at everybody in the US. The CDC would conduct pre-post assessments on randomly selected respondents to measure any change. Thus, there was no control group as in the sense that some citizens were randomly assigned to the message (treatment) while others (control) were not. However, and this is the big idea I’d never encountered, the CDC argued that people who reported that they had not received an intervention message should be considered as a No Message Control Group, as if for them the intervention did not exist. Problem solved!

At some level of thinking, this sounds reasonable. Hey, if a tree falls in the forest and you don’t hear it, then functionally for you the tree didn’t fall. You didn’t know you got the Treatment and are thus unTreated which means Controlled.

At another level of thinking, this is crazy.

1. Hey, if you’re running a communication intervention that’s aimed at a population then part of your job is to deliver that intervention to all of the population. When people are telling you that they didn’t hear the falling trees, you failed at your intervention and at a fundamental element. Another way to phrase this is, if you’re cutting trees in the forest and no one hears them fall, did you really cut down trees or are you just another Beltway Bandit charging for services you never performed?

It is a sweet verbal trick to take folks who say they didn’t get your message and call them a No Message Control Group when more correctly they are people you failed to reach with your expertise and message. You cannot possibly run a communication intervention that misses enough folks to form a Group, Controlled or Otherwise, and call yourself expert or competent or talented or credentialed or whatever.

2. Hey, what about selective exposure to information? One of the oldest and best known effects about humans is that they tend to avoid things they don’t want to hear. Leon Festinger’s 1957 work on Dissonance provided a great theoretical explanation of this effect – we avoid information because it might trigger inconsistencies we’d rather not face because we’d have to go down the Dissonance Path and that’s not fun. Thus, we selectively exposure ourselves and deliberately avoid information that might challenge us. A recent meta analysis from William Hart and colleagues found an average d of .36, a Small plus effect or a Windowpane of 41/59. This is a noticeable effect. It is not a huge and obvious effect, but certainly larger than the Buxom Blonde with Big Tips effect or the Run Or Die effect.

So, when you’ve got people telling you they didn’t see your message, guess what you’ve got? Right. People who were avoiding your message, not simply missing it. And, guess who is more likely to avoid your messages? Right. The people you really want to change. Thus, you are building a biased Control Group that is overfilled with people who are resisting you and avoiding you. Worse still, you are creating an artificially lower comparison for your Treatment Group. You have slipped all those genuine intervention failures from the Treatment category to the Control category, making your Treatment look better by comparison.

Yeah, my Rule: If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It.

But!

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You’ve Changed It.

Hart, W., Albarracín, D., Eagly, A. H., Brechan, I., Lindberg, M. J., & Merrill, L. (2009). Feeling validated versus being correct: A meta-analysis of selective exposure to information. Psychological Bulletin, 135(4), 555-588. doi:10.1037/a0015701