You tend to think of persuasion as a business skill where sources try to change Other Guys for a large mission, product, service, event, anything larger than just yourself. And even when it’s just little old you, say a teacher employing Why? Because! to motivate students, it still feels exterior, external. But, sometimes, you persuade to leave an impression about yourself on Other Guys to accomplish social gains. Like this fictional account.

The streets in Chueca were so narrow and its plaza so full in those months that it was easy to mill around in such a manner that people on your right assumed you were with the people on your left and vice versa. This was also true in its various overflowing bars; I could order a drink and stand looking bored in the middle of the bar and people would suppose I pertained to one of the adjacent parties; indeed, people in one large group or another often began to speak to me, assuming I was one of their number whom they hadn’t had the chance to meet. Over the general din I could hear next to nothing, but I smiled and nodded and sometimes slightly raised my glass, and henceforth turned a little more toward the group whose member had addressed; slowly I would be absorbed. Which is how I met Arturo . . .

This from Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam Gordon is on a poetry fellowship in Spain where he discovers his Spanish skills are not as good as he thought they were and worse still his poetry skills may be lacking, too. Gordon wanders through Madrid feeling isolated from others and himself, hitting upon these nonverbal persuasion plays to connect with others. Hey, take a crowded scene in a sociable bar with lots of drinking and you’ve got Low WATT processing and people Cue-ing off of smiles, body lean, and proximity to make friend judgments. Even if your language skills are weak, just look like you’re in the game and esto, you are in the game.

Of course, such persuasion plays are shots in the dark and Adam Gordon misses as often as he hits. And his misses lead to getting punched in the face from angry, drunk, and high Spanish men who think Gordon’s language-impaired silence means mockery. Persuasion giveth and it taketh.

There is a marvelous art of social persuasion, sometimes studied as impression management, shy like a fox, Machiavellians, and on and on with the tactics of getting ahead in your social world. If you like this line of concept, you might enjoy reading Ben Lerner’s book, Leaving the Atocha Station, about the fellowship adventures of a young man, Adam Gordon. Lerner displays a deft and light touch with material that borders on cliché – the young American artist abroad. Leaving the Atocha Station floats through perspective taking, language, meaning, and translation all the while telling an interesting story. I found the book to be one of the better novels I’ve read in the past ten years, especially given that this is Lerner’s first attempt at a novel after success as a poet. The guy is a helluva good writer and I hope he produces more novels.

“As a human being, we have marginalized him, but as an artist, he has no sense of himself as an outsider, or an insider for that matter, because he has no sense of what these categories mean. He has no sense of the an audience at all, critical or otherwise. He simply needs to express something. Compulsion without ambition. Not only can this not be faked, it cannot be willed either. He could not stop what he is doing or change it, or tailor it to someone else’s expectations, if he wanted to.”

This from Jonathan Dee’s novel, The Privileges, page 180. Spoken by Agnew, the art professor, it describes a fictional street artist outside the Art Institute of Chicago doing Art Brut, raw art, an art unschooled, untrained, and nearly mad. The key element of Art Brut glows in the sentence,

Compulsion without ambition.

And, as well observed,

. . . a condition that can neither be faked nor willed.

Shade off these meanings just a bit and you must find related concepts like Sincerity and Authenticity. Authenticity often feels compulsive; you just have to say it regardless of the consequence. And, it is an act that cannot be faked or willed – another great way to see Authenticity.

Persuasion is never compulsive and is always ambitious. And, it Changes best when both faked and willed. Persuasion cannot be Art Brut. Persuasion is only Art.

And since you can do Science with Persuasion, Science is Art!

P.S. The Privileges is a great metaphor of persuasion and self-persuasion. Jonathan Dee shows how people Change Other Guys and in so doing Change themselves. And while Adam, Cynthia, Jonas, and April Morey understand the Changes in the Other Guys, they do not see it in themselves. I find parallels to the Great Gatsby, another who aspired to Change and in so doing doomed himself. While none of the Morey’s end up floating dead in a pool, all of them have died in ways they cannot see.

I recommend viewing Tucker & Dale versus Evil, a fun, crazed, and entertaining mashup of hillbilly and preppie stereotypes mixed with slasher horror themes. To take the movie seriously requires that you laugh throughout and not as a release to horror, but to the persuasion insights the movie produces.

We begin with a group of preppie college boys and girls in the rustic woods, starting a camping Spring Break. They stop at an old general store filled with supplies and stereotypes. The kids see the stock precursors of doom lacking only the Banjo Boy from Deliverance. Then Tucker and Dale arrive on the scene, their beatup pickup truck filled with chainsaws, weed whips, shovels, and axes. Dale spies a pretty co-ed and falls in love with her, but knows she’d reject him. His buddy Tucker chastises Dale for selling himself short and cajoles him into just making polite conversation. With a good heart and clean intentions, Dale walks to the girl and her group.

The camera angle reverses and we see Tucker and Dale, two genuinely good, good-old boys, through the perceptions of the college kids. They see hillbilly horror. The pickup truck laden with instruments of torture and terror. The bad clothes and hick accents of Tucker and Dale. The nightmare begins . . .

I’ll leave the remainder of the movie for your viewing pleasure and discuss only the set up. This movie starts with the basic plot, theme, and style of the hillbilly horror film then proceeds to think through the persuasive effects of stereotypes, expectancies, and attribution. Tucker and Dale are West Virginia hicks, no doubt. The talk, the look, the walk all mark them. They are also kind, sweet, thoughtful, considerate, helpful; I’ve met them many times in my West Virginia travels. But, the preppies only see dangerous hicks and the movie takes off from there.

Throughout the film you see the interplay of expectancies, stereotypes, and attributions as they drive the crazed behavior of everyone. The college kids think they are being hunted by Tucker and Dale while Tucker and Dale think the college kids are crazy on drugs and are engaged in a weird fraternity ritual. The film is a constant collision of the cognitive processes we observe every day at the Persuasion Blog and Primer.

If you simply desire a fun movie night, rent Tucker & Dale versus Evil. But, please, keep an eye out for the persuasion fundamentals, too.

P.S. Everyone, including Hollywood, misses the physiognomy of West Virginia. Think of John C. Calhoun. High cheekbones. Taut-skinned faces. Wiry. Everyone defaults to the thick bearlike mountain man with dark hair and a thick full beard. The classic look is thin, but tough, male or female. Read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed to understand.

Here’s John Calhoun.

Now, the WVU Mountaineer.

And, the Jerry West Statue in front of the WVU Coliseum.

Before Jerry West was known as Mr. Clutch and the model for the NBA logo, he was Zeke from Cabin Creek, West Virginia.

And so she began to tell herself that Dabney’s acting was “restrained” or “economical.” She appreciated that Dabney was “secure about himself” and “didn’t need to prove anything” and wasn’t a “showoff.” Instead of worrying that he was dull, Madeleine decided he was gentle. Instead of thinking he was poorly read, she called him intuitive. She exaggerated Dabney’s mental abilities in order not to feel shallow for wanting his body. To this end she helped Dabney write — O.K., she wrote—English and anthro papers for him and, when he got A’s, felt confirmed of his intelligence. She sent him off to modeling auditions in New York with good-luck kisses and listened to him complain bitterly about the “faggots” who hadn’t hired his services. It turned out that Dabney wasn’t so beautiful. Among the truly beautiful he was only so-so. He couldn’t even smile right.

This from Jeffery Eugenides 2011 fiction, The Marriage Plot: A Novel. Eugenides gives us a look at the cognitive persuasion processes inside the head of Madeleine, an undergraduate at Brown University thinking about her current boyfriend, Dabney. Madeleine is a bright, ambitious, and well brought up young woman who views herself as bright, ambitious, and well brought up. Dabney is a fashion model going to Brown to learn acting. He also has a great abs.

Eugenides tells us how Madeleine thinks about Dabney to make their relationship work: She engages in attributional fictions. She explains Dabney’s behaviors with a variety of flattering causal forces – economical versus wooden, secure versus showy, gentle versus dull, intuitive versus stupid. Choosing the more positive attribution for Dabney allows Madeleine to crave sex with Dabney and not feel like a tramp. Thus, she gets to eat her sex and have it, too!

You can also see the motivational push and pull of Dissonance Reduction in Madeleine’s attributional fictions. She knows from the start that Dabney is not the fella for her, but those abs, baby, those abs. She’s not ready to understand her sexuality yet and cannot abide the thought that a bright, ambitious, and well brought up woman like herself could be so shallow. However, if Dabney is secure, intuitive, and gentle, then golly, those great abs are just a bonus!

While persuasion is always about the Other Guy, sometimes the Other Guy is you.

P.S. The Marriage Plot is a simple read, littered with fabulous detail about Providence, lit crit, molecular biology, and that transition from college to reality. Eugenides writes in the 3rd person omniscient. He prefers to describe abstract thinking rather than careful description of what people say or do. It’s interior explanation. He ends up over-explaining characters rather than letting them speak for themselves. Here’s an example of the style.

Finally, when things got very grim, Madeleine broke down and told her troubles to her mother. Phyllida listened without much comment. She knew that Madeleine’s call indicated a significant shift in policy, and so she just murmured on the other end of the line, happy with the territory won.

Realize all the details contained in these sentences. A different writing style would describe thoughts, statements, gestures, and actions that made up the “grim things.” Think about the descriptive possibilities for the moment that Madeleine broke down. Imagine the content of the conversation between Madeleine and Phyllida, her mother. We know that Phyllida “murmured” because she sensed her gains in the argument, but what were the murmurs? Why didn’t Madeleine pick up on them. How did Phyllida act when she won the territory?

For me, The Marriage Plot is overwritten, overexplained. The writer is always intruding with these high level perspectives on characters and events, telling me what he knows rather than showing me the characters and how they walk, talk, or fall silent. You always know there is a writer and that you are reading fiction with The Marriage Plot. It is rather like Tom Wolfe’s Charlotte Wolfe from a few years back in that form and content.

It is still the proverbial good read.

Persuasion science evolves!

A startup called SonicNotify embeds inaudibly high-pitched audio signals within music or any other audio track. When a compatible app hears that signal, it triggers any available smartphone function to link you to websites, display text, bring up map locations, display a photo, let you vote on which song a performer plays next and so on.

This technology is proposed as a concert trick. If you have this app on your iGizmo while attending a concert, the performer can trigger it with an inaudible cue that then delivers tons of content to your device. Consider this fun application.

Location is also a part of this, because each speaker in a venue can transmit a different tone, opening up new possibilities for live concert participation along the lines of what we saw with inConcertApp. “We can also target sections through radius with frequencies, so we can have Section C’s phones turn into purple hearts, while Section F on the other side of the arena has red squares,” added Israel.

Way back in the day, remember when you’d fire up your Zippo lighter and hold it up during a power ballad? And those card tricks at stadium games where people find a square under their seats, hold it up on cue, and spell out BEAT PITT! Well, now you can do that with your iGizmo.

Mavens. Tell me you see how this technology works with both the Cascade and persuasion. It’s another kind of electronic dog collar only when you sense the iGizmo you chirp at it inaudibly and make the iGizmo send a message to the Other Guy. You can mix ‘n match like dressing up Barbie! Think of the possibilities mavens!

Can’t wait for the Hollywood movie where the hidden Bad Guy surreptiously gets this app on his phone then the Good Guy accidently triggers the chirp. Surprise for everyone!

Hey, include sounds in your branding. Include these inaudible chirps within your sonic logo.

And people wonder why I don’t have a smartphone.

P.S. Thanks for a valued network that pointed this out to me!