One of the most interesting nonverbal elements of speech is the various ratios you can form of the amount of non-persuasive speech (pauses, dysfluencies, etc.) to actual persuasive speech (fluent spoken statements). When people talk, their speech includes not only the fluent production of sound that has persuasive content, but also contains extra sounds that include errors, fillers, restarts, and on and on with the list of spoken mulligans we emit when we speak. The ratio holds two implications, one for the Other Guys and the second for the speaker.

When speakers are smooth, fluent, and continuous in their speech, Other Guys find them more credible, trustworthy, and likeable. When speech includes disruptions, dysfluencies, and breaks, Other Guys find them less credible, trustworthy, and likeable. If you still watch TV news broadcasts you see why folks like Scott Pelley or Brian Williams get millions of dollars essentially to pose in front of the camera and talk fluently. Just listen to their speech. When they speak the sounds are meaningful, intended, persuasive. When they Pause the silence between meaningful sounds is just silence, and sometimes maybe even persuasive as with a Dramatic Pause. Contrast that with the broken, shaken, and stirred speech of a dysfluent speaker and the credibility difference is obvious. Other Guys sense these ratios and make persuasion judgments.

Now, research also demonstrates a second effect from these ratios. Dysfluency also marks real problems in the speaker’s cognition and affect. When people are confused and upset, it shows up in those pause and phonation ratios. If I want to destroy your speech fluency then I make you talk when you are baffled or anxious. Your speech will betray your mind and your heart.

Thus, these two effects are the opposite sides of the same coin. Our speech betrays our bewilderment and Other Guys sense that and do not trust or believe us.

Now, consider these two examples from, of all places, the Supreme Court and the case of Health Care Reform.

On Tuesday, the persuasion source in charge of defending the legislation, the Solicitor General, was the first speaker. He had two years to prepare for this moment and his opening remarks were scripted. Just listen to the first two minutes of the audio.

Now, compare that to a different lawyer, one arguing against the legislation who spoke first on Wednesday. He, too, had months, if not years, to prepare for this moment when he spoke first.

The contrast between these two speakers is obvious. The Solicitor General, speaking to defend the reforming legislation, struggles in his opening prepared remarks with awkward pauses, restarts, and misstatements. He formally apologizes with an, “Excuse me,” and takes a drink of water. All this during his prepared remarks. Then compare to the second day speaker, an attorney delivering his prepared remarks against the legislation. He sounds like a newscaster. Smooth, fluent, coherent without sounding wooden, over-rehearsed, or mechanical.

While it would be easy to exaggerate this, I think the pause phonation ratios in these speeches are proxies or markers or indicators of larger persuasion processes and outcomes. They are scientific metaphors. Sure, you can count to the decimal place various ratios for the Solicitor General and the other attorneys – that’s the science – but they are still only metaphors for the larger persuasion processes and outcomes from this event.

Metaphorically, then, these ratios point to persuasion failure in the presentation for the legislation and persuasion success in the presentation against the legislation. Whether this has any impact on any Other Guys, most especially the Court judges is an open question. The Justices have had this case for many weeks and have been reading and thinking about it extensively well before the oral arguments.

Actually, the more interesting implication here is to wonder whether the dysfluencies say more about the Science behind the opposing arguments. Some folks have maintained that the legislation passed under emotional and dramatic conditions (the victory of Republican Scott Brown to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat lost the legislative majority for the Democrats). In that haste, the law was flawed upon passage. The Science of this case would then say the law is not a Falling Apple. Thus, the reason the Solicitor General delivered such broken and dysfluent speech, even prepared, is because the idea he defended was broken and dysfluent from its hurried and rushed passage.

You may recall the explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. Twenty nine men were killed in the disaster on April 5, 2010. Most of the public attack for the event aimed at the coal operators and their negligence. My former lead agency, NIOSH, weighs in with an independent investigation (pdf) and finds that another government agency, the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), could have prevented the event if it had merely followed its own procedures (click to enlarge).

With this explicit and well reasoned evaluation of a health and safety disaster, NIOSH again demonstrates a level of independence and competence people don’t normally associate with the Federal Government. This NIOSH panel specifically identifies a partner agency, the Mining Safety and Health Administration, and their incompetence. NIOSH does not absolve the mine operators for their failures, but clearly shows how properly functioning government inspection also failed here.

It’s commonplace to observe that events with many fatalities have many causes, but it’s not until you actually investigate them that you see the truth of this. When I moved from the university to NIOSH in 1998 I quickly understood that the Usual Gang of Suspects lined up in the pop press and in the court of public opinion were usually the wrong suspects.

This report will not get much attention in the pop press because they’ve already determined what caused the accident. But, if you work in a mine, you want to read this report because this one could actually save your life. Like so many disasters of this magnitude, many people failed to do their jobs properly and over a long period of time.

No one ever believes that it could happen here until it happens here. Such precautionary thinking is just antithetical to human nature. No one thinks they are capable of missing such large, obvious warnings, yet we do it all the time.

P.S. I appreciate the honesty of the NIOSH report, but you can read the persuasion tea leaves from the Secretary of Labor who released the report . . . late on a Friday afternoon. Great timing of the news cycle. The Google news aggregator notes about 150 news sources for this story which addresses one of the largest workplace fatalities in the last 10 years.

You’d think with a labor-friendly Democratic administration in power, this report would generate a lot more attention, interest, and action, but like they say, success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

P.P.S. You may recall the NIOSH evaluation of an NYC Health Department study of 9-11 first responders and their long term health problems. NIOSH called the NYC analysis inadequate and inaccurate. In public. Gee. Maybe that kind of attitude is why they hired me back in the day.

Max Boot reviews a new book on General David Petraeus, All In, by Paula Broadwell. Broadwell narrates the life and times of the General with a particular emphasis upon his leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan. Boot offers a mixed evaluation, finding the book to be honest and accurate, but there’s something missing he really dislikes.

As is so often the case, the authors’ greatest fault is a byproduct of their greatest virtue: loyalty. Gen. Petraeus granted Ms. Broadwell considerable access and, it seems clear, she does not want to abuse his trust by showing his actions in an unfavorable light—or even in a light differing from the one that Gen. Petraeus himself would use.

Boot then discloses several examples from his personal experience covering Petraeus that illustrate unflattering moments for the General. Boot wishes that Broadwell had discussed and developed these and other events that showed the nitty-gritty of the General’s work.

Boot, to his credit, does observe the central and compelling persuasion problem with his criticism.

Gen. Petraeus probably would not like to see such details in print — as CIA director, he would not want to complicate his relations with other countries.

Really? Why would the Director of the CIA disapprove of a detailed presentation of his private thoughts on allies and enemies, foreign and domestic? Jeepers, you’d think such a person would want a full throated broadcast of his opinions so that all the Other Guys would know exactly where they stand in Petraeus’s estimation.

You see the persuasion problem and possibilities of the living biography. Recall the Rule.

Great Persuaders Can Be Famous or Effective but Not Both.

If Broadwell disclosed how Petraeus worked effective persuasion, he’d be famous for it and then persuasion ineffective for the forewarning effects of that disclosure. A living biography, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is a hallmark of Sincerity. This works for biography but not for the subject. Such Sincerity kills his persuasion.

All Bad Living Biography Is Sincere.

Which means that All In is probably a persuasion play from David Petraeus through Paula Broadwell.

Work from the example to the principles. Consider the case of Alzheimer’s research and this amazing TACT.

The 2013 budget proposed by President Barack Obama last week would give the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not a penny more than it received this year. But the Administration found a way to give special attention to one disease: Alzheimer’s, which will receive $80 million in new research funding from a source outside NIH’s budget. This month, the Administration also announced, to the surprise of many at NIH, that the agency will reprogram $50 million in its current budget for the disease.

In a tight budget, one particular research area received an extra $80 million. Now. Why did this TACT happen?

Momentum began to build 5 years ago when current Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who has an interest in brain diseases, and George Vradenburg, a former television and AOL executive who became an Alzheimer’s fundraiser, began working with Markey and a non-partisan panel. Deliberately “independent,” Vradenburg says, the Alzheimer’s Study Group was co-chaired by Gingrich and Senator John Kerry (D–MA), and included former NIH Director Harold Varmus and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Its 2009 report called for $1 billion in annual research funding.

The persuasion strategy here is to use science to unite nominal opponents. When everyone sees Falling Apples, persuasion and power can work together. We saw much the same approach in the success of gay rights groups, an issue that requires a very different kind of Falling Apples than does Alzheimer’s.

Thus, it is possible to combine persuasion, power, and science in a way that unites diverse Other Guys and points them all toward the TACT you desire. Now, ask yourself why people in movements with global warming or healthy lifestyle cannot do the same thing.

See the many persuasion lessons here.

Keep your self concept and esteem separate from the TACT. As long as you live your persuasion, you will probably fail at persuasion. More gracefully, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

You know you have Falling Apples when you find diverse Other Guys seated at your table. Alternatively, when everyone looks and sounds like you, you don’t have Falling Apples.

While persuasion gravity is good, Falling Apples gravity is better. When you are talking a lot, you’re doing persuasion gravity. When you are pointing at Falling Apples, you’ve got gravity.

Bad Persuasion drives desire and need for Power. When you cannot get the TACT with persuasion or science, there’s nothing left but power. Thus, at the end of this movie don’t be surprised when you see Shakespearian or ancient Greek tragedy. Dying in failure, killing what you love.

P.S. Persuasion Bonus! Dr. Rudolf Tanzi from Harvard is pushing TACTs on Alzheimer research and is part of this effort for more funding. Don’t know Tanzi? Consider these shots.

Let’s polish up the candid shot into something professional.

Yeah, the guy you probably recognize is Joe Perry, lead guitarist for Aerosmith. He’s signed up for the Rockstars of Science persuasion play with Tanzi and, yeah, that other guy, Francis Collins who runs NIH. And everyone wonders why NIH is untouchable. Get in the game, muggles.

P.P.S. Gotta love a guy who plays a Martin.

The CDC is starting an anti-smoking media campaign with a $54 million budget. Look for ads like this in your infoscape soon.

Yes. Let’s spend $54 million on a national persuasion campaign based on fear appeals. That’ll do it. The head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, says this campaign will work.

“We estimate that this campaign will help about 50,000 smokers to quit smoking,” Dr. Frieden said Wednesday in an interview. “And that will translate not only into thousands who will not die from smoking but it will pay for itself in a few years in reduced health costs.

Frieden also apparently supplied the reporter with deep background, not for attribution, on super secret CDC persuasion research to date unreviewed and unpublished that explains how to break addictions with only persuasion. The reporter notes.

Studies have shown that such graphic advertisements are effective in persuading smokers to quit, but they have also often led to opposition from smokers, who call them alarming and demeaning, and to efforts by the industry to end financing for the ads.

I infer the CDC has super secret, in-house, unreviewed and unpublished research on this persuasion effect because it is news to me. I’ve been reading this literature regularly since 1992 and no one has reported anything that uses only persuasion to get people to quit smoking (prevention, maybe if you know what you’re doing, like the truth campaign did). Hey, you don’t have to be SuperScholar® on this. Just read the next Persuasion Blog post on a failed experiment on smoking cessation involving . . . fear appeals!  Or the fear appeals failures from Frieden when he was running the Department of Health for New York City.  And past reading the research literature, you have only to look out your window. About 45 million American adults smoke. They’ve never seen a fear appeal about smoking?

I’d also like to know who did the molecular genetic-macro economic-neuromancer study to divine that $1,000 of advertising per smoker will buy a quit. Again, 45 million smokers and none of them has been exposed to a thousand bucks of anti-smoking advertising?

A few years back the CDC spent over $300 million on the Verb physical activity campaign aimed at kids and young teens and got no behavior change. They did find a correlation between self report exposure to campaign messages and self report behavior at a Small effect, about a 45/55, but that’s not the same thing, of course. There was no pre-post difference in physical activity. None. Zero.

Now they will spend $54 million on an addictive behavior and get 50,000 quitters. It’ll be fun to read the evaluation studies to prove that. And, you will read evaluation studies that do prove that. This isn’t a hypothesis. It’s a guarantee. No one in the CDC or contracted by the CDC will contradict the head of the agency after his public pronouncement of the effect.

You also have to appreciate the Old School approach taken here. It’s from the dustbin of history, Soviet Science. The Leader announces new production numbers and lo and behold a few months later you read a report that says we hit those production numbers. Chairman Frieden says 50,000 smokers will quit and there will be a report proving 50,000 smokers quit.

Got a question for the poor soul tasked with proving this quotation from the Chairman. The CDC estimates that 45 million US adults smoke. Estimates. Like the way pollsters estimate votes during an election. It’s not exact. The true value could be a little higher or lower than 45 million. The true number of smokers ranges between 42 and 48 million, right? That 6 million range is just the error of measurement, but good enough for estimating.

Okay. The CDC is going to run a national campaign aimed at those 45 million (plus or minus 3 million) smokers. And it is going to change 50,000 of them. How can they possibly measure that? If the true number of smokers varies between 42 and 48 million, a 6,000,000 range of error, how will they possible count precisely to 50,000?

They can’t. But, you will find an expensive evaluation report that confirms Chairman Frieden’s production target. Give him $54 million and he’ll deliver 50,000 quitters. No hypothesis. No doubt. No risk.

Consider two persuasion lessons, one small and one big.

The small lesson is that you can do a lot of bad persuasion with $50 million. Folks in the CDC and their allies are persuading themselves that their science is scientific and that if you spend the money on persuasion campaigns you get the behavior change. They are persuading themselves that they can precisely count a 0.001% decrease in the 42, 45, or 48 million smokers. They are persuading themselves that they are making a difference in the world. Stated another way, $54 million buys Dissonance Reduction.

The big lesson is about zealotry and its discontents. The CDC went from a $300 million budget for a major lifestyle campaign to a $50 million budget on smoking cessation. Everybody in Congress is losing faith in them.

This tells you about the tough times for Political Health Persuasion. During the Bush administration they got 300 million for failed persuasion on physical activity. During the Obama administration they only get 50 million for anti-smoking. You can’t argue that the hard economic times drive this difference. The Obama team spent billions on Political Energy Persuasion that produced nothing but terrible persuasion for re-election. (The Solyndra attack ads write themselves.) So the Lifestyle Police are running out of allies and more importantly things like money and a seat at the Cool Table.

From any reasonable persuasion analysis this anti-smoking effort is pathetic. In 2009-10 anti-smoking persuaders had the most favorable political environment since the Jimmy Carter administration with control of the White House, Senate, and House in the hands of Democrats. And, all they got were those bad FDA ads. That’s it. And those crappy ads are under judicial review because they apparently and arguably violate the Constitution.

They cannot compete with lame physical activity funding that spends hundreds of millions of dollars for no practical effect. Even the First Lady will Verb Now with an ex-smoking husband in the Oval Office. You can’t get these guys on your side?

I’d argue the outcome proves the player and we see that the anti-smoking crowd is populated with muggles, not mavens. The only thing less competent than their science is their persuasion.

And don’t expect suggestions from me in this Blog. Think about it. I don’t Nudge.