Creating persuasion always requires creativity. Here’s an interesting and new way to generate creativity.

Specifically, I propose a method of elaboration called the generic-parts technique (GPT), in which two questions are continually asked as a person creates a parts diagram (Fig. 1). For each description a participant creates, he or she should ask, “Can this be decomposed further?” If so, the participant should break that part into its subparts and create another hierarchy level in the diagram. The second question to ask is “Does this description imply a use?” If so, the participant should create a more generic description based on material and shape. This procedure results in a tree, in which the description in each leaf (i.e., the bottom level of the tree’s hierarchy) does not imply a use and involves the material and shape of the part under consideration. Further, because the parts become smaller as the hierarchy levels progress, this process also calls attention to the size of each of the parts. In essence, the GPT helps subjects think beyond the common functions associated with an object and its parts.

Tony McCaffrey invented this activity and tested in a randomized experiment where participants in control did a word-association task while those in treatment did the GPT exercise. All people were then given several problem solving tasks (the Duncker candle problem, for example) and allowed to work until they solved or just gave up. The results?

The GPT group solved 67.4% more problems than the control group did (GPT group: M = 82.7%; control group: M = 49.4%), which was a significant difference, t(26) = 4.23, p < .001. The standardized effect size was dramatically large, Cohen’s d = 1.59 (0.80 is considered large, 0.50 is medium, and 0.25 is small).

McCaffrey argues that GPT gets people to break down a commonplace into smaller pieces that then permits more creative thinking and insight. Take the familiar, break it down to components, and consider the components. Decomposed the common suddenly becomes strange. And strange encourages new thoughts.

Hey, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere and Sincere is certainly familiar when done repetitively. GPT breaks out of the Sincerity!

Tony McCaffrey. Innovation Relies on the Obscure: A Key to Overcoming the Classic Problem of Functional Fixedness. Psychological Science, February 7, 2012

doi:10.1177/0956797611429580

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.

Lamps. Candles. Light bulbs. Green light bulbs. Maybe windows. White paint. Anything that makes things lighter. Try this persuasion play.

We asked participants to recall and describe in detail either an ethical or an unethical deed from their past and to describe any feelings or emotions associated with it.

Okay. Think about something I shouldn’t have done. Now, the persuasion outcome part. Ask me to rate the room for how light or dark it is and then ask me if I want: a jug, a lamp, crackers, a candle, an apple, and a flashlight.

As expected, participants in the unethical condition found the lab to be darker than did participants in the ethical condition (ethical condition: M = 87.6 W; unethical condition: M = 74.3 W), t(72) = 2.7, p < .01, d = 0.64. Moreover, as predicted, participants in the unethical condition demonstrated greater preference for the light-related objects (but not the other objects): lamp (ethical condition: M = 2.34; unethical condition: M = 4.16), t(72) = 5.23, p < .0001, d = 1.23; candle (ethical condition: M = 2.37; unethical condition: M = 3.62), t(72) = 3.36, p < .01, d = 0.79; and flashlight (ethical condition: M = 2.35; unethical condition: M = 4.33), t(72) = 5.68, p < .0001, d = 1.33.

Good grief, look at those Windowpanes. Medium Plus on the light-dark evaluation and Large Plus on the attitude preference for light producing objects. These are obvious, practical differences between the recall conditions. Getting people to think about themselves as ethical versus unethical produces immediate, behaviorally important changes. Given attitude intensity like this, if you present an attitude consistent behavior immediately, you are highly likely to obtain the TACT.

See this for the ELM Peripheral Route it is. People are not High WATT processors thinking carefully and effortfully about the lighting conditions of the room or the practical value of the objects. They are skipping stones over an ocean of thought and guilt and shame. I strongly suspect that if these people returned to a room with the same lighting conditions the next day, their light-dark ratings would be very different as would their ratings for the objects. The evaluative response is tied to the immediate manipulation of ethical versus unethical. Remove that activation and the attitude effects would disappear.

The practical lesson here is to see the light on the persuasion possibilities of guilt. If you observe Other Guys reflecting on their bad past, let them see the light. You need to catch both the reality and the metaphor of The Light. The experiments demonstrate how you can sell the reality, but you need to think about selling the metaphor. How is your goal, Light? Think about it.

See this also in a chain of persuasion. See The Light runs the Peripheral Route so obtains only immediate, quick, and ephemeral change. Sure, you can sell more candles, but how about getting the Other Guy to perform an action that commits them to a new position. Get Them to See The Light by signing a petition or taking information or making a proselytizing speech to another person. Use a Light Cue to get Them into a Hot Dissonance position.

The last nuance – how do you induce those guilty recollections and thoughts without being obvious? The experiment boldly instructs participants to recall a shameful experience. How do you do that in the practical world? Perhaps, you begin with an embarrassing disclosure. Perhaps, you have a confederate make that disclosure. Remember the Rule: Drive with Science, Putt with Poetry. Well, this is the Poetry part of the play.

Banerjee, Pronobesh, Chatterjee, Promothesh, and Sinha, Jayati. (2012) Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness. Psychological Science. 2012/03/06

doi: 10.1177/0956797611432497

Let’s feel the need, the need for speed (YouTube).

Consider speed as WATTage switch.

Thirty-six university students were randomly assigned to read aloud a series of one-sentence statements of trivia (e.g., “A pilot light continually remains lit in a gas stove”; “In ring toss, players throw a ‘hoop’ over a ‘peg’”). The statements were presented on a computer monitor at either a fast pace (40 ms per letter with 320-ms intervals between sentences; i.e., about half the normal reading speed for this population) or a slow pace (170 ms per letter with 4,000-ms intervals between sentences; i.e., about twice the normal reading speed for this population.

Read aloud Fast or read aloud Slow. Then.

Participants then completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; adapted from Lejuez et al., 2002), a behavioral measure of risk taking. In the task, participants inflate a number of computer-simulated balloons one at a time by clicking a pump. Participants control how much they inflate a given balloon by choosing how many times they pump it up; with each pump, the balloon becomes further inflated, and 5¢ is placed in a bank. If a balloon is pumped too many times, it bursts, and the participant loses the contents of the bank. Participants can stop pumping a balloon at any time and lock in the gains earned for that balloon. All participants followed this procedure for 18 different balloons and were allowed to keep all the money they earned during the experiment.

This task is more fun when you have a real pump and real balloons that explode in your face, but even the computer simulation provides sufficient excitement. So, we’ve got Speed and Risk. What happens?

Participants who were induced to read quickly reported faster thought speed (M = 6.05, SD = 1.84) than did participants who were induced to read slowly (M = 4.71, SD = 1.72), F(1, 34) = 5.10, p = .03, ηp2 = .13. In addition, participants who were induced to think quickly rather than slowly took more risks, as indicated by the average number of times they pumped each balloon, regardless of whether the balloon ultimately burst (fast condition: M = 21.82, SD = 5.14; slow condition: M = 17.16, SD = 5.96), F(1, 34) = 5.19, p = .03, ηp2 = .13.

These are Medium effect sizes, Windowpanes around 35/65, so they are obvious and practical. You’d know who was in which group. As interestingly, Speed Readers burst more balloons and delivered more pumps on balloons that didn’t burst. Both reader groups earned the same amount of money, but the Speed Readers had much greater variance with more failures, but bigger successes because they pushed the balloon to the limit, thus winning more money than the other guys who quit sooner.

While this research clearly points at risk-taking, I want to point out the WATTage play at work here. Speed of thinking manipulates WATTage and produces what appears here to be a Peripheral Route response. People do not engage that Long Conversation in the Head with a thoughtful consideration of all the relevant Arguments. Instead they fly along chasing Cues related to speed – rapid, fast, quick, nimble, zooming – in their pursuit of money. You see yet another reason for people’s mistrust of Fast Talkers; They draw you in and mess with your mind.

Thus, as corny as it sounds, Fast Talking can generate that Need For Speed which then trips Other Guys down the Peripheral Route for your further manipulation. If you want the Other Guy to get risky, Fast Talk or for certain get Them to Fast Think. If you want the Other Guy to miss flaws and weaknesses, Fast Talk. Get nuanced. If the Other Guys are unchangeable cautious, Fast Talk what you DON’T want them to do. And, finally, realize that you can make the Need For Speed Play with a technological device (geez, imagine how you can manipulate this on a website) or face to face.

Jesse J. Chandler and Emily Pronin.
Fast Thought Speed Induces Risk Taking
Published online before print March 5, 2012,
Psychological Science March 5, 2012

doi: 10.1177/0956797611431464

P.S. Top Gun was the first movie to make me feel my age. Recall the love scene with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. They are listening to Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. I’m grooving to the music, remembering it Back in the Day. Then Cruise says, “I remember my parents listening to that song.” Until then I’d identified with the Cruise character and after that I realized I had a son. A very short son.

The New England Journal of Medicine reports great science with bad outcomes. A team of researchers recruited over one thousand pregnant women who smoked and gave them a 15 hour behavioral counseling treatment and then randomly assigned half the women to get a nicotine patch or – and this is the great science – to a placebo patch. The researchers then counted who quit smoking through delivery. Here’s the bad news.

Of 1050 participants, 521 were randomly assigned to nicotine-replacement therapy and 529 to placebo. There was no significant difference in the rate of abstinence from the quit date until delivery between the nicotine-replacement and placebo groups (9.4% and 7.6%, respectively; unadjusted odds ratio with nicotine-replacement therapy, 1.26; 95% confidence interval, 0.82 to 1.96), although the rate was higher at 1 month in the nicotine-replacement group than in the placebo group (21.3% vs. 11.7%). Compliance was low; only 7.2% of women assigned to nicotine-replacement therapy and 2.8% assigned to placebo used patches for more than 1 month. Rates of adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes were similar in the two groups.

Even with behavioral counseling (the persuasion part) and a drug (the power part) fewer than 10% of pregnant women were able to quit smoking until delivery. Worse still, the drug delivered through the patch produced no gain in behavior change over a mere placebo. You’ve got to figure that pregnant women would have to be more motivated to quit compared to other smokers and yet given persuasion and power, you’re lucky to get 10% quit rates over just a few months!

Some TACTs resist all persuasion and smoking is one of them. The presence of addiction destroys all proven persuasion plays and even most power plays like drugs or money. When determining your strategy, you must understand the possible TACTs and all the factors that drive them. Addiction overwhelms the effect of persuasion past simple plays like Quit Now! or, better still, implementation intentions. Sure, keep persuading, but realize that communication is a weak intervention, so control your costs.

Getting smokers to stop is worth the smallest persuasion effort you can offer (like Implementation Intentions). Doing more is a waste of resources. Instead, use expensive persuasion to maneuver Other Kids away from starting.