Elocution lives at TED!

Leave the toga, robe, or stovepipe hat home; casual attire now required for cool public performance! Sanders gesturing required!

Yeah. Technology, Entertainment, and Design changes everything.

If you want to mess around with the Other Guys perception of Size, manipulate their sense of Power. Like this.

Specifically, participants randomly assigned to the high-power condition were asked to recall an incident in which they had power over another individual, whereas participants assigned to the low-power condition were asked to recall an incident in which someone else had power over them. Participants randomly assigned to the control condition were instructed to recall and write about their experiences from the previous day. All participants were asked to write in detail on a lined sheet of paper.

Or this.

Participants were then told that they would take part in a business simulation in which they would be assigned the role of either manager or employee. This power manipulation has been used in previous studies (e.g., Anderson & Berdahl, 2002; Galinsky et al., 2003; Lammers, Galinsky, Gordijn, & Otten, 2008). Participants were told they would complete a leadership aptitude test that would determine which member of their pair would be assigned the manager role and which member would be assigned the employee role. In fact, participants received false feedback about their performance and were randomly assigned a role. The experimenter explained that the manager (high-power condition) would have complete control over the work process and would direct and evaluate the employee (low-power condition).

People randomly to these conditions then estimated the height of objects, estimated their own heights, or picked the height of an avatar they’d used in a video game. In three experiments, people persuaded to feel more powerful estimated their own height as greater, the size of external objects as smaller, and picked taller avatars to represent themselves. All the effects came in at Medium to Large Windowpane, ranging from 35/65 to 25/75.

Consider potential persuasion plays with this.

You might power up your Other Guys to get them to feel stronger and better equipped to handle challengers as in sporting contests.

If I’m bringing bad news to an Other Guy, I might consider a power play first. That self perception of personal size might manipulate His perception of the bad news, making it seem smaller.

Anytime you want the Other Guy to see Themselves as Larger or external things as Smaller, power up!

Michelle M. Duguid and Jack A. Goncalo. Living Large: The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height Psychological Science January 2012 23: 36-40, first published on December 14, 2011
doi:10.1177/0956797611422915

Recall this fabulous persuasion play with health care workers and hand washing. Video cameras monitored workers and observers coded whether they washed their hand or not at baseline then provided real time, continuous feedback to all personnel. Hand washing rates skyrocketed after feedback. This graphic should refresh your memory.

Talk about an effective persuasion intervention. Just tell folks what they and everyone else are doing in real time and you get wildly better health performance. Everyone approves . . .

. . . unless you are a physician. They appear to fear the feedback. The good MDs at Journal Watch, a medical abstracting service, describe the study as . . .

Big Brother by the Sink.

Seriously. Physicians view this as the exemplification of George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, and Big Brother Is Watching. If they read more widely they might even see shades of Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler’s totalitarian classic. Observation and feedback on a scientifically validated health behavior among all health workers is viewed as an obtrusive, evaluative, and controlling force.

We can move easily from this beautiful fiction to beautiful persuasion theory: Reactance! Docs perceive a video feedback system as an unfair restriction on their freedom. Down with Big Brother! Up with Freedom!

If you are selling this feedback system realize that you’ll probably need to get through a committee of MDs to obtain support and approval. Clearly, they are threatened with observation and feedback, just like most people. You might want to begin with a strong affirmation play to bolster their self esteem, then roll into your feedback presentation.

Even with smart folks who call themselves scientists, science can elicit Reactance and no change in the Other Guys. You’ve got to expect that response and persuade in front of it.

Persuasion often succeeds on the long way around. Like this.

. . . we asked participants to recall positively valenced memories from their childhood versus their last visit to the grocery store (in the control condition), and then we asked them to respond to items measuring moral purity. Toward the end of the study, participants were asked whether they wanted to help the experimenter with an additional, optional task, . . .

Childhood memories or a visit to the grocery store then that request for help. So what.

A larger percentage of participants who recalled childhood memories (75% of them) were willing to help the experimenter by completing the extra task than that of participants in the control condition (54.5% of them), χ2(1, N = 110) = 4.72, p = .03, Cramer’s V = .21. This result indicates that, based on the odds ratio, participants were 2.35 times more likely to help if they recalled childhood memories than if they recalled a neutral event.

That’s a Medium Windowpane, about a 35/65 proportion, an effect size most epidemiologists only dream about. You’d easily tell who was in the Treatment condition compared to the Control. So, to generate helpful behavior just have people . . .

. . . think about your childhood and good memories you have from it. Please write a few paragraphs describing them and one event that you still remember to this date. Please provide as many details as possible so that another person reading what you wrote could understand how you felt at that time.

Dumb luck, right? You’d never replicate this. But, let’s do it anyway. Change the Control condition to something autobiographical (recall high school days), but leave the Childhood Memories Treatment the same. And, let’s change the prosocial payoff.

Our research team is interested in collecting donations for the victims of the Japan earthquake. Please indicate if you are willing to make a donation. If so, we’ll ask you to leave money in the envelope next to the computer. If you do not have money with you but intend to donate please write the amount you intend to donate below (next question) with your name. You can bring the money to the lab any day of the week this week.

So?

Consistent with the increase in helping observed in Experiment 1, participants who wrote about childhood memories donated more money to the victims of the Japan earthquake (M = $2.02, SD = 1.83) than did participants in the control condition (M = $1.23, SD = 1.79), t(85) = 2.04, p = .045, d = 0.44. A larger percentage of participants in the remembering childhood condition (63.6%, 28 out of 44) donated money compared to that in the control condition (41.9%, 18 out of 43), χ2(1, N = 87) = 4.14, p = .042, Cramer’s V = .22. On the basis of the odds ratio, participants were 2.43 times more likely to donate if they recalled childhood memories than if they recalled memories from high school. Together, these results indicate that childhood memories promoted prosocial behavior.

How about that? Another Medium Windowpane, an obvious and practical difference in prosocial behavior, this time donations. Gino and Desai provide two more experiments illuminating this effect with an emphasis upon the moderating influence of moral purity from the childhood memory that motivates the prosocial behavior. Pick up the paper and check out the details in this Full Cycle research project.

But, catch the simple persuasion play. Get the Other Guy to recall deeply positive childhood memories. Through activation of moral purity – a child’s innocent sense of justice, of morality, of playing nice with others – you predispose helpful prosocial behavior through a request for assistance. Gino and Desai also provide an interesting demonstration of punishment from these childhood memories when confronted with an Evil Doer, a different way of conceptualizing prosocial helpfulness.

And, see the effect size. Medium. Practical. Obvious. Functional. Combine that with a good theory and review of the lit with several smart experiments and you’ve got a new persuasion play, Thanks For The Memories, Kid.

Realize that this is a Low WATT, Peripheral Route Cue. People are not thinking carefully and effortfully when the prosocial request is made. They are engulfed with a child’s moral purity and Cue off that innocence. You need to run this Play quickly with no delay between the memory dump and the request. You just need to be patient as you listen to all those stories about toys and bikes and ball games and ice cream and the time when . . .

Gino, F., & Desai, S. D. (2012). Memory lane and morality: How childhood memories promote prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 743-758.

doi:10.1037/a0026565

Here’s a great practical persuasion intervention that’s based on well established theory and even provides some counting. Evaluate it.

The next year Bial started the Posse Foundation. From her work with students around the city, she chose five New York City high school students who were clearly leaders — dynamic, intelligent, creative, resilient — but who might not have had the SAT scores to get into good schools. Vanderbilt University was willing to admit them all, tuition-free. The students met regularly in their senior year of high school, through the summer, and at college. Surrounded by their posse, they all thrived. Today the Posse Foundation selects about 600 students a year, from eight different cities. They are grouped into posses of 10 students from the same city and go together to an elite college; about 40 colleges now participate in the program.

You see Norms and Modeling, Comparison and Reciprocity at the core of the Posse program. Participants are placed into small cohesive social groups then enrolled together in the same college. The group is constructed around shared Norms (aspiration to college as a key element). Participants see at least 4 other people behave which provides 4 different models to copy. They Compare themselves to each other and since the group was designed around that common Norm of college aspiration the Comparison drives them. And I’d argue there follows a ton of Reciprocal exchanges all aimed at college success that again motivates and reinforces each other.

While the Posse program started with risky inner city kids, other colleges are modeling it. Consider, DePauw University.

At DePauw, Babington said that the success of the Posse model inspired the school to put all first-year students — not just those from Posse — into small groups with an upper-class student as a mentor. They meet regularly to talk about topics like time management, high-risk drinking and preparing for midterms. Babington said that at the same time it instituted this program, called First Year Experience, the school also moved its fraternity and sorority recruiting to later in the year and built more student housing. The changes “dramatically improved the retention rate,” said Babington, from 86 or 87 percent of freshmen returning the next year to 91 or 92 percent. “I do attribute a lot of it to First Year Experience.”

Now we finally get some counting on the Posse program. I’m reluctant to a 4-6 point increase “dramatic” and it may not even be statistically reliable. And, just to pile on, we’ve only got results from one location over one year. Finally, if you read the article you find a handful of success descriptors about one Posse group that graduated 11 of 12 (91%) or heart warming individual cases of achievement, but no large program evaluation.  A visit to the Posse website reveals a claim of a 90% graduation rate which is dead-on with the expected value for a competitive college.

The program also apparently requires a fair amount of dedicated resource to run. Selecting these kids takes personnel, then there is a significant interviewing and training element. Here’s an example.

Starting in January, Brown and the 10 others in her posse began to meet weekly with a Posse staff member. The purpose of the sessions was to solidify the group and teach them what they needed to succeed at Middlebury: how to write at a college level, but just as important, how to negotiate the social world: how to deal with a diversity of race and socioeconomic status, how to communicate with people who were very different — “finding ways to express what you want to say so that people get your point and don’t feel disrespected,” she said. She was living in the shelter at the time.

Early in my academic career I spent several years as a counselor in an Educational Development Center doing exactly this kind of work with at-risk students at a regional state university. While we focused on kids with minimal preparation rather than the higher talent kids in the Posse program, we had the same goal: Retain to graduation. The program had over a dozen fulltime positions and ran more on a business schedule (8am to 5pm) than the typical professor schedule. It wasn’t cheap.

Melanie is currently participating in a similar program at WVU but aimed at talented undergrads who don’t realize they are grad school types.  The McNair program targets these hidden talents who would thrive in a professional degree program, but simply have no idea they exist.  McNair finds these kids, trains them, and aims them at grad school.  But, again, it takes resources.

Of course there are social, political, and legal implications in these programs and while that’s important, please focus on my smaller point: Evaluate the persuasion program. Does it work? How well? Why does it work? What does it cost?

Past the feel good elements here – which always tend to dominate the Counting Report – it appears that the original Posse program does a good job at picking unlikely kids who can succeed at tougher universities at pretty much the same rate the existing recruitment program delivers.  The Posse program produces a real effect with those hidden gems.

The Norm element compels me as a persuasion guy. That’s a great persuasion tactic that harnesses each member of the posse to that central goal of graduation in a small group setting. Of course most universities, especially the more selective ones, are aiming at the Posse idea, but at the University level and not the small group level. You see the persuasion advantage you get with the Posse approach to Norms compared to the University approach. You can’t build the same kind of cohesion and loyalty in a group of 2,000 as you can in a group of 10. You could try to create 200 Posses, but that might create a new set of problems – gangs.

So,  what do you see? How could you apply this in your setting? Most importantly, how would you count it?