I’ve noted before the failure of advocacy groups who appear to offer protest as a means of persuasion when it is probably better understood as mere expressiveness.  Consider now this example from, of all issues, health care reform.

An advocacy group wishes to convince us that health insurance companies are Evil and need to be controlled as part of health care reform.  Here’s how they make this point.

And here, too.

I understand the cleverness of the metaphor and it does attract broader attention, as with ABC News, for example.  I have to wonder, however, at the persuasive impact of the message.  To equate the legal actions of people with a familiar icon of criminal identification, the Wanted Poster, seems to be an unreasonable stretch.

Sure, these Posters get Reception in the first Stage of the Cascade.  But, do the Posters then generate the kind of Processing and Response that will then lead to desired behavior change (Our Kind of Health Care Reform!)?  As I noted before, advocacy demonstrates its lack of skill or interest in persuasion when it only seeks and gets Reception, but then cannot produce helpful Processing and Response.

As always, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

And, can’t you find more desperate photos of the Evil Ones?  Or Photoshop them like Time magazine did with OJ?

Get your swing ding-a-ling on . . .

. . . Machiavelli adheres forever with persuasion as both description and prescription.  To persuade is to be like Mach and to persuade well is to make Machiavelli proud.  Machs exhibit no ideological commitments, possess a cynical take on human nature, follow a heartless calculation toward other people, and display a marked disregard for conventional morality.  “Git ‘er done, baby” could be the popular homespun saying, properly twisted.

Academic studies of Machiavellianism paint a dark and dangerous portrait.  Those infected with Mach qualities find themselves classified as pathological and can read detailed descriptions of themselves in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of deviance for clinicians and insurance companies.  And, those who elude capture, but range free in the world like Hannibal Lector between incarcerations, can find themselves quantified in journal reports with Normal Machs who reveal their dark side in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, the Ten Dollar Game, and blasts of white noise.

Of course, it also helps when you invent a Machiavelli that does not exist.  If you read the original Mach IV scale that measures the contemporary meaning of Machiavellianism then compare it to to what Machiavelli wrote, you wonder whether the scale authors were academics or poets.  The Prince is much more subtle than hammers on the thumb like,

“One should take action only when sure it is morally right,”

“Most people are basically good and kind,”

“Honesty is the best policy in all cases,”

“There is no excuse for lying to someone else.”

Certainly anyone who scores High Bad on statements like this is someone to examine carefully for either poison or a bad sense of humor.  They might even be crazy.  But, persuasive?  Manipulative, even?

And while it is good to despise pathology – but, isn’t that a tautology – it is free riding to savage those who save the city from predators.  Machiavelli should not be acknowledged as a bastard, but our bastard, but as a deep thinker on the means of survival, success, and succor for all, including those who would carp, criticize, and cavil all the way to a death camp.

Consider from the Dark Source itself, The Prince, with Machiavelli describing the case of the notorious tyrant, Agathocles:

Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. . .  Nevertheless, his barbarous cruelty and inhumanity with infinite wickednesses do not permit him to be celebrated among the most excellent men. What he achieved cannot be attributed either to fortune or to genius.

And, now, a different source, but still Machiavelli’s thought:

“All cities that ever, at any time, have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats, or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them.  Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world.”

from “Words to be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money”, in Chief Works and Others [of Machiavelli], trans. Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), v. III, 1439.

Prudence operationalizes itself through power and persuasion.  This is pathology?  This is dangerous?  Even Jesus admonished the Disciples to spread the Gospel, but wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove . . .

. . . or blues out with Mr. Armstrong . . .

When you do Science for any other reason than for the sake of doing science, you move yourself into the realm of persuasion.  My Rule observes:

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple

. . . which means you do not persuade when you’ve got science.  With science there is no ambiguity, uncertainty, or confusion (maybe error, but that’s something different).  Science is the pursuit of falling apples.

So, how are we to understand the work of some climate change researchers?  As Science for the sake of doing Science or as something beyond Falling Apples?  Consider this quotation from Dr. Phil Jones, a key scientist for the IPCC panel.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

To nonscientists that quoted phrase “statistically significant” sounds important, if unclear.  It is impossible to explain the concept briefly without over simplifying, but you can read more about it here.  If you can take my word for it, this admission is devastating to the claim that there’s been any practical change in global temperatures over the past 15 years.  In scientific parlance and reasoning, it means it is prudent to retain the null hypothesis of “no effect” and continue researching.  It also means, Don’t Cry Wolf!

Yet, this is exactly what Dr. Jones and his colleagues did.  They used their scientific credibility to hide the details behind a curtain as they cried, “Wolf!”  And, of course, we understand that crying “Wolf” means they were trying to persuade people.  They were not telling us about Falling Apples because the Apples were not Falling as the absence of statistical significance demonstrates.  And, they certainly were not doing Science simply for the sake of Doing Science.

And, this performance is not restricted to climate change researchers.  Recall Tiger Woods’ $12 billion tab on the dime of his various corporate sponsors?  Yeah, Tiger’s escapade in an Escalade caused a significant drop in the value of corporate stock for his sponsors.  Except if you actually read the report and go past the PR Headline, you discover an interesting repetition:  The results are not statistically significant.  Not even close.

If you read their badly formatted figure on page 8 that contains the individual stock prices over time, you see that the 95% confidence limit for each stock on 12 of 13 days includes values that show a loss, no change, or a gain.  To state this another way, each estimate for the effect of Tiger’s transgressions on each stock is statistically nonsignificant at the standard 0.05 alpha level.  It means that the estimates are not reliable.  The study authors artfully hid that flaw with an opaque admission that masked more than it exposed.

Finally, we should caution that our estimates are statistically `noisy,’ in that they could be significantly higher or lower than the numbers we report. One must make that caveat in any statistical study like this, and in our case the statistical margin of error is particularly large in part because Mr. Woods’ sponsors are (with the exception of Nike and EA) subsidiaries of larger parent companies.

When your results are scientifically worthless simply call them “noisy” and voila, you’ve got a Headline.  They, too, cried “Wolf,” but at a Tiger’s expense.  Ha-ha!  Great fun with science, isn’t it?  We get headlines and we admitted everything, but slipped it by everyone nonetheless and no one gets hurt.

Except if you are Dr. Phil Jones who had to resign his leadership position and is under continuing investigation by his university as if he were a rogue like Dr. Ward Churchill, noted Wolf Crier of all things Native American.  And, others in the climate change research community, too, are now feeling the consequence of trying to persuade with Falling Apples that, alas, are not Falling.  Most of the time Persuasive Science is merely a treat as with our UCal Davis economists free riding on Tiger’s misery.  But, the point of science is doing it for the sake of science and not for the sake of headlines, advocacy, or saving the world from itself.

Now, let’s consider Art for Art’s Sake!

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

Please realize this Rule does not mean:  If You Can Count It, You Can Change It.

I can count the gray hairs in my beard, the wrinkles on my face, and the stretch of the skin over my elbow, and even if you color, nip, or tuck them, I’m still getting older.  You can count it, but you cannot change it.  Many smart people miss this distinction and believe that the power of counting provides the power of changing.

Consider various Credible Sources in the now running gag of calorie counts on menus as a way to change waistlines.  A common sense reading of the scientific literature indicates that you can do a lot of counting on this problem, but Calorie Counts won’t change hips, thighs, and bellies.  People do not change their diet enough from this intervention to create a practical, lasting change.  But Cool Credible Sources keep counting into the wind.

Consider this NYT unsigned editorial and the scientific study they cite in the editorial.  Both pieces argue that Calorie Counts are good, they work, and they should be expanded.  Please try and read the new scientific study the Times references, because that study is a great illustration of Counting Ain’t Changing.

First, realize that this scientific study is not quite scientific in the usual sense of the term.  It comes from guys who call themselves scientists (okay economists, but most of us here aren’t real scientists, meaning physicists, but we’ll ignore that distinction), working in a scientific program (a Graduate School of Business), at a university that does science (Stanford).  So, the paper is scientific in that sense.  But, the paper as cited by the Times is not scientific in the sense that it has been reviewed, accepted, and published in the scientific literature.  It’s been published by PR release, no peer review now.  Inspect it closely, but you’ll find no mark of consideration and acceptance from a larger field of experts.

Second, while these economists know how to count, they do not know how to change.  They find that when Starbucks restaurants started using calorie counts on their menus, the amount of ordered calories decreased 6%.  Working the way economists do with assumptions (assume this 6% always works with all menus and every restaurant uses them and Americans obtain about 25% of the calories from restaurants and on and on), the economists explain that 6% difference in the real world as:

If average daily intake is around 2,000 calories, the implied calorie reduction is 30 calories per day.

Thirty.  Trente.  Dreißig.  Treinta.  Si.  San Jyu.  A day.

Thirty calories is a real thing.  You can make 30 calories in a chemistry experiment or by slicing a slice of Wonder Bread in half.  Calories exist and you can count them.  But, if by some miracle you could create an intervention that caused everyone to eat 30 fewer calories a day, it would have no practical impact on their waistlines.  Their metabolism would adjust to this frip of a  decrease in a few days or weeks and maintain the old body weight.

Yet, the study authors and the unnamed Times editorialist think that their counts means your change.

Consider, finally and briefly, another Rule.

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

Persuasion makes a change.  The Cool Credible Counters at the Times and Stanford only imagine that they do.  The Times and Stanford offers the Image of Truth in their Mirrors, but not the Persuasion of Truth because their claims fail.  Cassandra cautions these writers:  Credibility for Attention is a Losing Trade.

Dry Vodka Martini

• 1 shot, journalism
• 1 dash, persuasion
  
• 1 ice filled shaker
• stir in shaker, pour, then enjoy!

Lady Gaga’s Great and Insincere Persuasion

I lost my manufactured pop culture street cred when I stopped teaching my large lecture Mass Media course in 1998.  Til then I had a relentless focus on the hipster world because it connected my students to the course and functioned as a hook to grab their Reception, then as a WATTage switch to get them to Process communication theory and research.  Just as a man will do anything if he thinks it’s foreplay, students will listen to anything if they think it’s groovy, gear, and fab.

Now, as an aging FauxHipster, even I can see the pop success of Lady Gaga when the Wall Street Journal (!!!) gives her the star treatment.  If you want a great demonstration of the truth behind All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere, now hear this:  At the Simon Cowell standard of cruel honesty, Lady Gaga cannot sing, cannot dance, and cannot pose, but she can persuade the world to think her a Icon which means there’s nothing sincere about her.

She’s great!

But, will she last as long as the last one with Blonde Ambition who showed such Great Insincerity?

Mojo Times?

The Sunday New York Times today is one of the best editions of that paper since Pinch Sulzburger took over and nearly destroyed it.  The paper is readable from <p> to </p> for every page.  Perhaps they’ve recovered from their Bush Derangement?  Once nothing but Biased Processing and Sincere Persuasion, the Grey Lady is gorgeous.

Today.

Auteurism at Apple:  Sincerity?

Great feature on Steve Jobs at Apple and the Auteur of Innovation.  Here’s the key persuasion point:

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

I’m uncertain how to understand Apple.  Apple and Jobs attracts admiration from the Cool Table, but the Cool Table is rarely persuasive.  Magnetic, yes.  It attracts those who are attracted to it which is not nearly the same thing as persuasive which means you change the Other Guy rather than draw Other Guys who are Just Like You.

You see this in Apple’s market share.  They get the Sophisticate Slice, but nothing like the Microsoft Masses.  For example, if I wanted to win an election or a war, I wouldn’t ask Steve Jobs for advice (unless, of course, the election or the war only involved the Cool Table).  I would ask Bill Gates.  Look at Mr. Gates work with vaccine production and distribution.  This is a guy who really thinks big and important.

Apple and Jobs reek with Sincerity.  Granted they are cool, hip, beautiful, sleek, graceful, innovative, and on and on.  But sincere.

Obama’s Persuasion Crisis

The Chinese ideograph for Crisis contains both Danger and Opportunity and the NYT offers a great perspective piece that embraces the dynamic tension Obama faces here.

Mr. Obama rode into office on one of the most elegant narratives in recent campaign history: that he was the embodiment of hope and change. It caught the national mood, yet remained vague enough to mean pretty much whatever a voter wanted it to mean.

The Times writer then notes various challenges to this Image. Reverse Bush, but Surge Afghanistan; help the people, but bailout the banks; and so on.  The writer then unhelpfully quotes a White House perspective.

The White House largely dismisses the warnings. “The president has had a consistent political narrative since the day he stepped on the national stage in 2004,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “The interpretation of it is cyclical.”

I noted that Mr. Obama lost his way on the Persuasion Path last summer and think he remains lost.

Forever Green, Forget the Price

You can recharge your cell phone with a solar panel device that uses Ms. Sunshine instead of Mr. Coal.  It only costs $99, but it comes with a bag so you can tote and charge on sunny days.  Pouty lipped model not included, although this technology may be a Chick Magnet.  Solar is sooo hot with Pouty Lipped women, isn’t it?

It costs about a penny to recharge the bad way (look it up).  That’s 9900 solar charges which equals over 27 years of coal charges.  Purple faced advocates:  Yes, this is too simple.  Yes, you are complex.  You are smart.  Yes, you are right.  But, of course, It’s about the Other Guy, so who cares about you?

Go long on Green when you can put it in a box and make profit for yourself.

Money, Politics, and Attitudes

Fun report on an interesting money study.  Researchers looked at how people handled their investments depending upon whether their political party was in or out of power.  You invest differently if Your Team is running things compared to when the Other Team is running things.

One of the primary findings concerned the relationship between investors’ political optimism and their propensity to hold domestic stocks. When their preferred political party came to power, investors tended to become much more upbeat about the economy and the domestic stock market.

Now, of course, there’s no good economic reason to do this.  It’s a matter of your political power perception making you feel differently about the stock market.

For Patrick

My nephew, Patrick, is a talented musician who plays the sax and wants to pursue a career in music.  We often discuss the paucity of sax pieces in the classical music repertoire.  Well, Patrick, here’s a nice Times story about Prism and how they’ve handled the problem.

Keep on moving, folks.  No persuasion here.  Just sax, but no violins.

Race and Persuasion

“I KNOW there is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive,” James Spader’s hard-driving lawyer says in the new David Mamet play, “Race.” “I know that. Race is the most incendiary topic in our history. And the moment it comes out, you cannot close the lid on that box. That may change. But not for a long long while.”

Makes it tough to write a review which, of course, is an exercise in applied persuasion.

Osama ‘Bama Wanna-be

Omar Hammami had every right to flash his magnetic smile. He had just been elected president of his sophomore class. He was dating a luminous blonde, one of the most sought-after girls in school. He was a star in the gifted-student program, with visions of becoming a surgeon. For a 15-year-old, he had remarkable charisma.

Great personality profile on an American boy, Alabama boy to boot, who’s now in Somalia leading Al Qaeda boys in jihad.

632,500

Read all about it.

Remember the Clinton Triangulation Persuasion Tactic?

Clinton would pick an issue and a position on that issue that tended to drive key audiences away from their normal allies and toward Mr. Clinton.  School uniforms to instill discipline in students, for example, is an outstanding example of Triangulation Persuasion.  The idea sounds kind of conservative, but only in a symbolic way; however, if you’re not thinking too carefully, the idea appeals to a conservative.  They move closer to Mr. Clinton and farther away from Republicans.  Triangulation.  (It’s based on Balance Theory by Fritz Heider and someday I’ll explain that.)

Now, what’s the Persuasion Triangulation here?

Bin Laden Rebukes U.S. on Climate Change

By JACK HEALY
Published: January 29, 2010

Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, blamed the United States and developed countries for not halting climate change and said that the global economy should immediately abandon its reliance on the American dollar, according to an audiotape released Friday by the broadcaster Al Jazeera.

1.  He’s running for office as the One World Green Party candidate.

2. He’s no longer receiving Oil Money for his financing and is now free to criticize the former hand that fed?

3. He’s never heard of China?

4. He’s holding Gold Stocks and expects a return to the Gold Standard?  (Is he in combination with arbitrage traders like George Soros?)

5. He’s trying to make President Obama look like President Bush?

I can’t decide whether this is smart or the desperate play of someone living too long in caves.

Dry Vodka Martini

• 1 shot, journalism
• 1 dash, persuasion,
  
• 1 ice filled shaker
• stir in shaker, pour, then enjoy!

Low WATT Is Dangerous for your Health

People prefer stories to numbers, so no wonder no one believes me about WATTage, your Willingness and Ability to Think, the prime persuasion variable, because I tell the story with numbers in a feeble and worried attempt to prove the credibility of persuasion research, and perhaps my own.  Sigh.  Here’s the story on Low WATT:

SAN FRANCISCO — On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.

Very lost.

“I ran into a truck,” Ms. Briggs said.

It was parked in a driveway.

The NYT story then skillfully weaves numbers into the drama.

Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007, which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.

The trick here is that even conversation requires some cognitive work and unfortunately people have limited capacity or, less politely, you’re dumber than you think.  And, cell phone accidents prove you’re a pudding head.

About my only complaint with this otherwise excellent piece of journalism is this:

Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the wheel or on foot.

Beginning?  Just little ole me has published research on WATTage (broadly understood) beginning with 1982 and believe me, I was not the first arrival at this party.  The dual process models of cognition took off in the 1970s and one could make a good case that the human problem solver theories of Herbert Simon from the 1950s focused on this problem.  And, if you don’t mind pulling on a concept as if it were silly putty, then even august Aristotle glanced on the effects of Low WATTage in his disdainful comments on the “audience” with its sorry state of reasoning in his persuasion primer, Rhetoric.

Of course, none of these works contains a pretty picture from an fMRI machine, therefore the ideas must be voodoo, theological, and certainly PrePostmodern!

Scripts Can Save Your Life

The Washington Post has a nice review of The Checklist Manifesto, a searing examination of medical failures caused by physician errors.  Atul Gawande wonders why these failures occur, then compares the practice of medicine to other high risk activities like flying, design and construction of skyscrapers, and high stakes investment management.  In talking with these folks, Gawande observed they typically used some kind of checklist to manage their process and thought it would be good for medicine, too.

This touches persuasion with WATTage, again, and with scripts.  Physicians are pretty smart people yet they simply cannot grasp the difference between intelligence – of which they’ve got more than the average bear – and WATTage – of which they are just an average bear.  The complexity of modern medical treatment merely overwhelms their WATTage in much the same way cell phone conversation while walking on a busy city street overwhelms one’s WATTage.

And a checklist is just a simpler form of a script which is a routine sequence of dialog and action for persuasion.  It keeps you on task with focus allowing you to save WATTage for more important things as they pop up.

But, of course, everyone who has any talent or brains hates scripts or checklists because a list is for the little people.

Dying Gasps from the Dying Beast

Alan Wolfe torches the dead wood called, Game Change:  Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime written by dying beastmasters, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.  You’ve probably been riding the political media gossip waves from this book with its disclosures of Harry Reid’s artless, crude, but accurate handicapping of that light skinned Negro who manages dialect with ease, Barack Obama . . . and more recently that shrew Elizabeth Edwards . . . Bill Clinton’s continuing “woman problem” and on and on with the salacious rumor mongering made possible by that most excellent Cool Table persuasion ploy:  the Unnamed, but Highly Placed, Anonymous Source, as if source credibility resides in the writers assertion – a useful conceit.

Of course, there’s more than rumors and gossip in a 448 page book, but as Wolfe details, nothing more than a common reader of the news already knows.  That seems to be the specialty of Mark Halperin.  He’s a beautiful and beautifully connected member of the Village or the media Cool Table, who succeeds like Jay Gatsby’s son would:  Charm, smarm, and guile.

I gave up on Halperin after his 2008 deception called The Way to Win:  Taking the White House in 2008 which was alleged to be an insider look at the Clinton and Bush election machines.  He coauthored that book, too, with another print guy.  Maybe Halperin can’t write?  He’s most famous as a smug TV news political consultant where he speaks for one minute.  Such practice cannot be good for one’s book writing skills.  But, if you can always partner with someone else who think he is a writer, then it all works out.

Here’s Alan Wolfe’s close on his review.

I read the bloggers and, while I admire their energy and commitment, I often find their near-hysteria off-putting. When they write about the Villagers, I detect, if not jealousy, then smugness, as if they believe they could do a better job than the journalists who take home the big bucks. As someone who grew up reading great political reporting, even the kind that produced the classic campaign books of previous years, I wish that all those who scoff about insular and un-self-critical Villagers would be proven wrong. It is too bad that Heilemann and Halperin have proved them, by and large, right.

Bang.

Propaganda, Posters, and Self Disclosure

The NYT has a good little story with a great graphics slide show on the contemporary uses of poster propaganda.  Check it out more for the pictures than the commentary.  All of them are non-American and display that unmistakable European feel similar to the great work from the 1930s in Germany, Russia, and Italy.

But see if you can spot the self disclosure the story inadvertently makes with its selection of posters!  I didn’t realize that All Contemporary Propaganda Is Reactionary!

“Priceless,” but still Persuasion

A good WSJ review of the book, Priceless, makes me interested in reading it for myself.  What compels me most in the review is how it appears that the book is nominally about economics, yet seems to be about persuasion.  Priceless describes the psychology behind . . . given the title you’d expect and be correct, sir! . . . prices, noting various ploys that revolve around ancient and modern persuasion principles.

And people wonder why I’m bitter, paranoid, and relentless!  All these really good books that hit the best seller lists from Malcolm Gladwell to the latest one all turn on persuasion yet never know the field even exists.  Of course, I want you to buy my book and make me rich and famous and hey, while that happens you can also learn about really smart guys like Rich Petty, Shelly Chaiken, Carl Hovland, Leon Festinger, Robert Cialdini, and on and on.  Persuasion and attitude research is the great undiscovered and unknown treasure mine of human nature.

Whew.  Feel better now.   Back to the opera.

Priceless sounds like a great book and I apologize if my ranting detracts any attention or appreciation of it.  Check it out.