Combine technology, statistics, and sports to find that sweet spot where science and persuasion meet.

Head coach Keith Guy and the Muskegon Heights Tigers headed into Tuesday night’s quarterfinals of the Michigan high-school basketball playoffs armed with a secret weapon. On the coach’s iPad, there was a series of charts and diagrams that plotted almost everything that’s plottable about his team and its opponents, Cadillac High School. This included their shot locations and scoring pace, the offensive and defensive potency of every five-man unit they’d put on the floor this season and how effective their star players have been when they’ve received the ball at any spot on the court.

Moneyball hits the high school hardwood. For about $2,000 bucks cutting edge high school basketball coaches acquire the services of

Vasu Kulkarni, a 25-year-old computer whiz and basketball junkie from Bangalore, India, who developed a program that helps human analysts quickly break down game film.

Coaches send digital game film to Kulkarni who farms it out to analysts who then run it through Kulkarni’s program to spew out enough statistics to warm the heart of a second year research methods and statistics grad student. All that sabermetrician sass, just like the pros, only at your local high school.

The science part of me shouts, Show Me The Money! I have trouble believing that this approach makes much positive difference, especially at the high school level, but even at the pros. I’m not aware of any good research evidence that demonstrates a practical, positive effect for winning championships with moneyball. Not that it isn’t illuminating if only for embarrassment.

For coaches, Krossover’s results can be rather shocking. For years, Tammy Lusinger, head coach of the girls’ basketball team at Mansfield Summit High School in Arlington, Texas, had a favorite play called “Bama” in which the girls cleared out one side of the court then set up a series of screens to free a player for an open shot. “It’s a great looking little play,” Lusinger said last week. But after she started using Krossover, she was in for a surprise: The numbers showed that they were only scoring on that play 5% of the time.

Talk about a fabulous demonstration of the powers of self persuasion. Coaches and players convince themselves that they’ll beat you with Bama, then they Count the Change and come up short. See how easy it is to fool yourself in a complex game like basketball or even life. But back to my original request to view the money. Here’s the closing line on the Bama story.

Earlier this month, Lusinger and Mansfield Summit won their second Texas state championship in the last four years.

See, Kulkarni began selling this service in 2010 which means that Tammy Lusinger’s team won a state championship without it and then won a championship with it. I appreciate the lessons learned and that the service can be a valuable teaching tool, but where’s the money?

Just as people mistakenly believed Bama made them invincible, they will also mistakenly believe that high school hardwood moneyball makes them invincible. Again, don’t get me wrong. As the son of a high school football coach, I appreciate preparation and game tape (ask me how many times I’ve seen the coach’s film of the 1956 Tangerine Bowl). Information is useful. But we’re clearly in a statistical stampede and that brings us back to persuasion.

You see the powerful Normative influence going on here. Simply as the Comparison Cue (If Others Are Doing It, You Should, Too), high school moneyball is golden. And, it can function as a Warrior Cue, like those H-P calculators that mark seasoned financial veterans against their younger laptop colleagues. Just flash an image from Krossover during warm-ups and the opponents will know they are facing a technologically superior team!

All of this is made possible through the double edged sword of cheap technology. Kulkarni has made a computer program that takes raw digital images, converts motion into numbers, then sausages those numbers into millions of marvelous casings called EFG%, ORtg, PER, and even OWS. Every adoring parent has the latest digital video camera and you can see the moms and dads coordinating themselves into teams with plans for positioning and editing. And parents probably pony up the 2k in cash to buy the Krossover service.

In its own way the Moneyball Persuasion Play play fools people with randomness. Simply because technology makes Scientific Science available, people think they now know something when all they are doing is running the new version of Bama to win the state championship.

The NYT provides an unintentional paradox with the modern mania over health. Start with living forever. The NYT discusses a peer review study on the interrelationship of getting fat and staying fit on health outcomes like blood pressure or cardiovascular disease. The Times writer actually does a good job of reviewing the research. Here’s the key result from the peer review paper, not the Time summary.

Participants who maintained or improved fitness had 26% and 28% lower risk of incident hypertension, 42% and 52% lower risk of metabolic syndrome, and 26% and 30% lower risk of hypercholesterolemia, respectively, compared with those who lost fitness (Table 2) after adjusting for possible confounders and baseline fitness levels (model 1).

Consistent with other research we’ve looked at on the Persuasion Blog, if you exercise and don’t get fat, you have better health outcomes, here with high blood pressure or high cholesterol, and also with mortality. If you stay lean and exercise you are healthier and live longer . . . at about a half of a Small Windowpane, about a 48/52 effect. And forgive the dreary refrain, this puny effect obtains from observational research with convenience sample, measurement concerns, and on and on with Threats to Internal and External Validity. Run and diet and you may live a little bit longer. Maybe.

And, if you read the comments to the NYT article, you see a lot of reader skepticism, although not on my technical issues. Direct experience simply contradicts the extolled virtues of sweat, self-denial, and pain. Yet, everyone keeps spending trillions of dollars and publishing trillions of bits and bytes all in the pursuit of Eternal Life.

Now, let’s pivot to the paradox posed in the second Times story. It involves foreign doctors leaving their home countries to practice medicine in the US. The headline tips the perspective:

America Is Stealing the World’s Doctors

The writer moves nicely through personal stories and statistics to demonstrate that a lot of local doctors trained in poor countries, particularly Africa, leave their home countries for the US and never return. This is good news for the US because the AMA estimates that without these imports, we’d be short about 200,000 docs, particularly in primary care in rural locations. Of course, Nebraska’s gain is Namibia’s loss. And what is Nebraska’s gain: getting docs to nag you about running and dieting so you’ll Live Forever.

In these two inadvertent stories the Times reveals at least two paradoxes. First, we think can Live Forever if we watch our weight and run, except the science provides only the weakest evidence for this assertion. Second, we’ll take docs from desperate countries where their skill is needed for a dramatic, obvious, and compelling difference and pay them ten times as much money to tell us to do something that sounds good, but won’t have much effect.

When you take a hard headed look at it all – lifestyle, morbidity and mortality, health care spending, physician training, immigration policy – you see that the US devotes tremendous resources, even when that requires importing, to make a trivial difference. If you want to understand US health care, you’re better off studying persuasion than you are science.

Thunder on Climate Change!

Denying the links between greenhouse gas emissions and man-made climate change is akin to denying the links between HIV/Aids and unprotected sex, smoking and lung cancer, or alcohol consumption and liver disease. In each of these cases, well-funded deniers have had to be exposed and confronted before appropriate health-promoting legislation was put in place.

It is interesting that an advocate for policy change regarding Climate Change should use the examples of unprotected sex, smoking, and drunkenness as comparative standards for assessing Global Warming. In these three examples, the relationship between the stimulus and the response, the cause and the effect was at minimum, Large, a Windowpane of at least 25/75. The relationship was relatively direct from smoking to lung cancer or addiction, from unprotected sex to AIDS transmission, from alcohol abuse to liver disease or addiction. Nothing in the Climate Change research contains data to support such a simple, clear, and strong pattern.

No one in the Climate Change Chorus can point to any evidence of a link between human energy use and harmful climate change at the strength of the cited examples of unprotected sex, smoking, and drinking. There is no evidence of such clarity and power in the research literature. None. At best when researchers strain with sophistical statistics they can find evidence of a trend for something like warming temperatures, but they cannot provide any direct, clear, and unambiguous link between human energy consumption and harms from climate change. We are building the science of climate change, but nothing in that science to date is like the science of tobacco, sexual behavior, and alcohol abuse.

Note the mark of the muggle here, particularly with smoking. When you hear Change Agents compare their cause to tobacco, you can be certain you are listening to advocates, persuasion muggles, people who loves themselves more than they love Changing Other Guys.

How smart do you have to be to understand the persuasion concept, Groupthink? Read.

There’s also a darker side to this effect: In cities, ideas and opinions, like product preferences, can spread virally and congeal into conventional wisdom. Cities thus risk becoming incubators of groupthink.

This overwrought and overwritten example comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal and terminates with yet another misapplication of the term Groupthink. The story focuses upon differences between iPhone and Android users and then draws those facile conclusions like Groupthinking Cities.

Again. Groupthink is not defined as people coming together because they like the same thing. That’s similarity or homophily in persuasion terms. Groupthink applies to small groups of highly connected people sharing common work goals who permit cohesion to overwhelm frank discussion. The drive to connect is stronger than the drive to comprehend. Groupthink marks a High WATT Biased Processor on the Central Route cutting the Arguments to fit a Conclusion.

Since I’ve begun blogging I’ve noticed this misunderstanding of Groupthink in a few pop press sources, but the WSJ and the NYT seem to have a corner on the market. Today at WSJ, we have Groupthink with an analysis of which smartphone you use. Here Groupthink is applied to people who have the wrong opinion on Health Care Reform. There, a Member of the British Parliament tasks people with the wrong opinion on Global Warming. And, over the NYT we have a fascinating mashup with Groupthink and introversion. Then, here, in this book review of, all things, a climbing disaster on K2.

But, wait.

Sure, Steve, you’ve caught these mistakes through mere happenstance. Maybe it’s not just WSJ or the NYT. Have you searched more systematically?

Oh. Wow.

Apparently someone could start a blog called No That’s Not Groupthink and post daily. Try for yourself. Hit this link to see today’s collection through the Google News aggregator.

On Sunday, April 1, 2012 as I’m writing this, I see a listing for Chris Weigant in a piece at the Huffington Post on March 30, 2012. He believes that Groupthink is a synonym for that well known effect, the Herd Mentality. And, in a March 30, 2012 Financial Times piece Christopher Caldwell worries about the faddish interest in crowds and groups under the title, Groupthink Is No Match for Solo Genius.

Now, let’s give credit where credit is due. Sometimes pop press writers get Groupthink right. For example, on March 31, 2012 Paul Krugman’s liberal conscience echoes the Groupthink cry from Laurence Ball February 28, 2012 essay on the Federal Reserve’s action. Ball provides a cogent and coherent recounting of Groupthink and actually quotes a good definition of it. Good grief, a Nobel prize winning economist and another one who must be pretty smart, too, since Krugman reads him! Is that what it takes to understand Groupthink?

I could continue in that professorial style of exhausting both the content and the reader with detail upon detail in the name of scholarship, but you get the point. Smart people writing in smart outlets have no idea what they are talking about. Each instance is a small example of FauxItAllery and sure you’ve got to give people some room to expand a thought that might not be according to Hoyle. But, within that see the Bad Science in an attempt at Persuasion.

In all these negative instances, the writers misunderstand and misapply a well defined and well studied persuasion effect as a means of advancing their Persuasion. They reduce this useful concept to little more than a belittling insult thrown during a partisan rock fight.

Groupthink is what strangles your voice when a contrary thought pops in your head during a meeting. The discussion is gathering steam toward a conclusion that you find flawed, but in the interests of solidarity you don’t rock the boat that may soon flounder on the rocky reef only you can see ahead. When individuals allow their sense of cohesion to triumph over thoughtful expression, Groupthink rises. Many people in the group may see disasters ahead, but each suppresses that expression without pressure from another group member. We patrol our minds with the mind we think everyone else has.

And you want to call this the Herd Mentality?

You see the foolishness of these Cool Tablists. They think it more intelligent to drain the meaning and value of Groupthink down to a slur. They also demonstrate a baffling inability to read. Just check the Wikipedia basic entry on Groupthink. This requires a Nobel prize to comprehend? Shootfire, I’m not asking that anyone read any original peer review research, just the pop press like either of Irving Janis’ books on the topic. Or that simple Wiki entry.

I often lament or satirize the woeful reputation of persuasion science. People just don’t understand how wonderful we are. And, it’s worse than that. People don’t understand at all.

Past my stifled cries, gnashed teeth, and rent garments, see the persuasion opportunities. All those Cool Table elites at highly self- and other-esteemed sources like the Times or the Journal or the Post are complete persuasion fools. Talk about easy, ripe, and luscious. I still think it a dangerous game for scientists to play science with these Other Guys, but if you can play without Sincerity, you can shoot those fish in the barrel to advance your career or agenda. Past scientists, if you are trying to make a living off of science, you can be sure that the Cool Table will believe anything you say.

Just tell them your critics are Groupthinkers.

P.S. Laurence Ball makes a pretty good case that at least in the end stages of the Fed under Alan Greenspan, Groupthink processes were probably operating, but his analysis of Groupthink with Ben Bernanke’s Fed fails for me. Ball notes that Bernanke is perceived as an interior, shy, and introverted person who won’t rock the boat. Ball then suggests Fed committees should include aggressive, outspoken people as the cure. There’s no evidence that such personality traits function in Groupthink as Ball describes. Indeed, bombastic group members could easily stifle rational and open discussion as others remain silent as a means of avoiding bombast. And, if you read the case studies from Irving Janis’s work, you find constant examples of Groupthink that included outsized personalities in the room. Whatever the failings of Ben Bernanke and the current Fed, from Ball’s evidence, I don’t think Groupthink or introversion is an issue.

P.P.S. See also in both Krugman and Ball the classic Actor-Observer Attribution effects. Krugman and Ball sit outside the room Observing the Actor, Ben Bernanke. They attribute Bernanke’s actions to his disposition – he’s shy. Bernanke probably attributes his behavior to situational factors – facts on the ground, political reality from Congress, etc. And, if you put Krugman or Ball in the room, their attributions would shift accordingly. Like the old cliche goes, where you stand depends upon where you sit.

Sure, if you can’t Count It, you can’t Change It, but not all Counts are Changes. Like this.

The International Weatherpeople at IPCC have issued another report (594 pages!) on the proven perils headed our way shortly. And, they are Counting on their website landing page from late March, 2012 (click to enlarge).

Note again the brave and futile persistence with Counts of Consensus with all those Authors, Countries, and Comments. And, consider, this Count that does Count an important Change.

Gee, only 359 news sources are carrying this New New Thing. This is a huge report, not some diddly memo. But, maybe 359 news sources on the Google News Aggregator is a big deal? Let’s compare . . . like this one from the same moment with corporate PR about Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and his search for the missing engine from Apollo 11.

Goodness, consider the Cascade implications here. The IPCC cannot beat the PR machine for a corporate tycoon looking for space junk at the bottom of the ocean for Reception/Exposure.

If you work this TACT, you might consider trying persuasion for a change.