Okay. I’ve only been doing this for a couple of weeks, so my wealth of experience with online courses is impoverished. My work in this domain is limited to one university and one course, so your mileage may vary from mine . . . but that said, it is abundantly clear to me that online communication is a wildly different form of human communication compared to face to face interaction. (Wow, Steve! Did you need a doctorate to make that observation or did it come from years of experimental lab research?) Bear with me.

Right now I’m teaching for the first time an online advanced undergraduate course for West Virginia University in the Department of Communication Studies. I’ve been teaching (or training or leading) persuasion to adults for 20 years in just about every kind of format one can imagine. In some respects my experience in persuasion created all of my larger opportunities beyond normal academic social science. It’s hard to imagine connecting with Dr. Fred Butcher when he ran the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center at WVU if I hadn’t been doing persuasion. It’s hard to imagine connecting with Dr. Al Munson when he ran the Health Effects Lab Division for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Persuasion has simply been a crucial part of my success conventionally defined as a professional. So, I work hard at it, think about it a lot, seek training and guidance from experts, and in general devote a lot of resource to doing it and getting better at it. This is a long way of saying, that I think I’m pretty good at this. (And let’s keep our bearings here and ask Melanie about other skills I think I possess and she’ll give you a little laugh and a tight smile that you often see married people show when they are biting their tongues.)

And, yet, for all my experience and success in all things persuasion, this online course is surprising me almost everyday. I’m used to having a persuasion classroom completely under my control, but an online classroom is a very different animal. Beyond the obvious technology challenges (gee, you mean the university server randomly selects some emails to send and receive?), the biggest surprise to me has been the difference in the psychology of online communication. Right now, two theories seem most relevant: ELM and attribution theory.

For an online course, I think most people most of the time are considerably more high WATT when they process messages for an online course than when they are in the face to face world (f2f) or in other online activities (i.e. general surfing on the web). I’ve got no numbers on this, but based on more years of study than I care to count, it just feels that way even without a 2 X 2 ANOVA design on this.

Normally, this would be exactly the state of affairs I’d want in a teaching/learning environment. Gee whiz, if you can get high WATT processors and you’ve got strong arguments (and I think I do), then you should be in hog heaven. Yet, I see behavior in both myself and my online participants that indicate more problems where there should be fewer. My ELM interpretation of this is that while people may be more high WATT in an online course, it appears that this high WATT processing is more likely to be Biased rather that Objective. If you know ELM (or HSM) theorizing, this means that everyone is very willing and able to think about information, but Objective processors tend to go with the information given whereas Biased processors tend to make that information fit with an existing scheme, plan, or bias.

Thus, my claim here is that online courses generate Biased high WATT processing. People do not tend to ride with the bits of information they encounter, but rather actively look for information that confirms what they are looking for and when they can’t quickly, easily, and obviously find that information, you tend to show pretty hot attitudinal responses. (Look, if you’re one of my students in this online course, don’t get fired up here. I’m not saying you or anyone else is mean, crazy, or stupid. Just keep reading the ELM chapter in the Primer and in O’Keefe, okay?)

The second obvious area of influence comes from attribution theory. When you’re doing an online course, your style and content of attribution will change compared to either the f2f world or other online activities (again, surfing). I just did a quick search on PsychInfo on attribution theory and various keywords related to online activities and got no hits. (I can’t believe this application has not occurred to anyone yet. I must be using the wrong key terms.) When you have no f2f context, feedback, or comparison, and when you are in a high WATT Biased processing mode, attributions have got to change and it is unlikely that the change will be in a favorable, happy, and milk of human kindness direction. I’d predict that virtually anything you encounter that is not exactly what you expected will trigger a biased attributional process that will tend to protect you and maim the other.

In sum, then, I think that online education produces a “paranoid style” of information processing in most people most of the time, especially in early phases of the experience. And, if no one takes steps to moderate this style, then things will not get better and may get worse (again relative to f2f or other web activities). It’s an interesting practical persuasion and influence problem.

This past weekend I began a persuasion seminar with 14 smart and interesting people in Charleston, WV for a WVU Corporate Communication program. During our discussion of CLARCCS cues, one participant, John, shared an interesting observation he’d made on a shopping trip that, at the time, didn’t seem quite that meaningful, but upon learning about the cues, he realized he’d discovered a very powerful persuasion tactic.

See, John was shopping for a new computer at one of those large office and equipment chain stores. During checkout, the sales clerk left John alone and while John was waiting, he noticed a small printed sign taped to the cash register that had several typed lines of instruction in sequence. Being curious and left alone, John read the page. In essence, the sign describe a team approach to persuading customers.

When a customer entered the store, Employee1 would make a friendly greeting and unless there was an immediate request, the Employee1 would walk away. Shortly thereafter, Employee2 was directed to contact the customer and point out current sales and again unless there was an immediate request, Employee2 would then walk away. Employee3 would then enter the scene with a “how may I help you?” approach. Employee3 would then work with the customer to connect her or him to the needed product or service and then direct the customer to Employee4 who would complete the transaction at the register.

Now, the pattern of Employee behavior looks like normal business behavior. The novel, interesting, and useful persuasion tactic, however, comes from the deliberate sequencing of steps through different employees. By assigning different specific communication tasks to each role in this play, the business makes it more likely that each customer will “get” all the information the business wants out there. Furthermore, by distributing each message across multiple sources, it becomes less likely that the customer will feel like a persuasion target and more like someone shopping in a store with a lot of helpful agents.

This team persuasion tactic is a brilliant application of the principles of persuasion. It provides a formal and ongoing structure for the business to deliver persuasion (that typed sign on the register). It hides the persuasion attempt across multiple sources. It has got to be great for team morale as each person on the team will play different parts in the scene. You can imagine the signaling they invent and use, just like a baseball coach on third base giving signs. And, I’ve got to believe that team persuasion goes right to the bottom line with increased sales and customer satisfaction with the greatest benefit of all: No one even knows it’s happening. An excellent application of the Rules.

I’m going to whack the scientific and medical communities in this post, so let’s start with a big point. Science is a lot like Winston Churchill’s observation about democracy. Paraphrasing him, democracy is the worst form of government except compared to every other form of government ever tried. To complete the analogy, science is the worst form of human knowing except for every other form tried. Thus, science is generally a good thing, but it ain’t perfect because it’s still people who are doing it. Thus, while it is a good idea to look for science when possible, you shouldn’t stop thinking simply because some science exists on a topic.

The latest evidence for the combination of science plus skepticism comes from the howling we hear from the medical community about the effects of hormone replacement therapy. Let’s quote a recent news story:

“U.S. breast cancer rates plunged an unprecedented 7 percent in 2003, the year after millions of women stopped taking menopause hormones when a study showed the pills raise the risk of tumors.

The startling new analysis, reported Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, does not prove a link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, but strongly suggests it, many experts said.

“When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it,” statistician Donald Berry of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said of the drop.”

Sounds like great news, doesn’t it? Picture the scene . . . stunned medical researchers and physicians staring with slack jaws at bar charts showing the greatest single year decline in breast cancer cases ever recorded. Somebody must have discovered the greatest pill since aspirin. Except the decline isn’t caused by people taking a pill but rather from people not taking a pill. Not taking a pill all these slack jawed marvels thought was the greatest pill since aspirin just a few years ago. Turns out all the science they were sure you could find behind HRT didn’t exist. Too bad no one did that science before they prescribed it to millions of women.

That quote about . . . “does not prove a link between hormone therapy and breast cancer, but strongly suggests it . . .” is a bit odd in this context. Looking at some of the strongest scientific evidence anyone can produce in this field, Experts are skeptical about drawing causal links between the decrease in HRT use and the decrease in breast cancer cases. A few years ago when everyone had a pill to push and had considerably less scientific evidence about the potential harms of HRT, nary a peep of scientific skepticism was heard. Everyone just knew without having to do the science that HRT was safe and effective.

If you’re trained as a scientist you can go to Medline, the National Institutes of Health’s online medical library, and do your own key word searches on HRT and discover for yourself just how weak the science at that time was. If you’re not trained as a scientist, one compelling piece of information you can easily confirm with your own physician is to ask if HRT was an “off-label” prescription. Off-label means that the physician is prescribing the pill beyond the scientific evidence for that problem. In other words, the physician didn’t use direct evidence, but rather drew inferences and made assumptions. Thousands of MDs went off-label with HRT and prescribed it knowing that there was no direct scientific evidence for its safety or effectiveness. They just assumed it because of the existing science from other applications. And millions of women took those pills like good little girls without realizing they were participating in one of the largest natural drug tests ever done in the history of medical science.

Quick replay: thousands of medical scientists and physicians use science and conclude that HRT is safe and effective, but then when they go “off-label” and wisely assume that HRT is safe and effective past the basic research, tens of thousands of excess breast cancer cases emerge and then when everyone goes off “off-label” breast cancers case drop in the largest reduction ever seen.  Isn’t “science” supposed to be the royal road to truth? Let’s finish the way we started. Science is the worst form of human knowing except for every other form tried. Clearly, even scientists have trouble always doing science.

It’s also interesting to look at how people are reacting to all of this from a persuasion perspective. Scientists are people too and subject to the same rules as we all are. Scientists freely chose a behavior (recommend HRT for menopausal women) without good science behind that behavior. Then, it turns out that the behavior leads to negative consequences. That is the classic path to dissonance. Now, when dissonance is elicited, people are motivated to get rid of it. How do you get rid of dissonance? Well, the classic path here comes from Attribution Theory. When you freely chose to do something that leads to a negative consequence, you can avoid dissonance with an external attribution. “You know why I did that? I did it because Something Else made me do it.” (For the oldest literate demonstration of this please consult Persuasion in Literature and Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the apple.)

Okay, thousands of women got breast cancer at least prematurely and possibly needlessly because they took pills off label as prescribed by their physicians. There’s got to be a bad guy here and anybody who’s been following American health care can tell you who the first likely suspect will be: the drug companies. Hey, they made the pill. They made the physicians prescribe it. They made billions of dollars in profit. They are the bad guys!!!!

In the interest of full disclosure let me note that I was a paid consultant to one drug company in 2002 while I was a scientific administrator in the CDC. (You can imagine the paperwork that I had to complete to get that clearance.) Over one weekend I met with about 20 other Experts to discuss the problem of medical compliance. Believe it or not, up to 50% of people do not properly take their prescribed medical regimen. This panel was convened by the drug company to come up with new ideas for motivating people to follow all the instructions all the time, especially with drug use. It was a great trip held in San Juan during the winter. I brought Melanie along and she had a great time, so I had a great time, too. Plus, it was interesting working with all these other Experts in a wide variety of fields. The drug company did an excellent job of squeezing ideas out of the best minds they could find and, as these things go, at a fairly cheap price. If they got even one good practical idea out of this gang, it could potentially be worth millions of dollars in sales and profit to them. They did not pay us anywhere near the potential value. I have also been a paid consultant with a variety of medical practice and research groups over the years so I’ve been bought off by that side of the street, too. I’m filled with biases from my past as an academic, government administrator, and consultant. And in the interests of even more disclosure, I have close relationships with women who’ve had breast cancer following HRT. It’s a tangled web. Okay, so it’s disclosed and now you know my hidden agenda in this. Back to the disaster . . .

More HRT use caused more breast cancer. The drug companies made HRT, sold it, and profited from it. So, thinking the way the medical community reasoned years ago about the potential benefit of HRT, it’s obvious the drug companies must be the bad guys here. While writing this post, I did a quick Google search (terms: off label hormone replacement therapy) and found several websites already pointing digital fingers (there’s a cute irony, “digital fingers”). Please check out either this post at the Columbia Journalism Review and another from a blogging physician. Both identify those bad drug company boys and girls as culprits. Yes, I’m wildly overgeneralizing from one case to the whole population (as if CJR speaks for all journalists). I’ll take my chances that my inferences about how journalists and physicians view this and take a big leap with the assumption that they mostly agree: The Pharmas Did It!

Okay. Without any exception, exemption, or excuse, the pharmas own a large slice from the pie of guilt baked up in this disaster. They did promote the pills. Relentlessly. Effectively. Cleverly. They followed the advice from Blake in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Always Be Closing and that’s what the pharmas did.

But, so did journalists and so did physicians. To hear the CJR try and wash clean the dirty hands of American media here is beyond my ability to restrain laughter during “American Idol.” Journalists in print, radio, and electronic outlets did no, none, zero, zed, zip, nada “investigative reporting” on HRT even though the weak research record was easily available and understandable. Journalists, too, are driven for the bottom line and Always Be Closing is just a standard part of corporate journalism. They didn’t look because it was too easy to just report what they heard and it was too profitable to report what they heard.

And, physicians. The one blog post is hardly representative of the group. I’ve spoken on a personal basis with a few physicians and they will all point to pharmas as a source, but they will never accept any responsibility for their own off-label prescriptions. They will point their fingers at pharmas even though none of those pills could have been taken if the physicians hadn’t written the script for it. And if MDs are so weak of character that the bad boy pharmas can literally and legally make them write script against their better judgment, then what kind of judgment do MDs really possess? Apparently, the kind of judgment that can be bought and sold rather easily. Wouldn’t it be wiser for the AMA to stand up quickly and take this one on the chin. Yep, we were wrong. We didn’t do our due diligence with the science on this one. We’re not sure exactly how much of the blame is ours, but it’s big enough to warrant our acknowledgement. But that declaration would mean a lot of dissonance and dissonance ain’t fun.

There will probably be a train wreck in some American court rooms over this. Pharmas will write a big check, but I don’t think that physicians will escape unharmed financially or reputationally. Journalists will have a great time with this story. They will act indignant with everyone and send out swarms of investigative reporters who will get to the bottom of it all the same way Woodward and Bernstein did with Watergate: They’ll read court documents publicly available and act as if they risked their lives like you see in a Hollywood movie.

And all this is predictable, explainable, and possible through understanding the persuasion concepts of dissonance and attribution. Maybe . . . there’s certainly more going on and not every person involved can be understood this easily or simply. But, the ideas do apply, have merit, and make sense within these limits.

This is a long and complex post, so let’s summarize. Science is great for knowing, but sometimes it fails largely because scientists are people and they fail. And, these failures can be understood through persuasion concepts. Like I saw all this coming, right? Of course, not.

If you get around the Internet and are interested in current events, you’ve probably visited the LA Times website and might have even followed the ups and downs of this newspaper. For some folks, the LA Times is a major source of power in their world and they are upset at its more centrist editorializing, particularly with the recent firing of Robert Scheer. If you are an activist and a major media outlet is starting to get out of tune with your harmony, what do you do?

How about this . . . (described at the LA Observed blog)

“We embrace an inside/outside strategy, whereby subscribers lobby from within and non-subscribers, withholding their subscriptions, exert pressure from without. Please let us know (xxxxxx@aol.com) if you want to pursue an inside (subscribe) or outside (boycott) strategy.” This is the persuasion tactic that a group of Southern California progressives is going to apply to get the LA Times to add an anti-war leftist opinion writer to the editorial page or to drop right wing writers. If you had a good psych class in high school or college or if you are parent, you should recognize this tactic.Just about any normal human being quickly learns that consequences shape behavior. Get a reward and you’ll do that again. Get a punisher and you’ll move to the other side of the street. Professor B.F. Skinner is the iconic public figure for this theory and you might even remember seeing pictures of him standing beside a box that was the reinforcement environment for Skinner’s research subjects: Pigeons, rats, mice, and sometimes people.

SoCa progressives want to build a Skinner box for the LA Times. Through a combination of rewards (continuing subscriptions if your editorial page pleases me) and punishments (withholding subscriptions until your editorial page pleases me), these folks hope to shape the LA Times in a more congenial and progressive direction.

This appears to be fairly straightforward, serious, and potentially effective. Disgruntled folks organize themselves into an economic Skinner box and make the LA Times the lab rat (or if Professor Skinner was still alive to consult with them, I’d assume he would prefer to think of the LA Times as a pigeon) and keep whacking away with rewards and punishers until the rat does what you want it to do.

Unfortunately, this is bad persuasion and in a political context, I’ll call this the “Politics of the unElectable.” While these folks are serious about themselves, they are not serious about creating the change they seek. Let’s think about this for just a minute.

What kind of effort must these people exert to run their Skinner box? They can organize via email and websites, maybe an infrequent phone conversation. From the comfort of their homes, they can implement their chosen reinforcers with the touch of a few keystrokes as they subscribe to the Times online and pay with credit card or they can send an email to the Times to let the Times know they are withholding the subscription. Every now and then maybe as many as two or three hundred of these kindred spirits can plan and execute a picket at the LA Times.

In other words, they will expend about as much effort as it takes to open an account with one’s preferred pornography website. (Except for the picketing thing . . . that’s more like organizing a group appearance at an adult bookstore.)

While it is low effort, the effort is nonetheless gratifying although not in the same way as with the pornography website. Don’t you remember how good you felt composing that letter to the editor, getting the dictionary and maybe the thesaurus, showing each draft to your spouse or your dog or your cat. Then sending the thing off. Take that! The psychological payoff for cheap protest is not to be underestimated. In fact, I suspect the less you do, the better the protest feels for reasons best explained by Dissonance Theory which we’ll leave for another post far distant in the future.

But, sometimes even low effort can bring big rewards assuming you’ve got a great persuasion tactic. And what’s wrong with a Skinner box the for LA Times?

You gotta control all the significant sources of reinforcement for the rat or the pigeon or child or newspaper if you expect the Skinner box to work. If you’re whacking your kids with a punishing consequence for not cleaning their rooms and your spouse is whacking them with a rewarding consequence for expressing their individuality, you’ve got a failed Skinner box (but probably a pretty standard family).

Look, the Times is a multizillion dollar going concern. Yeah, it is suffering right now along with a lot of newspapers as they struggle to keep a preWeb business model making profit while they figure out a new business model for a postWeb world. But the passionate and principled actions of a few hundred subscribers is not even close to being a significant source of reinforcement for the Times. And as long as advertisers keep the ad dollars flowing no activist group from the left or right is going to materially affect the Times editorial board with a Skinner box tactic. And we haven’t even started on what the bad guys (the neocon right wing fascist cabal) are doing to keep the Times moving right. The progressive Skinner box affects nothing and no one except for the progressives’ state of mind.

This analysis cannot be that subtle, difficult, or arcane. Certainly even some of the folks in the group must have voiced a concern about this. (Unless they have become the dreaded Echo Chamber or Groupthink Gang).

Remember the Rules. All bad persuasion is sincere. If you can’t succeed, don’t try.

For some people central route persuasion may seem to be a more honorable and honest approach to persuasion. You seek motivated receivers who want the best information before they reach a choice. You provide the strongest arguments for your case and let your opponents offer their arguments. Let the best side win.

Well, it may be more honorable, but it is not necessarily the most effective approach to persuasion. You don’t have to be a football fan to understand this when you consider an example from the National Football League.

This year the NFL conjured up a new way to make money. The owners held back a handful of late season games from the standard TV contract and created a new “NFL Network” that carries these eight Thanksgiving to Christmas games played on Thursdays and Saturdays. It’s a smart marketing move. During this time period college football is not active because the regular season is complete and most of the bowl games don’t start until Christmas. So, football junkies are down a pint for this month. Into the void steps the NFL Network with eight games to be available during the typical times when college games would air.

From a persuasion perspective I’d call this a scarcity move (when it is rare, it is good). Typically employed as a peripheral route strategy, scarcity operates on a low WATT processor who feels the pressure of the rare thing (like those home shopping channels that make a product available “only in this hour”) and without carefully looking at the merits of the thing makes a purchase. In this instance, I do not think that the NFL is using scarcity as a peripheral route tactic. Instead, the NFL is deliberately creating a scare item (football games available during a period when they are not usually available), and using that scarcity as an argument to support the consumer purchase of the product. The reasoning goes like this – “I’m a football fan and I love watching football on TV. From Thanksgiving to Christmas there is less football on TV. The NFL Network is now offering games during the dry spell. Yippee!!!” This is not a peripheral process. This is central route. The scarcity of the product is truly an argument that bears on the central merits of the purchase. In fact, this is just a nice illustration of economics and the relationship between supply and demand. When this is true, it is killer central route persuasion and the source is in line for a major gain.

So, this sounds like smart business . . . except, virtually no one is able to see the games.

See, since these games are outside of the standard TV contract, no one is contractually obligated to carry the games. Producers like NBC, ESPN, Fox, and CBS and cable operators like Time-Warner, Comcast, etc. agreed to deliver all NFL games – except these eight – as part of the contract. It looks like the NFL wanted more money for these eight games, but the usual gang of suspects didn’t want to pay the premium, so they declined the offer. The NFL is stuck with having these eight games, but can’t get them out to the public. Now, the NFL Network is trying to manipulate public opinion into pressuring these groups to deliver the NFL Network games at rates the producers and operators don’t like.

If you visit the NFL website they promeniently feature their concerns about the evil cable operators. They offer highly edited quotes that appear to offer some sympathy to the NFL and provide various strategies that outraged NFL fans can pursue to register discontent with cable operators. And if you are a real sports fan, you can see people like Tony Kornheiser make snide comments about the failure of his cable operator to offer these games on his ESPN cable sports show, “Pardon the Interruption.” The fact that Tony is a football analyst for ESPN and therefore paid by the NFL is not disclosed.

If you take the central route, you are thinking that you can make your case on the merits. You believe that your arguments are the best arguments and will lead to more favorable elaboration activity in your receivers. It is straight-up, head-on, me-against-you, let-the-best-one-win persuasion. You don’t need to play any persuasion games that exemplify the peripheral route – no CLARCCS cues – just straight out logos, classic Aristotle, and the best arguments for rational minds.

The persuasion problem for the NFL here is that their arguments are not clean, simple, and fundamental. They wanted more money for these eight games and in a fair marketplace, they couldn’t get any takers for their offer. The NFL is now trying to mobilize their fan base to attack the cable operators and get the operators to take an offer they’ve already refused. As long as the fan base does not realize this, the NFL might succeed in this persuasion strategy. However, we are now in the seventh week of the scarce resource and the cable operators have not changed their minds. It looks like the NFL brought a knife to a gun fight. We’ll see confirmation of this if the NFL Network disappears after this year.

Remember the Rules: Great persuaders don’t need rich uncles, kindness from strangers, or third party vote splitters.

Today we learn that a medical Expert proposes a new solution to the obesity epidemic. According to an article in the “Daily Mail” newspaper:

“Oversize clothes should have obesity helpline numbers sewn on them to try and reduce Britain’s fat crisis, a leading professor said today. And new urban roads should only be built if they have cycle lanes, according to Naveed Sattar, Professor of Metabolic Medicine at the University of Glasgow.”

There’s more . . .

“Prof Sattar also wants ads for slimming services without independent evaluation banned, TV ads for sweets and snacks stopped before 9 pm, higher tax on high fat and high sugar foods and tax breaks for genuine corporate social responsibility.” (You can read the article if you’d like.)

Where to begin?

A point about journalism first. If free speech falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Whether it makes a sound is debatable, but it certainly doesn’t make a profit. The first rule of journalism in any form is to attract the ears and eyes and today journalism clearly believes it can attract ears and eyes with experts, particularly health and safety experts.

Second, let’s realize that obesity is a health risk and that we’ve known about this not just in the past year, decade, or millenium, but since we’ve got recorded time. When you get seriously overweight, you will have health problems. No news here.

And, third, we know that while there are multiple causes of obesity, when there is a sudden and large increase in the percentage of obese people in a society, typically the largest cause is not medical, but rather lifestyle factors. That is, when you find a society that quickly goes from a lot of lean people to a lot of fat people, the cause is not a virus or bacteria or some other new ailment, but rather that the society has figured out a way to generate a lot of cheap, abundant, and safe food for all of its people and people are having trouble controlling their behavior.

Professor Sattar must be an Expert in metabolic medicine. That’s beyond dispute. He’s a professor at a university, he’s got the lab coat, a bar chart, and probably a pill. He knows all about the biochemistry of anabolic and catabolic functions and everything that makes our motors run faster and slower. No news here.

But what has the Professor’s expertise in metabolic medicine got to do with any expertise in the lifestyle problem of obesity? His CV online makes no mention of any training, experience, or skill in behavior change at either the individual or social level. Now, on a fairly common sense basis, if I was trying to create behavior change in people I don’t think I’d say, “hey, find me an Expert in metabolic medicine.” In much the same way if I was suffering from hyperthyroidism, I don’t think I’d say, “hey, find me an expert in Behavior Change.”

Yet, the Professor has no shame in making behavior change recommendations and the “Daily Mail” of Britian has no shame in printing those recommendations. Should we take any of this seriously from a Healthy Influence perspective?

Well, let’s see . . . what kind of behavior change theory supports his recommendations (helpline phone numbers in oversized clothing, higher taxes on various foods, requirements for cycling lanes)? The range of recommendations vary from information (helpline numbers, nutrition labeling) to regulation (taxation, required road building policy).

There’s good evidence and simple common sense to demonstrate that regulation does change behavior. Primary seat belt laws, for example, do create greater compliance and lower mortality and morbidity rates. It’s arguable that regulations in the form of taxes and road building, however, would not do much to change individual behavior because these regulations do not address the primary causes (cheap, tasty, safe, abundent, accessible food) of the problem. It’s also an argument of last resort for an expert to make. (”I can’t persuade these damn fools to keep from hurting themselves, dammit, pass a new law RIGHT NOW!” Gee whiz, any citizen can make this appeal. What’s the point of being an expert if you fall into magical thinking?)

Then what about the more persuasion orientated ideas from the Professor? While there’s again good evidence and good common sense that providing information and education does change behavior, the literature is pretty clear that there is one very serious limitation to the effect: If people already know or think they know about the problem, “new” information is not likely to be seen as new and will be discounted or ignored. In other words, “new” information had better be truly new information and not simply the pedantry of an untrained and ignorant expert. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in Britain or the Western World is uninformed about the link between overeating and obesity. Information ain’t the Special Sauce here.

I do not doubt for a moment the sincerity of Professor Sattar. He believes what he says and he says what he believes. And while this is true, no one should doubt that his sincerity can do no good for the problem he seeks to solve. Further, I’d argue that experts like Sattar make the problem worse. His bad persuasion attempts only serve to reinforce the existing beliefs and attitudes of the people he’d like to change. His recommendations are likely perceived as weak attacks that people can easily overcome. Thus, Sattar is running a bad inoculation experiment that does make existing attitudes and beliefs stronger, but the problem is that he wanted to change those attitudes and beliefs. Instead of taking one small step toward success, experts like Sattar make a giant leap into failure.

If you can’t succeed, don’t try. All bad persuasion is sincere. It’s about the other guy, stupid.

If you follow the NBA you know that the league is using a new basketball this season. David Stern, the commissioner of the league, made this decision as part of a marketing agreement with a basketball manufacturer, Spaulding. A new brand of ball will probably sell like hotcakes because who wants to play streetball with the “old” one when there’s a “new” one, right? You’d also assume that this marketing agreement brings benefits to the players as part of the overall profit sharing that goes on between the owners and the players. So, everyone is happy.

Except everyone isn’t happy. The players have been complaining all season about this lousy new ball. Early predictions were uniformly negative. Most people expected scoring to go down and turnovers to go up because the damn ball is no damn good.

Except a couple of months into the season, “. . . statistically there has been an improvement in shooting, scoring, and ball-related turnovers . . .” according to Commissioner Stern. Yet because the players remain unhappy about having this new ball forced upon them, the league is going back to the “old” ball.

What’s going on here? Listen to a player for a clue.

“For the league to be successful, obviously the players have to be happy. The basketball is the most important thing to us,” said LeBron James, one of several NBA All-Stars who criticized the new ball. “Like I said before, you can change the dress code, you can make our shorts shorter, but when you take our basketball away from us, that’s not a transition we handle.”

“. . . but when you take our basketball away from us . . .” Bingo! That sounds like players perceived an unfair restriction upon their behavior and responded with classic reactance. While this situation is clearly not a carefully controlled experiment, the combination of player resistance and statistics of better oncourt performance with the new ball leads me to see this as an entirely preventable circumstance. On a rational basis, the new ball functions at least as well if not better than the old ball on key criteria like scoring and turnovers. But players are still upset, so something else is going on.

Whatever Mr. Stern did during the development of the new ball and its use in the league, he clearly did not communicate with the players enough to make them believe they were truly consulted.

I do not believe for one minute that Mr. Stern arbitarily and autocratically jammed this new policy on the players. I’m sure that many of them knew about the coming change and participated in its development. However, their participation in their eyes at least was not sufficient to preclude that sense of unfair restriction.

This leads us to the art of persuasion. Even if you don’t know the term, “reactance,” you still realize that people will get ornery if they think you’re messing with their freedom. How do you get the new ball in play without starting a revolution? It would be interesting to know whether Mr. Stern received any formal public committment for the new ball from any players prior to implementing the new policy. My guess is that he did not. (Or if he did those players were perceived as willing confederates to the commissioner and hence were not perceived as “real” representatives.) When people participate in the planning of activities that affect their perceived freedom, they tend to accept restrictions as fair.

Of course, this tactic requires that you know how to manage the participation in a way that leads you to where you want to go rather than in some other direction. But, that’s a persuasion problem for another post.