All the world’s a stage, especially for persuasion.

“But the whole time I’ve been a performer I’ve been interested in the interplay between the world of acting and the world of business,” he said. He began developing his Act Professional curriculum 12 years ago. To test his mettle, he signed on as a trainer at Performance of a Lifetime, an organizational development firm started by two sometimes actors. In 2008, Act Professional opened for business, working mostly with nonprofits and universities. Through the years, Mr. Grupper has taken clients as disparate as Unicef, Citigroup and Estée Lauder.

This WSJ article profiles Grupper as both a successful stage actor and business consultant for CEOs. Grupper clearly gets the performance part of persuasion and the emphasis upon playing for the Other Guys. He helps muggles struggle with their Sincerity and shows them how to find the art of persuasion.

Remember: All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

The WSJ presents an interesting persuasion application. Many tech and Internet companies are recruiting college students as Ambassadors for their brands, products, and services. According to the story, the students are not paid for this work, but rather get valuable points and prizes in the form of resume hits like, Campus CEO or Director of Social Media. For this reward Ambassadors engage in self directed persuasion efforts on campus like going into classroom and writing the company name and logo on chalkboards.

You see the obvious advantage for the companies. Free labor spreads the word in a target rich environment. You provide a little Cool Factor and the student does the rest. Of course, notably absent in the article is any kind of Count for the business TACTs. Does the Ambassador Persuasion Play™ produce any Counts of Change?

This past weekend, about 150 college reps and their friends convened in New York City for the second annual Rent the Runway Rep College Capstone Weekend. To take part, college students were required to write a post for a company blog and produce a one-minute video promoting the service. A spokeswoman says it was “recommended” that attendees rent a dress from the company for the event.

Even if the Ambassadors don’t generate a penny’s worth of business for Rent the Runway through new customers, the Ambassadors themselves buy RtR’s product themselves. So, at the very least the Ambassador play gets Unpaid Employees to buy the product! Talk about selling sand to a Saud!

And one cannot help but notice the Ambassadors featured in the article.

Normally, the persuasion play with attractiveness is to use it to attract other people, but with the Ambassador Persuasion Play™, it seems you use the attractiveness of the student to gull them into providing free labor and buying your stuff. The Other Guy in this case isn’t all the other students on campus, but just those Pretty Women and a few Pretty Men who’ll pay to work for nothing because you tell them they are attractive and everyone knows how persuasive that is.

They’re back.

A healthcare advocacy group run by physicians is preparing to file a petition calling on President Obama to stop eating hamburgers, hot dogs and other unhealthy foods before cameras. “As role model to millions of Americans, the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public,” said Susan Levin, nutrition education director with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

We saw this crew in Iowa at a Bacon Festival, trying to gin up any attention to their cause by stepping into somebody else’s spotlight. That apparently didn’t work well so the PCRM is moving up in weight class to the President.

Who is funding such lame work? Good grief. Look at their budget! Nearly $11 million in operating expenses for 2011 with over $14 million in assets! And the best they can do is that Bad Bacon Persuasion or petitioning Obama to eat hot dogs behind a curtain?

Perhaps a Peitho nomination is in order after all . . . you just have to know the TACT and the Other Guys.

The US government is releasing information from the documents seized during the fatal raid on Osama bin Laden.   We’re learning about bin Laden persuasion preferences.  Like a name change.

So badly tarnished had the al Qaeda brand become that bin Laden noodled with changing the name of his group . . . Bin Laden went on to nominate some possible new names for al Qaeda. “These are some suggestions: Monotheism and Jihad group, Monotheism and Defending Islam Group, Restoration of the Caliphate Group . . . Muslim Unity group.” None of these suggestions were exactly catchy and the group did not rename itsel.

Call me radical, but if folks are willing to blow themselves up for the cause, can the brand name make that much difference?

I wouldn’t be caught dead in those Wranglers, but I’d die in my Levi’s?

While you can classically condition about anything, I have my doubts about Ding-Donging on Existential Actions. I can see the utility of the Brand Name for public communication to a variety of Other Guys, like the Westerners bin Laden is trying to kill and to various sympathizers he wants for support, but for the key Other Guys, those willing to die for the cause . . . really, the Brand Name matters?

Consider a more prosaic explanation for the name game. When you’re hunted, on the run, and all you can do is think then you’ll think about what you can change and that boiled down to mere words at the end for bin Laden. And, if you think about it, his actions reveal his persuasion preferences. He subscribed to the Source School of Persuasion and not the Receiver School of Persuasion.

Source guys think the persuasion is all about them, how they look, walk, and talk. Style. Flavor. Brand. Insight. Vision. Receiver guys, by contrast, follow the Rule, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid. Instead of dying while playing with words, a Receiver-oriented radical would have died trying to Change the Other Guy with whatever he could find in the Local. As I noted two years ago, it turns out that bin Laden was too Sincere for change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

doi: 10.1177/0956797611432497