Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

Karl Rove is probably the most effective political persuader active in the past 20 years. He wins. Here’s how he wants to win against Obama right now.

The soft attack ad.

Attack ads work. Properly done they reduce support for the issue or person attacked and translate into fewer votes. But, they must be properly done. The proper here revolves around President Obama’s enduring popularity and likability as a person. Many people who voted against him, still find him a winning guy, somebody who’d be a great neighbor, colleague, or guy at the end of the bar. Attacks that don’t account for his likability may fail.

Rove is currently running a soft attack ad that evades Obama’s likability through indirection. Consider Wake Up.

The ad begins with a thirty-something woman alone in bed at 3am awakened by a storm. In voiceover we learn she’s worried about mom, kids, job, retirement. Then she recalls Obama’s plans and promises and we see photograbs of the President, headlines, and charts. The woman continues to worry. We’ve got to do something.

Notice the main element of an attack ad – the direct challenge on character or, in this case, competence. The ad provides those icons of credibility, newspaper grabs, to document the attack, but see how the attack is couched. A young woman in a modest nightgown, worrying alone in bed at 3am as a storm approaches. We see a picture of her with kids and hear about her mom. We never see or hear anything about her partner, but everything about the context looks like she probably has or had one. Thus, we have a young, vulnerable, and highly responsible woman thinking aloud the Attack Arguments against a highly popular and likable Obama.

Please read over the WSJ article about this approach as a great practical lesson in How-To with attack ads. Also find the emerging tactics Rove appears to consider. (I say “appears” because Rove will set you up. More on that in a bit.) Right now Rove sees more risk in the standard attack ad and wants to stay in soft. Rove asserts that he won’t go hard negative with his attacks unless Obama starts it.

Several groups, including American Crossroads, said they were ready to shift tactics if the Obama campaign turned sharply negative in its attacks on Mr. Romney.

That’s manifestly untrue. It sounds good and fair like, “We’re trying to be nice, but the other guy went negative and we had to respond!” Rove is going to maneuver Obama into a corner and punish him with hard attack ads, but that will depend not upon Obama’s attack ads, but when Rove thinks he can put Obama in a corner. Quotes like the one above are a part of those Rove “appearances” where he seems to be speaking plainly, but actually has a persuasion play.

Rove has a strategy. In military terms, Rove has identified the Obama Centers of Gravity and Rove will reduce or neutralize them. Anyone with eyes can see that one major Center for Obama is that likability. Right now Rove is not trying to make Obama less likable; he’s trying to neutralize Obama’s popularity. When Rove makes these soft attacks, he punishes Obama who cannot defend himself with his likeability. Yeah, sure Obama will run a nuanced response ad with shots of him comforting women in nightgowns.

Rove also has a fabulous history of provoking opponents into dysPersuasion. You might recall John Kerry’s babbling caught live on tape, exclaiming that he voted for a bill before he voted against it.

Not to waffle, flip-flop, or talk out of all sides of your mouth no matter how subtle, nuanced, or inspired. Rove had a camera team follow Kerry to town hall meetings then plant questions about this specific legislation that Kerry had voted both ways on. After no luck on several tries, Kerry finally got tired and delivered the double-talk Rove desired.

No single message is decisive in a campaign as long and intense as the race for President. While we learn a persuasion lesson in this specific instance, it’s all part of a much larger plan that can shift with contingency and circumstance. You’ve got to admire Rove for attacking through the strength of an opponent.

An enthymeme is a persuasion syllogism. It deliberately omits key elements in the Major or Minor Premise to better ensure that you fall into the persuasion Conclusion. For example, read the first two paragraphs of this Paul Krugman article.

A few days ago, I read an authoritative-sounding paper in The American Economic Review, one of the leading journals in the field, arguing at length that the nation’s high unemployment rate had deep structural roots and wasn’t amenable to any quick solution. The author’s diagnosis was that the U.S. economy just wasn’t flexible enough to cope with rapid technological change. The paper was especially critical of programs like unemployment insurance, which it argued actually hurt workers because they reduced the incentive to adjust.

Right. Krugman is the Nobel-prize winning columnist for the New York Times. He knows his stuff about economics. He read this paper that proves our unemployment problems are structural and can’t be fixed quickly. Tah!

O.K., there’s something I didn’t tell you: The paper in question was published in June 1939. Just a few months later, World War II broke out, and the United States — though not yet at war itself — began a large military buildup, finally providing fiscal stimulus on a scale commensurate with the depth of the slump.

Do you see the enthymeme, easy, ripe, and luscious? Wanna fix unemployment? Start a World War!

When you write enthymemes that attack yourself, you don’t need an opponent.

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

I’m warning you.

(MoneyWatch) General Motors (GM) will cease running paid advertisements on Facebook, according to a source close to the situation who spoke to CBS MoneyWatch.com on condition of anonymity . . . The move by GM, the third-largest advertiser in the U.S., to back away from Facebook comes at an awkward time for the social network. Facebook is expected to go public on Friday in stock offering that could value the company at more than $100 billion.

Facebook is a Count that produces no Change. Get in on the morning of the 18th and out by the afternoon.

This is just a haphazard sampling, but with an Effect Size this Stupendous, even a focus group will demonstrate it. Start with a recent article about the Obama re-election effort.

CHICAGO — With a “chief scientist” specializing in consumer behavior, an “analytics department” monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab — Ping-Pong table and all.

Now, the popularity of hiring statisticians in business.

Arcane statistical analysis, the business of making sense of our growing data mountains, has become high tech’s hottest calling. There are billions of bytes generated daily, not just from the Internet but also from sciences like genetics and astronomy. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as product marketers, risk analysts, spies, natural philosophers and gamblers are all scouring the info, desperate to find a new angle on what makes us and the world tick. Computing has become cheap and available enough to process any number of formulas.

Finally, a scientific breakthrough for data mining.

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

You’ve read variations on the Big Numbers theme. There’s Truth in them thar Hills of Data and if you know how to Mine Them, you can Change the Other Guys, win elections, earn trillions, and sit at the Cool Table. Particularly among aspiring persuasion mavens, Big Numbers with Big Data and Big Statistics is the New New Thing. Since everyone is living in Web 2.0 everyone has torrents, tides, and tsunamis of information about Other Guys which has got to lead to Change. Right?

While there’s a ton of nuance in the answer to that question, the First Nuance for me is:

Numbers without Theory is just a million Monkeys at the Abacus.

Just as those monkeys at the typewriter won’t produce Shakespeare, neither will these monkeys at the abacus produce Fishbein and Aizen or Petty and Cacioppo or, to be more famous about it, Kahneman and Tversky. Yet, the New New Thing rush to Big Numbers pretends you can drop the theorist and as long as you have monkeys with degrees from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon armed with quantum computers, you can discover like Einstein.

You see my bias. I’m a theory guy and that reflects both my nature and nurture. Without a schematic, a blueprint, scribbles on a paper cocktail paper, you will not find Truth whether for elections, business, or science. Theory is the One Ring that binds all other Rings. And the better your Theory, the better everything else about your persuasion.

Sure, If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It. But remember.

Just Because You Can Count It, Doesn’t Mean You Can Change It.