Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

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.

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate for US Senate in Massachusetts, is getting stomped over her careless handling of her ethnic heritage.  Warren reports a family history with an honorable Native American in the past . . . somewhere back there.  Documentation is available to indicate a 1/32 trace which is faint mark in that column for the US Census report.  Even Democrat allies like Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, are ripping Warren.

 “There’s nobody watching this that doesn’t think she’s in big trouble,” one well-known Massachusetts Democrat said.  Joe Trippi, a prominent national Democratic consultant, told the Herald that while Warren has time to recover, the campaign should have anticipated this issue would surface.  “The problem is they weren’t ready for something they should have been ahead of,” Trippi said.

And Warren isn’t helping with defensive comments about her ethnicity focused on stereotyped facial features of Native Americans.

I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that – a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he – her father, my Papaw — had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do.

You can imagine George W. Bush saying that and the firestorm of derision and outrage it would trigger.  Warren evades some of that criticism, but not enough of it.  This clearly hurts her campaign.

But – and this is the persuasion lesson – it’s May and the election is in November.  While this is a bad error from Warren, it is better understood as a persuasion test.  How does she persuade past this?  She’s got over six months to repair the damage of this particular incident and fix the problem Joe Trippi alludes to.  She should not have gotten hit like this and more importantly she should have reacted better than she has.  The failure marks her persuasion weaknesses, but she can fix it if she is a persuasion maven.

Warren typically gets high marks for her earnest Sincerity as both a Harvard professor and a defender of the financial interest of everyday people.  Since All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere and she’s going to need a lot of persuasion to beat Senator Scott Brown, you can mark her persuasion skill in the coming months with how well she learns to pose Authentically while moving Persuasively.

Let’s feel the need, the need for speed (YouTube).

Consider speed as WATTage switch.

Thirty-six university students were randomly assigned to read aloud a series of one-sentence statements of trivia (e.g., “A pilot light continually remains lit in a gas stove”; “In ring toss, players throw a ‘hoop’ over a ‘peg’”). The statements were presented on a computer monitor at either a fast pace (40 ms per letter with 320-ms intervals between sentences; i.e., about half the normal reading speed for this population) or a slow pace (170 ms per letter with 4,000-ms intervals between sentences; i.e., about twice the normal reading speed for this population.

Read aloud Fast or read aloud Slow. Then.

Participants then completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; adapted from Lejuez et al., 2002), a behavioral measure of risk taking. In the task, participants inflate a number of computer-simulated balloons one at a time by clicking a pump. Participants control how much they inflate a given balloon by choosing how many times they pump it up; with each pump, the balloon becomes further inflated, and 5¢ is placed in a bank. If a balloon is pumped too many times, it bursts, and the participant loses the contents of the bank. Participants can stop pumping a balloon at any time and lock in the gains earned for that balloon. All participants followed this procedure for 18 different balloons and were allowed to keep all the money they earned during the experiment.

This task is more fun when you have a real pump and real balloons that explode in your face, but even the computer simulation provides sufficient excitement. So, we’ve got Speed and Risk. What happens?

Participants who were induced to read quickly reported faster thought speed (M = 6.05, SD = 1.84) than did participants who were induced to read slowly (M = 4.71, SD = 1.72), F(1, 34) = 5.10, p = .03, ηp2 = .13. In addition, participants who were induced to think quickly rather than slowly took more risks, as indicated by the average number of times they pumped each balloon, regardless of whether the balloon ultimately burst (fast condition: M = 21.82, SD = 5.14; slow condition: M = 17.16, SD = 5.96), F(1, 34) = 5.19, p = .03, ηp2 = .13.

These are Medium effect sizes, Windowpanes around 35/65, so they are obvious and practical. You’d know who was in which group. As interestingly, Speed Readers burst more balloons and delivered more pumps on balloons that didn’t burst. Both reader groups earned the same amount of money, but the Speed Readers had much greater variance with more failures, but bigger successes because they pushed the balloon to the limit, thus winning more money than the other guys who quit sooner.

While this research clearly points at risk-taking, I want to point out the WATTage play at work here. Speed of thinking manipulates WATTage and produces what appears here to be a Peripheral Route response. People do not engage that Long Conversation in the Head with a thoughtful consideration of all the relevant Arguments. Instead they fly along chasing Cues related to speed – rapid, fast, quick, nimble, zooming – in their pursuit of money. You see yet another reason for people’s mistrust of Fast Talkers; They draw you in and mess with your mind.

Thus, as corny as it sounds, Fast Talking can generate that Need For Speed which then trips Other Guys down the Peripheral Route for your further manipulation. If you want the Other Guy to get risky, Fast Talk or for certain get Them to Fast Think. If you want the Other Guy to miss flaws and weaknesses, Fast Talk. Get nuanced. If the Other Guys are unchangeable cautious, Fast Talk what you DON’T want them to do. And, finally, realize that you can make the Need For Speed Play with a technological device (geez, imagine how you can manipulate this on a website) or face to face.

Jesse J. Chandler and Emily Pronin.
Fast Thought Speed Induces Risk Taking
Published online before print March 5, 2012,
Psychological Science March 5, 2012

doi: 10.1177/0956797611431464

P.S. Top Gun was the first movie to make me feel my age. Recall the love scene with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. They are listening to Sitting on the Dock of the Bay. I’m grooving to the music, remembering it Back in the Day. Then Cruise says, “I remember my parents listening to that song.” Until then I’d identified with the Cruise character and after that I realized I had a son. A very short son.

The New York Times continues the Adoration of Zuckerberg in a Sunday Review profile of the Facebook CEO. You know they launch an IPO on May 18, doncha? And, in case you’ve forgotten just how great Zuckerberg is, nearly a child genius you could say, you need to read the profile. Might help with your investment decision.

Among the many heroic attributes the profile reveals, the close is the best.

On some evenings, as dusk falls in Menlo Park, Mr. Zuckerberg and a small circle of his lieutenants play roller hockey, and maybe knock back a beer or two, outside Facebook’s headquarters. The game is a relatively recent arrival there, although Mr. Zuckerberg has played it since his boyhood in Dobbs Ferry. Out in the courtyard, the crew — almost all of them men, almost all in their 20s — hoot and skate until it is almost too dark to see much of anything. Across the courtyard floor, giant black tiles spell out the word “hack.” They’ve nicknamed their rink “Hack Stadium.”

Roller hockey. Men . . . in their twenties. Counts like a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. You learn a lot about a leader when he’s in a fire fight around the net.

The Facebook boys and their captain, Mark Zuckerberg, skate hard. They line up shots with care. And they play to win.

Okay, mavens, this is PR Hack 101 and it serves its purpose. Burnish the brand in front of a potential $100 billion payday. And, if you can get enough Other Guys to put out on May 18 with ridiculous prose like this then that’s what you do. A small price to pay for success.

I have no idea how well the IPO will float, but I sit slack jawed at the persuasion lessons behind it. Facebook is a PT Barnum play and still proves there’s a sucker born every minute. Jeepers. I’m not even sure this is persuasion.

And I don’t care what anyone else thinks or says. No way the NYT has money riding on this. No way.

A marketing company shares what it considers the most effective print ads of the year. Through a proprietary formula, the agency quantitatively rates thousands of print ads, then presents the best 10 of the year. You can visit the 2011 ads then the 2008 for a comparison.

As I look over these Top 10s I am at a loss to explain why these are rated as Great compared to all the other ads. Of course, we don’t have the Bottom 10 ads as a comparison and that might help, but this exercise reveals the problems with assessing persuasion.

Maybe you’re the maven after all and you can explain why these ads are Top 10 and others that look the same and ran in the same contexts aren’t. I can’t.

Start with my Rule: There Are No Laws of Persuasion and If There Were, Why Would Anyone Tell You.

Stated another way. If you do know the Laws that allow you to understand these Top 10 ads, then you are the Queen of Tomorrow.