Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

From the movie, “The Jerk” by Steve Martin.

With the release of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Persuasion on April 7, 2009, I’m starting to feel like Narvin R. Johnson and that exhuberant joy of seeing your name in print.  Yippee!!!

I googled up the title today and found ninety-six, 96, that’s 50+46 listings of online book sellers for the book.  Wow!  That’s the kind of spontaneous publicity . . .

More surprising to me is the foreign language listings – Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese among others.  Hey, spontaneous INTERNATIONAL publicity!

This is just pure joy right now.  All eager anticipation with none of the bitter disappointment experience may bring.  The external Spring; that sweet delay between the moment you pop the question and before she replies; the delightful instant of the crack of the bat when you really get a hold of one, yet before it sails foul; yep, I’m in the sweet spot of optimism, possibility, and joy.

Recently the New York Times reporter John Tierney ran an excellent story based upon a published scientific review of the relationship between self control and religion.  The journal, Psychological Bulletin, published this review and Tierney included a pdf of the article so that readers could go to the original source rather than just take Tierney’s word for it.  (Amen to that practice.)  Briefly, the review paper found that conventional religious beliefs, especially from a Judeo-Christian background, helped people demonstrate more self control across a wide variety of situation and issues compared to people who did not hold religious beliefs in general.  Stated another way, religious people have better self control than those who are not religious.

What interested me most from a persuasion perspective was not Tierney’s well written and very accurate story on the research paper or even the research paper itself.  Rather the persuasion angle for me was the incredible mine of biased processing found in the reader comments to Tierney’s article.  (You’ll recall that biased processing is a high WATT evaluation of arguments that aims at making those arguments fit an existing belief or schema rather than following the arguments to a “relatively objective” conclusion.  Thus, a biased processor is really thinking about the persuasive issue  and is not taking a cue based, peripheral route approach. )

If you scan over the reader comments you find example after example of biased processing. To date Tierney’s story accumulated 200 comments and it appears that virtually no one who commented read carefully either Tierney’s story or the original research report Tierney linked.  Comments show that readers supply their own meanings for key terms like “religious” or “self control” that were not in Tierney’s story or the original report.  Or because a reader’s personal experience is at variance with the general conclusion (“I’m not religious, but I have self control!” or “My dad was religious but he was an unreliable louse!”) they argue that Tierney’s report or the original review is wrong.

Make sure you catch the point here.  I’m not arguing for a particular Truth or conclusion or science, but rather observing the comments for how they are processing the information in the story.  And, overwhelmingly, these NYT commenters demonstrate the prime qualities of biased processing:  high WATT, effortful, that long conversation in the head on the issue; but, the high WATT effort is aimed at making the “data” (the story and the review paper) fit an existing set of beliefs or positions rather than objectively following the “data.”

And, just to head off potential misconceptions, I’m not saying any of the commentors are stupid, mean, or evil.  Each of them probably could easily shift to objective, central route processing of the Tierney story and follow the information where it goes.  And doing so would not necessarily change anyone’s opinion