Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

Today we quote persuasion scripture from, of all places, the Book of James from the New Testament.  I say to all with ears to hear, listen; all with eyes to see, read!

Let no man say when he is tempted, “I am tempted of God”: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.  James I, 13-14, KJV

Thus, endeth our listening and reading from scripture.

Now, to our persuasion lesson.

James claims that when people fail, they speak incorrectly, inaccurately, and untruthfully when they attribute their failure to God because God does not tempt anyone, believer or doubter.  Rather, James asserts that our failures are our own and that we speak correctly, accurately, and truthfully when we attribute our failures to ourselves.  Thus, when we are tempted with Evil, evil, or just plain cussedness, we cannot blame it on God or Satan or our little sister.  James tells us that God tells us, our virtue lies in our own hands.

I offer this Biblical lesson not to evangelize, but to point to human nature and persuasion.  Whether you believe, doubt, or are still shopping around, consider the human nature implied in this passage, written at least 2,000 years ago.  It employs a most common human attribute:  Attribution Theory.  How we explain causality – internal attributions to ourselves or external attributions to forces beyond us – drives our beliefs and actions.  And this powerful persuasion theory from social psychology is old, deep, and wide.  It is not simply a creative invention of a clever researcher.  It is understood and implied in the oldest of texts from human civilization.

Yet, realize that Attribution Theory eluded systematic analysis and development for a very long time.  Even Aristotle, probably the first mind in Western Civilization to think scientifically about “cause,” missed the human misuses of it; perhaps it was too obvious for his comment?  We have to move over two millenia from 350BC to 1958AD and Fritz Heider’s examination before we get an analysis more systematic than this fragment from James.  Of course, Heider does not cite Aristotle or the other silent Ancients.  He notes Sartre whose bitter external attribution -  Hell is other people – may be the greatest and most beautiful rationalization, oops, external attribution, in recorded literature.

But, Heider does not cite James.  And, not because Heider doesn’t cast a wide net with his references.  He reads and cites the Works of Epictetus, that ancient Greek Stoic, and Marcel Proust’s epic novel cycle and variable-titled series,”À la Recherche Du Temps Perdu translated as In Search of Lost Time, and sometimes, Remembrance of Things Past.  Heider read past the gang of usual suspects in his meditation of Attribution.  But he didn’t read and cite James.

Which, as you can see from our fragment, is unfortunate because James in two sentences explains the foundations of a theory and our human nature.