From The Gothowitz Deviation episode of The Big Bang.

Leonard Hofstadter: OK I know what you are doing.
Sheldon Cooper: Really?
Leonard Hofstadter: Yes, you’re using chocolates as positive reinforcement for what you consider correct behavior.
Sheldon Cooper: Very good. Chocolate?
Leonard Hofstadter: No, I don’t want any chocolate! Sheldon, you can’t train my girlfriend like a lab rat.

Watch a clip (YouTube video) for action details. But listen carefully for the Persuasion Maven test in Sheldon’s terminology in the clip.

Did you spot it? They make the standard error with the terms of Positive and Negative Rf.  Sheldon calls chocolate a Positive Rf and shot of mild electric shock or a spritz of cold mist water a Negative Rf.  Sigh.  Mavens spot the raccoon here.

What Sheldon means is either a Reward (which increases a behavior) or a Punisher (which decreases a behavior).  Positive and Negative as explained in this Post refer to turning on or turning off a reinforcer.  A Positive Rf could provide either chocolate or a shock.  A Negative Rf would take away the chocolate or turn off the shock.  Thus, a Negative Rf like turning off an unavoidable shock could be a Rewarding Consequence that increases the behavior.  Sorry.

Past my own Big Bangery . . . it could work!

P.S. Remember when you figured this out:

Sheldon Cooper: Interesting. Sex works even better than chocolate to modify behavior. I wonder if anyone else has stumbled onto that?

For those of a certain age, the experience of mass media appeared monolithic. In the Golden Age of the 1950s through the 1970s a small number of media sources whether print or broadcast drew stupendously large audiences of Other Guys. We knew a time when 50 million people were watching weekly the same episode of I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke or All In The Family or Ed Sullivan. Media stars looked omnipotent.

Today, we can see our illusion. Our destiny was never in those Stars, but in Their technology. If you owned a megaphone – rare, expensive, technical – you made the Stars. Now, with iGizmos and Internet connectivity, anyone can be a Star. See this in only the latest example: Oprah Winfrey.

About 1.1 million people watched Oprah Winfrey’s return to the talk-show format Sunday night, the second largest audience for any show on her year-old cable network OWN. But that audience was a fraction of the 6.5 million viewers Ms. Winfrey averaged in the final season of her daytime show on broadcast television, and it dwarfed most of what has been on OWN so far.

Notice several statistics related to the Reception stage of the Cascade with Winfrey. First, her premiere episode her OWN cable network attracted 1 million viewers. Second, her old show on a broadcast network averaged over 6 million. Third, her famous old show wasn’t close to the big number from the Golden Age. In the Winfrey’s declining audience share of Other Guys you see the fragmenting effects of new technologies. As more people acquire the new megaphone, the audience share declines for any one medium (the tech device), vehicle (type of programming), or show (specific titles). Technology drives the change in communication and persuasion.

This creates wonderful and interesting opportunities for persuasion mavens. To reach an old fashioned mass audience of hundreds of millions of Other Guys, you need to be more creative and thoughtful in your persuasion efforts. No one yet has seemed to master the new mediascape for getting that old school huge audience. Sure, some folks, with Hollywood as the great example, can mount a global push for one new movie for a month, but notice how specific and ephemeral the change here. The kind of imperialism that once seemed both inherent and eternal in American media is reduced to petty fiefs clamoring for attention – primitives playing as sophisticates.

For the next 10 to 20 years, you will live in a fragmented and diverse media message environment. Then, inevitably, you will see the move to concentration in media sources as a few mavens buy, destroy, or swallow other sources to create a few branded and controlled individual networks achieving again a new kind of Golden Media Age like Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s and TV in those beloved 50s to 70s. Mavens abhor competition.

Thus, fragmentation gives and takes away. It is easier to get into the media game, giving anyone and everyone a shot at being a kind of Idol, no matter how briefly. But, your Reception will exceed your Reach and you will not achieve that massive impact we once knew.

You will be an Idol of the village, but not of the Global Village.

You’ve probably read the books or seen the great Matt Damon movie, so you know the Talented Mr. Ripley.  Ripley is an earnest, eager, and bright young man who understands Attribution Theory.  He seizes what the Local gives him then from that Box he constructs an Attribution Play to move the Other Guys minds where Ripley wants them to go.

Consider this honestly dishonest example (YouTube).  Ripley is earning the friendship of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow).  They are playing the getting to know you game of What Are You Good At?  Marge goes first.  Then Tom Ripley.

Within the context of a social game and Getting To Know You, Ripley appears to be playing along in the appropriate ironic way by speaking poorly of himself and his social skills.  Rather than saying he’s polite, restrained, and interested in other people, he calls himself a liar, a fraud, and an impersonator.  To a spoiled rich kid like Dickie Greenleaf this is jazz music jarring against the conventions of the 1950s, the time of the story.  Ripley’s in like Flynn with Dickie.

Yet, Ripley’s description is a true disclosure and not a jazz riff for Dickie’s entertainment.  Ripley lies, pilfers, and steals identities.  He is Oscar Wilde’s perfect persuader who employs persuasion inSincerity with personal Sincerity in his persuasion and his crimes.

Ripley’s adventure begins with misAttribution, deliberately provoked.  Ripley accompanies a lovely soprano singing a classical aria at a wedding of filthy rich people.  An older woman compliments Ripley on his artful accompaniment and the older man with her remarks on Ripley’s blue blazer and its Princeton crest.  The old man blathers on as people do in these bustling social events about Did You Go To Princeton, and Do You Know My Son, Dickie, and the Talented Mr. Ripley, the bright, earnest, and eager young man in the presence of great wealth and older men, merely smiles and nods a broad toothy grin, saying nothing, but only listening attentively.

The older man makes the Attribution and gives Mr. Ripley all the benefits of a blue blazer and a Princeton crest.  Ripley earns an invitation to visit the older, wealth man, a titan of 1950 industry and the Attribution Arrow has found its mark.  Immediately later we see Ripley running down a Manhattan avenue tearing off the blazer and handing it back to a young man in a car with a cast on his broken right arm.  Beside him is the soprano.  The young man thanks Ripley for filling in for him on such short notice and Ripley thanks the young man for the use of the blue blazer with the Princeton crest.

The remainder of the movie dazzles a persuasion maven with deft and quick applications of Attribution.  Ripley always understands how the Other Guy is thinking and Attributing which is only another way of saying Explaining.  Ripley merely restates an earlier observation the Other Guy made to mislead into a misAttribution of intent, cause, or outcome.  He polishes the restatement with simple smiles, head indications, grimaces, gestures, and sighs.  He lies rarely and only when no Attribution Play will work.

Ripley reveals his master’s understanding of human nature, thinking, and persuasion in this poignant scene with the first person he’s found who he can love and who loves him back.  They are discussing the crimes of Dickie and Freddie and the wasted living and lives of the Rich Set.  Ripley’s love asks how it is possible to do terrible things, yet carry on.  Ripley reveals.

Sure, it’s fiction but just as All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere, so too with All Bad Poetry and we can study either for the illumination of the other whether Good or Bad.  Recall another fictional persuasion maven, Dexter.  Again note how persuasion skill applies in the service of high functioning serial killers.

Exactly what this means for persuasion theory and practice, I do not say.

I’ll let you explain it.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, V. Behavior.

Fearless intelligence finds Emerson’s Egg in all pursuits.  For example, did you know that someone saved the Truth?

Among the works that survived — but only just — is one so beautifully written and so uncannily prescient that it seems to come to us out of a personal dream.  Titus Lucretius Carus’ “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” is a 7,400-line poem in Latin hexameters written in the first century B.C. It covers philosophy, physics, optics, cosmology, sociology, psychology, religion and sex; the ideas in it influenced Newton and Darwin, among others.  Yet Lucretius almost went the way of Didymus.  In “The Swerve,” the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why his book nearly died, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us.

You see the fearless intelligence that finds the truth in fragments linked in a golden bond only someone with Emerson’s intelligence can see.  But for a few Brights scattering throughout History, our world would not exist, most particularly the swerving Stephen Greenblatt, but along the way, the most delightful Michel de Montaigne and his Essays.

Really.

There is a reason for it all and Emerson’s Egg points to it.

Science is boring, tedious, and disconfirming work, the slow accumulation of pieces for a puzzle that is never quite complete and just when you think you’ve solved it, your science will find new pieces that don’t fit, and more interesting still, will suggest a new puzzle.  Thus, whenever you read a description of science that is complete, triumphant, and exalted, you can be certain the description is not of science, but only seeks to persuade you of science.  Consider this point in, of all sciences, history.

Of course, history is not like physics, molecular genetics, or even persuasion, but you can pursue history with a scientific method that values the accumulation of pieces over the quick and easy completion of the puzzle.  But, that don’t feed the bulldog which accounts for persuasive histories that have no science, but sell better as described in this review.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto provides an entertaining and penetrating analysis of four recent histories aimed at the Age of Exploration with a focus upon Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and John Cabot.  The four histories are good reads, but . . .

Shallow thinking gets our authors into deep water. Ms. Delaney is simply mistaken in her basic assumptions: The Middle Ages were no “age of faith” but were full of secular values as well as religious ones. There is no evidence that Columbus was particularly religious until—like so many people—he turned to God following the failure of his worldly ambitions. Mr. Cliff’s never-ending war between Christendom and Islam is a figment of contemporary imaginations: In reality, the violence that historical writers so love was intermittent between civilizations more usually in collaboration than conflict. Mr. Hunter’s striking suggestion that John Cabot (who was a Venetian, Giovanni Caboto) was actually with Columbus on his second voyage is a valueless speculation unsupported by any acceptable evidence. Mr. Bergreen’s conclusion that “Columbus forever changed the idea of what a European empire could be” has no direct relationship with any idea Columbus ever expressed and bears no relation to the rest of his book, which has little to do with comparing empires before or since.

Fernandez-Armesto provides more details of the scientific failures of each book and also thoughtfully provides more rigorous alternatives for each book he criticizes.  What I find interesting is Fernandez-Armesto explanation for these books.

Academic historians tend to welcome recruits from other ranks, like owls nurturing cuckoos, and applaud the intrusions of neophytes with a glee that physicians, say, would never show for faith-healers or snake-oil salesmen. I am afraid it is time for historians to wipe the smiles from our jaws and start biting back. If escape from the poverty of your own imagination is your reason for exploiting the stories history offers, or if you are taking refuge from another discipline in the belief that history is easy, without bothering to do the basic work, you will deserve to fail.

Huzzah!  I couldn’t agree more and would apply the same argument to other fields.  Scientists in all fields do not police the standards of their professions and allow pretenders to play in public . . . I’m not a doctor, but I play one at University and the only pill I recommend is . . .

Yet, I think there’s a deeper cause that is the solution to its own problem.  Democracy and science are antipodes.  Science is the loner’s game, the true Army of One, that doesn’t give a hoot in hell or a tinker’s dam about what any or all Other Guys think.  Democracy, by contrast, is the ultimate group game that invites all players and factions together at the Table of Brotherhood in a rule-bound game of give and take.  Science never tolerates Democracy and could not survive with it.  Democracy run like Science becomes the Dictatorship of the Truth and brooks competing voices.

You may have a different take on the tensions here, but I think you’d enjoy reading Fernandez-Armesto’s bright and beautiful review! I’ll close with his opening.

History is the people’s discipline—the only academic subject that demands no special professional training. Some of my favorite history books are by lawyers, journalists, scientists and nuns. To write well about history you do not need a Ph.D., just a few rare but accessible qualities: insatiable curiosity, critical intellect, disciplined imagination, indefatigability in the pursuit of truth and a slightly weird vocation for trying to get to know dead people by studying the sources they have left us.

Affirmation!  Then persuasion!