You think you’re smart.  Handle this.

The Obama administration is wrestling with the thorny question of whether scientists should inject healthy children with the anthrax vaccine to see whether the shots would safely protect them against a bioterrorism attack.

You remember anthrax.  Some knucklehead released that hound from hell in 2001 shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks demonstrating yet another weapon of mass destruction.  We’ve got a vaccine for anthrax that works pretty well with adults, but we don’t know about kids.  Consider these sequential practical persuasion problems.

1.  Persuade parents to volunteer their healthy kids right now before an attack.

2.  Wait until an attack then persuade parents why we didn’t test the vaccine on kids before and why we don’t know right now what will happen to their kids if they get the vaccine.

Don’t you just love the ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk?  This is just one more reason why academic research is sometimes so prissy.  You can avoid the consequences of situations like this; shootfire, you don’t even have to think about them much more than reading this blog post.  By contrast, if you’re in the Fed, you’ve got to deal with these terrible choices as an unavoidable part of your work.  If you think you’ve got the science to handle this, I’ve got a job for you!

Think about the dissonance properties for the scientists actually facing these choices.  You’re supposed to be smart and figure it out, but there are no correct answers and no matter what you decide you can be sure that the reality, when it arises, will play out differently than you expected.  But, you nonetheless made a thoughtful and deliberate choice that will nonetheless find aversive consequences.  That puts you on the dissonance path.  Dissonance reduction will then tuck you tighter to your earlier decisions, making it that much more difficult to see your failures and how to change.

And, of course, during all of this you are still trying to change the Other Guys, all those parents to either risk their kid now or to accept your refusal to test before the attack.  Jeepers, persuasion is hard enough when you only worry about what you are doing to the Other Guys without the situation doing something to you.

There Are No Laws of Persuasion.

But, sometimes you’ve still got to do it and be effective.

Consider this.

The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi-automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.

This from the DARPA solicitation, DARPA-BAA-11-64, with an initial close of August 11, 2011.  If you think you can play in this game, read more about it.

DARPA, unlike most Social Media 2.0 operations, does not blow smoke or turn mirrors on observers to distort their vision.  DARPA aims at winning wars, real wars, not those sissy PR backstabber Facebook games, but winning against real bodies in real time.

This call reveals quite a bit.  Just that one line . . . develop automated and semi-automated . . . strongly suggests that DARPA and DoD are running persuasion engines right now in other applications.  Even as advanced as DARPA tends to be they don’t describe program calls for flying saucers.  So, somebody’s got a computer program that minimally functions as what I’d call a Persuasion Engine.

As I continue to read the tea leaves, I note the absence of concepts for Self-Learning, which means they’ve got Engines that operate on static principles and do not incorporate a feedback mechanism to alter program response on the fly.  Thus, the thing operates on a bunch of IF-THEN rules, but doesn’t have any capacity to learn with those rules.

I’d also note that while the call describes dynamic observation and response, the program still operates at a fairly high level of abstraction.  It does not target a specific person in real time, but rather appears to sweep across a wide array of information sources to discern changes at an on-going population level.  Thus, this program is aimed at the formative stage of a persuasion campaign where you understand the available means of influence.

The interesting tension here will occur between Psychology and Electrical Engineering.  The EE guys will build the hardware and software and will follow computational and information science.  If you can’t do this, you only have a clever idea.  However, if you don’t have Psychology, you’re left with only a clever machine that doesn’t do much more than pour a cup of coffee when you clap your hands.

The trick here is not in the hardware or the software, but in the theory that drives it all. While I suspect that these mechanics aren’t saying everything they know, what they do say in public tends to be theoretically simple, traditional, old-fashioned.  Comparisons to the Health and Safety Cool Table are useful here. They’re still doing Health Beliefs with perhaps some Special Sauce on the side they’re not talking about publicly, but it’s still pretty much Your Father’s Oldsmobile with Batmobile pretensions. I don’t think the DoD and Beltway Bandit Cool Table is both more advanced and more deceptive. Of course, I’ve got a lot of self esteem riding on that hypothesis, so buyer beware.

To the Main Point. A persuasion engine requires the hardware and software, but without the theory it’s just going to sit there and require a lot of resource to produce about the same result as ten minutes of thoughtful reflection. You might get someone to finance version 1.0 on this, but unless your Daddy Is Rich or your Momma’s Good Looking, 2.0 is a dream. You need a theory beyond those crazed, mathed up data mining extravaganzas you typically find. Math and a dataset of a billion points will not provide the same insight that something like the Theory of Planned Behavior or the Social Cognitive Model does.

Closely related is operationalization. Military readers might see this as part of the tripartite Strategy-Operations-Tactics, but Humpty Dumpty uses words differently on the Persuasion Blog. Operationalization here means how you translate a huge stream of twitter feeds into Easy, Fun, and Popular. Try this. Look at Pennebaker’s work with emotion words and his software solution. Sure, you can take this and screw yourself into the ground in most embarrassing fashion, but properly done just build a library of words for each concepts, run the feed through that library, then see what you get. Refine. Refine again. Combine this with an understanding of TpB and you are wildly more dangerous than any data miner.

Finally.

Another problem here is that a persuasion engine will never go Bang! and kill a bad guy. Any fatal effects will be far downstream and always require another mechanic holding either a rifle or a laser designator or the next DARPA invention. And since they are the ones taking the Ultimate Risk, guess who’s explanation will carry more weight. Build the greatest persuasion engine known to Man, Woman, or the Persuasion Blog and you’ve still got to convince the commanding General that, yeah, we did it. A daunting standard of proof.

But, think about using persuasion principles to both discern the strategy of the Bad Other Guys as well as to change actively the way Other Guys think, feel, and act. You don’t have to dream of the Queen of Tomorrow to understand those possibilities.

Ripped from the Headlines.

Oregon Cops Hope Classical Music Deters Loiterers

What?

The whole project was brought to Portland by police Lt. John Scruggs, a stats-happy former neighborhood sergeant who heard of the program working in other cities and thought it was worth a try.  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s crime prevention through environmental design.  If you put rose bushes in front of your bedroom window, the burglar is less likely to break in through that window because they don’t want to get cut up.”

You can call it “environmental design” if you like, but in persuasion terms it is a straightforward application of Reinforcement Theory.  Classical music is an aversive consequence for many people, particularly in the age and aspirational demographic the police officer worries most about.  A little touch of Ludwig seems to do the trick.

Always remember that Reinforcement operates on function not content.  Whether a particular stimulus is a reward or a punishment tells you more about the Other Guy than the music.

We’ve considered propaganda before.  Here’s what the US Department of War said about propaganda back during World War II.

It’s still worth reading today, mavens.  Check it out:  AHA War Dept Propaganda (4 meg pdf)

It is an enduring conceit of intelligent people to see beyond the obvious and find the deeper mechanism and meaning, especially when it involves the New New Thing.  Right now, otherwise bright (and not so bright) people believe that Social Media is the sun we’re walking into after our life chained in Plato’s cave.  If you’ve been tracking the Arab Spring, you’ve seen the knowing looks at Facebook and twitter as key causes for the revolts in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and, who knows, an Arab Street near you!  (Or is it the Arab Street when you’re shouting about that idiot George W. Bush?  I guess it becomes the Arab Spring when the American military is merely out of sight but not out of mind or out of reach.  Is it Facebook causes Good Revolution or is it Facebook plus the 10th Mountain Division next door?)

You can read this pleased Atlantic column and the equally pleased link it provides to see the conceit in full flower.  Jeepers, the headline tells you everything you need to know.

So, Was Facebook Responsible for the Arab Spring After All?

The author offers a winding narrative of loosely connected details that make Facebook the Swiss Army knife of nonviolent Arab revolution while avoiding any serious thought.  She notes two anonymous Arab organizers who started in Tunisia in the late 1990s, observes several of their social media efforts, and arrives at the conclusion, Facebook Revolts!

While young and inexperienced people always think their revolution is the first and greatest revolution, more interesting here than youthful silliness is the fascination with media channels.  “Now we have tin cans and long pieces of string.  This.  Changes.  Everything!”  I always find it reassuring to read the Payne Fund studies from the 1930s that stared in awestruck wonder at the new medium of that time:  Movies!  Let’s hit the Fast Forward button less than 100 years and you get the same kind of breathless thinking about twitter.

The flaw in Facebook Changes Everything is obvious in my earlier notation about the looming presence of the American military in the Middle East.  No Arab bully, dictator, or charismatic can sleep at night without wondering whether SEAL Team 6 might deliver a little touch of democracy in the night, closely followed by a thunder run from a squadron of US main battle tanks at dawn.  Those who thought Obama a soft touch are now awakened to the fact that Hope and Change actually means Cairo, Tripoli, or Damascus more than it does Cleveland, Atlanta, or Los Angeles.  Obama is pretty much your Father’s Oldsmobile when it comes to military exercises in the desert.

That, and Facebook, of course!