Ignore that man behind the curtain!

My experience as the persuasion guy on health and safety projects quickly taught me to understand as well as I could the basic science behind any intervention I served.  Part of that drive to knowledge was due to my unfortunate temperament that compels a ceaseless need to think about everything.  The bigger part, however, came from getting burned by zealots parading as scientists who fooled me into thinking they had a Big TACT when all they had was either a Big Heart or a Big Ego.  When you work in health and safety, you need to know the difference because you can waste limited resources feeding a fool rather than Changing the World.  Consider this great example of plain old science.

A team of researchers took a sample of 99 zebra finches born from randomly paired adult birds in a captive population at a research facility.  These 99 birds were then tracked from hatchlings to the natural end of their lives.  Along the way this team studied the impact of diet and reproduction in one experiment, then kept the birds in safe cages until all naturally died.  They waited 9 years.  Throughout the study period, the researchers regularly took blood samples from each bird and measured the length of telomeres.  I suspect you know as much about telomeres as I do, so you’ll appreciate an expert quotation rather than Sayings from Chairman Steve.

Telomeres are highly conserved, noncoding, repetitive sequences of DNA that, together with a number of shelterin proteins, form caps at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, enabling chromosome ends to be distinguished from double-stranded breaks (3). In the absence of restoration, telomeres shorten during each round of normal somatic cell division because RNA polymerase cannot completely replicate the lagging strand (3, 4). The loss of DNA from the telomeric cap protects the coding sequences from attrition and also limits cell replicative potential; once telomeres reach a critically shortened length, cells stop dividing and enter a state of replicative senescence (3, 5).

Telomeres are DNA contents that play a role in aging.  As cells replicate normally across the lifespan, telomeres get shorter until they lose their protective function and the cells stop working.  That’s basically why after a certain age you can’t touch your toes, eat or drink like you did, or remember where you put your keys.  The telomeres run out which starts a cascade of change leading to cell death.  The interesting question here is just how important telomeres are to the lifespan.  The zebra finch study provides insight.

There was a highly significant relationship between early life telomere length and longevity: individuals that had longer telomeres at 25 d had a significantly longer lifespan (F1, 86.11 = 16.75, P < 0.001, Fig. 3).

You can translate the F = 16.75 into an effect size and you get a Large Windowpane of nearly 20/80.  Birds born with longer telomere sequences through 25 days lived a lot longer than birds with shorter sequences.  It’s also interesting to note that the length difference in telomeres exists at very young ages and does not carry over across the adult life span.

Telomere length declined with age (F [5, 158.92] = 20.92, P < 0.001), with loss being most marked during the first year (Fig. 1).

I cannot compute an effect size from this test, but the magnitude is not Small.  Here’s a graph to illustrate it.

This suggests that if we can do anything to affect telomere size or depletion, we better do it young.  If ever there was an interesting and potentially useful area for More Research, this must be it.

Let’s consider now longer life.  Assuming that our cells are like zebra finch cells and that a telomere is a telomere is a telomere, it’s apparent that the cards you are dealt determines the hand you can play at a Large Windowpane.  Now, contrast that against all the various Fairy Tale effects from the Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps.  As I’ve frequently noted in the Persuasion Blog, people will cry out for a Change that isn’t even Small, yet something that requires Congressional action.  Call this the Mallomar Redemption.  Make laws about diet to Save the World.

Now, contrast the Mallomar Redemption with the Telomere Limit.  A variety of well done lab studies creates a growing research literature that documents the Very Large impact of the factor.  For now, the operation of telomeres is not widely understood and we certainly are forever and a day away from the pill.  But, for now we can usefully quote Shakespeare, ” . . . the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves . . . ”

See the feeble and foolish attempt to change telomeres with mallomars, as if we can affect this DNA function with broccoli and bean sprouts.

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple.

Today’s persuasion lesson comes to us from the Bard of Canada, Gordon Lightfoot, and his musical consideration of love, lust, and mistrust, and how they combine into dissonance with Sundown (YouTube video). The song, Sundown, is about the woman a man cannot resist even though he knows better.

I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping ’round my back stairs

Sundown is probably not the name of the Woman – what Siren in a satin dress would creep anywhere or anytime – but most likely is another man in pursuit of the unnamed Woman who is loved by the Narrator of the song. If Sundown is another man, not the Narrator, we realize that the Woman in the satin dress has been with Sundown doing what should not be confessed to the Narrator. Sundown comes creeping ’round the back stairs of the Narrator’s place. We’ve got the classic love triangle with the Woman cheating on the Narrator with Sundown.

The Narrator now reminds us of how desirable the Woman is and more importantly of Her persuasion skills.

She’s been looking like a queen in a sailor’s dream
And she don’t always say what she really means

The Woman is irresistible. She’s also inSincere and persuasive which leads to aversive consequences for the Narrator: Other men, like Sundown, come creeping around back stairs finding the Woman in her satin dress. This leads to our persuasion lesson.

Sometimes I think it’s a sin
When I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again

That lyric is a poetic way to describe dissonance and its reduction. When things get worse and yet you feel better, you’re in the throes of dissonance. Or as Lightfoot puts it:

I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again.

He loves and wants the Woman all the more even though She is cheating on the Narrator with Sundown. What seals this interpretation is the repeated refrain.

Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping ’round my back stairs

If the Narrator did not love the Queen in the Satin Dress, then Sundown could visit Her through the front door. Yet the Narrator warns Sundown about creeping at the back stairs. The Narrator is wary, alert, and vigilant which means He loves the Woman. We know this from:

I can picture every move a man can make
Getting lost in her loving is his first mistake

Perhaps the Narrator realizes that Sundown loves the Woman as much as He does. But the Narrator’s love for Her drives dissonance – I want what gives me pain – and leads to the pursuit of dissonance reduction. The more the Narrator suspects He is losing (He fails to catch Sundown), He feels like He’s winning (He loves the Woman even more and redoubles his wary watch).

Dissonance proves why Peithos sat as the handmaiden to Aphrodite in Greek mythology. Sometimes the persuasion is as obvious as arguing for the bigger dowry in an arranged marriage and sometimes it is the mad love from dissonance.

P.S. For guitar players out there, Sundown is surprisingly easy in structure. It’s E (2-2-4), B (2-4-2), A, and D with a solo in the pentatonic E minor just varying on the octave. Lightfoot slapped a capo up the neck depending upon, I’d guess, his voice at that moment. As Clapton once said, “It’s just patterns, man.” That and those fingers.

Flying to NOLA for NCA with United offers unexpected persuasion pleasures. In Hemispheres Magazine observe.

Imagine you behind the wheel of the 2012 Porsche Panamera Turbo Sedan!

The seamless seven-speed PDK transmission lets you go from manual to automatic in a split second, while the walnut dashboard and creamy leather make you feel like Gatsby motoring his way out to East Egg (hastily).

Gatsby, glittering wealth, estates on East Egg, swimming pools, rich friends, big parties . . . nice metaphor with a Porsche Turbo Sedan, but . . .

When Gatsby hastily motored out to East Egg, Daisy drove, not Jay.

Worse still, on the hasty drive, Daisy struck and killed Myrtle Wilson, who dallied adulterously with Daisy’s husband, Tom.

Worser still, Gatsby lied to protect Daisy and asserted that he was behind the wheel.

Worser more, Tom told the distraught but clueless husband George Wilson, that Gatsby killed the beloved Myrtle.

Worstest of all, George then murdered Gatsby in his magnificent swimming pool.

But, other than that, how was your test drive?

P.S. NOLA is different still after Katrina. Fewer people, not as crazy fun, and showing the signs of Disney-fication with more money moving in and around the French Quarter. Echoes, but distant and faint, from that wonderful past. If you’re a foodie, you’ve got to visit Stella’s.

And the related Stanley’s was nice, too, especially the Breaux Bridge Eggs Benedict. Muriel’s still serves as fine and sedate a lunch as you could expect and charms with its upstairs rooms.

Galatoires impresses with Big Easy elegance.

And Emeril’s?  Well . . .

Researchers asked 23 college adults to participate in a series of evaluation tasks.  For the first evaluation task, participants were randomly assigned to read about a student website that contained either a speech about God or a speech about Pluto and its status as a planet.  A series of filler tasks followed this, then a key behavior task.  All participants did a taste test on a new cookie.  They were left alone with the bag of cookies for ten minutes and told to consume at least one, but as many as they wished, then complete an evaluation of the product.

We predicted that participants who first read about God would display better temptation resistance (i.e., eat fewer cookies) than other participants.  Consistent with this prediction, participants reminded of God ate fewer cookies (M = 2.82, SD = 1.54) than did control participants (M = 7.67, SD = 5.31), t(21) = 2.91, p < .01.

Jumping Jehoshaphat!  Convert that t value into the Windowpane and you get a Large effect, 25/75!  Read a speech about God, complete a bunch of unrelated tasks, and a few minutes later you eat about 3 cookies.  Read a speech about Pluto, complete those same tasks, and you eat nearly 8 cookies.

Talk about self control!  Talk about resisting temptation!  Praise the Lord and pass by the cookie tray!  Communion coming soon to Weight Watchers!  McDonald’s is adding the Ten Commandments to its Menu!

!!!

This from a six study package exploring the cognitive and behavioral effects of thinking about God.  I encourage you to read the report because it is interesting and complicated, but the main point falls from that cookie experiment.  Thinking about God, especially as the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of All Things, affects self regulation and behavior, most interestingly here, that health behavior of eating.

You might recall an earlier Persuasion Blog post looking at a religion meta analysis on health behaviors, notably mortality.  Here’s the main finding.

The results of the meta-analyses showed that religiosity/spirituality was associated with reduced mortality in healthy population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.82, 95% CI = 0.76-0.87, p <0.001), but not in diseased population studies (combined hazard ratio = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.94-1.01, p = 0.19). Notably, the protective effect of religiosity/spirituality in the initially healthy population studies was independent of behavioral factors (smoking, drinking, exercising, and socioeconomic status), negative affect, and social support.

Of course, all that data is from Observational Research with convenience sample and the Windowpane is Small.  But, if you believe the Tooth Fairy Tales from the Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps, you’ve also got to accept this finding as a True, too.

Whether thinking about God or visiting His houses, the Ultimate Ground of Being changes the way people will think, feel, and act.  Self control.  Moderation.  Conscientiousness.

Ever want that from Other Guys?  Persuading with God primes produces that Change!

Now.  What has this got to do with Nietzsche?  If you read the article you’ll find that across the six studies the researchers looked to see whether God primes worked only with Believers and especially not with Atheists.  They reported no difference in thought or action between the two different groups.  Even among nonbelievers, thinking about God produces change.  To a modern atheist this sounds stupid because if you are an atheist, you don’t believe in God or even god, so how can this possibly happen?  Nietzsche figured it out a hundred years ago.

Nietzsche argued that Western society lived in a God-saturated world and whether God was understood as the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim God or the God of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as the Prime Unmoved Mover, people still built their lives around an immaterial creative force.  Thus, Nietzsche argued there really wasn’t much difference between deists and atheists because atheists still believed in Something that makes it all happen.  For Nietzsche, the only difference between most atheists and deists of any stripe was merely the label.  Whether you call it God or Variation With Selection, for example, it is still the Ultimate Ground of Being.  Thus, Nietzsche would be unsurprised by these results.

Don’t preach.  Just prime.

Laurin, K., Kay, A. C., & Fitzsimons, G. M. (2012). Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(1), 4-21.

doi:10.1037/a0025971