Time magazine creates persuasion mayhem with salt.  First, they offer a good summary of a Cochrane review (look it up) on the outcomes of salt consumption.

Although lowering dietary salt resulted in a small dip in blood pressure, the researchers found no strong evidence that it reduced rates of death in people with high or normal blood pressure. One study suggested that restricting salt in patients with congestive heart failure could even potentially increase risk of death.

Okay, so a well done review and meta-analysis concludes reducing population consumption of salt has no impact on mortality.  Take your Falling Apples with a sprinkle of sea salt!

But.  In the same article, the Time writer notes:

Still, there is plenty of data — and consensus among experts — that excess dietary salt does affect blood pressure and cardiovascular health.

So.  The best scientific evidence we’ve got from the Cochran review claims no effect, yet there’s plenty of consensus among experts to claim there is an effect.

What journalism might call Point Versus CounterPoint is only what a persuasion theorist would call Biased Versus Objective Processing.  You can certainly find experts who will point to cases that prove salt kills and then try to generalize that reductions in salt consumption at the population level would save lives.  Anyone, without or without those little letters following their name, who reasons like this is not a scientist, but rather merely mortal and in the throes of common sense, human nature, and most particularly, Biased Processing.

What’s the difference between Falling Apples and Change We Cannot Believe In?

Persuasion.

Oh.  And, don’t forget the Bubble!

The Times tells us.

But James McQuivey, senior analyst at Forrester Research, sees significant implications in the choice of leadership.  “In the magazine world, they have been allowed to live with the illusion that it is the printed word that creates value,” he said. “But the value actually comes from the attention of the reader. She is exactly what they need. The question is whether they are willing to follow where she is ready to lead.”

This quote from Mr. McQuivey observes the new hire at Time, Inc. those past masters of the print magazine, struggling now in the digital age along with all the other print mavens whether at other magazines, newspapers, or books.  To run its business, Time has hired as CEO, of all people, Laura Lang . . .

. . . who was the chief executive of the digital advertising agency Digitas. Talk about your loud and clear knock on the door. That digital future we are always talking about is here.

Ms. Lang bought ads for clients from sources like Time.  Now, she will try to sell ads to those same clients.  Nowhere in the description of the able Lang do you read any background as an ink-stained wretch as a writer, editor, or publisher.  She buys and sells with persuasion not journalism.  Why?  Think again about that quote from McQuivey.

Word mavens thought their words possessed an inherent value when they just owned a printing press and a monopoly over distribution.  They made their money not on speaking truth to power or with stylish voices, but simply because no one else could afford or acquire their own printing presses.  The world wide web destroyed that monopoly and exposed the myth of the printed word.

Now persuasion rules the word and its successful distribution.  Truth, beauty, and justice with voice and style cannot compete for eyes and ears the way Peithos can.  Consider just one observation about Lang.

What magazines have not been able to do is to provide reliable measures of effectiveness . . . It isn’t a reach to bet that Ms. Lang will help magazine publishers be a part of a media age built on metrics.

By the Rules of Persuasion that last sentence means:

If You Can’t Count It, You Can’t Change It.

P.S.  I’m waxing more than poetic now, but bear with me.  Vico identifies three stages all civilizations cycle:  Gods, Heroes, and Men.  We live in the age of democracy, the age of people with an emphasis upon the lower case “p” and all that implies.  You cannot persuade gods and heroes – they motivate themselves.  With people persuasion is paramount.

At last we know!
 

Whatever the long-term effects of the Occupy movement, protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent,” the tiny proportion who, some estimates say, control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.

Oh.  So that was the TACT!

Stop the sticks!

CBS News reports an amazing breakthrough with stem cell therapy for heart disease. Read all about it or better still tolerate the 30 second ad and watch it.  Scott Pelley practically fell over himself in the report and the gorgeous Dr. John LaPook provided the depth, nuance, and insight only an MD can offer on experimental clinical trials.

Are we in sweeps week?

You could take LaPook’s word for it. Consider his credential.

He has done extensive work in the field of medical computing, including helping to develop an electronic textbook of medicine and writing a medical practice management software package that he sold in 1999 to a company that was later acquired by Emdeon Corporation, the parent company of WebMD.

Or you can chase down the science and read it for yourself. Here’s the description of the clinical trial. And here’s what appears to be the presentation slides (pdf) the lead researcher used at the American Heart Association meeting. Noticeably absent is any peer review publication on the trial.

Here’s the only data on the trial I can find and its from the CBS News report.

Milles was one of 25 volunteers in this small study. Seventeen got stem cells and eight control subjects got standard heart care. All the stem cell recipients had their heart attack scars reduced most dramatically — on average almost 50 percent — damaged muscle replaced by new healthy heart tissue. The eight control subjects saw no improvement. Ken Milles had better than 50 percent improvement.

I speculate that “50 percent improvement” may be a ratio, in other words a relative improvement compared to something else. If true (and I cannot be sure), that is a Small Windowpane effect size. While this is an experimental design with participants randomly assigned to treatment or control, the small sample size of 25 people would make this difference not even statistically significant. I appreciate the randomization and the difficulty of the intervention, but if this is truly a RR of 150% with 25 cases, the results fail. If the results, however, mean an absolute 50 percentage point improvement, that’s a Large Windowpane effect – wow – but still probably not SSD and the results still fail. In this case, the tests of statistical significance are important because sampling error is truly a rival explanation and it appears even a Large Windowpane is still within sampling error.

This is weak science and while the persuasion may be good for CBS News ratings, it is ultimately very bad for the general public. There is nothing in this study to encourage anyone about anything except for a handful of researchers. LaPook should know the limitations of this research and he played the charade on TV providing cover for what is extremely preliminary work. I have no idea how the actual research team contributed to this CBS fantasy, but they clearly were presented as the Cure.

Don’t misunderstand. This is good basic research and is well worth pursuing. Hyping the outcomes of such small studies especially before peer review publication, however, is extremely bad science and dangerous persuasion. It encourages fantasy beliefs about health interventions that benefit only the folks with a megaphone.

Gee. I wonder why US expenditures on health are approaching 20% of GDP?

Consider this headline and first couple of paragraphs from a WSJ story.

Under the Influence: How the Group Changes What We Think
Researchers Study What Gives Social Norms Their Power

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

How is it that so many people started saying “Awesome!”, or started wearing Uggs?

These are examples of how individuals’ behavior is shaped by what people around them consider appropriate, correct or desirable. Researchers are investigating how human behavioral norms are established in groups and how they evolve over time, in hopes of learning how to exert more influence when it comes to promoting health, marketing products or reducing prejudice.

The headline details a powerful persuasion concept, social norms. Yet, the first sentence leads with an example from diffusion of innovation, how people start a new behavior in a network of people.

Norms are beliefs and attitudes that control either how we respond (descriptive) or should respond (prescriptive) in a social situation. Innovation is a new behavioral act that may diffuse through a group. Norms always carry the threat of sanction and if you break them, you may face social punishment. Diffusion is always a choice that reveals your open mindedness, but rarely sanctions you.

Norms and Diffusion are different ideas that may move together, but only because they occur within the same context – groups. People don’t innovate Norms, but new Norms may arise after an innovation. It is a confusing confusion of two different concepts. In presenting them as overlapped ideas, the writer diminishes their meaning and utility, making the differences seem to be identities.

The writer also offers this observation.

But surprisingly little is known about how attitudinal norms are established in groups. Why do some people in a group become trendsetters when it comes to ideas and objects?

Researchers have been studying, testing, and writing about norms with social science for over 80 years. Norms compose one of the largest literatures in persuasion. Very smart people can spend their entire careers focused only on this area and still encountered writings they’ve not yet read. It’s old, huge, and active. To characterize the state of the art on norms with “surprisingly little is known” reveals only the cheery ignorance and willful laziness of the writer.

And, if we drop her confusions with Norms and think only about Innovation, the writer’s claim of “surprisingly little is known” still remains wildly inaccurate.  Do your own search on Ev Rogers and the Diffusion of Innovation.  This area goes back at least 30 years.

I will credit her, however, with at least avoiding mention of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally facile and ignorant, Tipping Point. Although how the writer could weave in diffusion of innovation without automatically Ding-Donging on Gladwell surprises me. His errors are conspicuous in their absence from this writer’s errors. How can she not know about Tipping Points here?

To a certain extent, my concern here can be classified under the heading, I Found a Mistake on the Internets, so let’s keep some perspective. At the same time, as I’ve commented before, these kinds of errors and fabulations are a pop press commonplace. They create a perception in this case that something called persuasion is little more than fodder for somebody working on a deadline. As the Primer and Blog demonstrate, persuasion science does exist and when you properly deploy it, you can make more money, save the planet, or just learn about human nature. You just have to be willing to work a little harder.