A valued network pointed me to Eben Moglen.  He scares a blogger with his concerns about Facebook, privacy, and databases.  If you read the post, the exchange is almost a Woody Allen piece with a young, confused, and earnest reporter interviewing a confident and crazed intellectual.  Moglen raises many of the same concerns I’ve noted about Facebook with its ability to capture, correlate, and classify everyone’s private information in real time, day after day after day.  Moglen imagines what I imagine: Hitler or Mao or Stalin bending Facebook to their purposes.  More prosaic, imagine Big Marketing bending Facebook to their purposes.  Shooting fish, political or profitable, in the digital barrel.

And yet . . . to misquote the immortal Clara Peller, Where’s the Domination?

Facebook is fully forth emerged and I can’t spot Orwell 2.0 or even Engulf and Devour 2.0.  Facebook is good for wasting time, PostMod musings, and angel investors, but the civic and commercial doomsday has yet to arise much less even rear its sleepy head.  On the few case studies I’ve done of Facebook Unleashed (like Al Gore and Climate Change or George W. Bush and book sales or Occupy Wall Street and whatever) show me that Facebook is selling sand to Sauds, but the rest of us are just lying on the beach working on our tans.

My concerns with Web 2.0 privacy remain:  It is a disaster waiting to happen.  Yet that disaster will say more about the Evil Maven who creates it rather than the technology He uses to perpetrate it.  Moglen and I misplay our worries when we shout about Facebook.  Hitler didn’t need no stinkin’ Web 2.0 to turn an enlightened, educated democracy into a totalitarian nightmare.  The Arab dictators had Web 2.0 and either they didn’t know how to use it or perhaps it really doesn’t matter that much after all.

Consider the Persuasion Rule:

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

The power of persuasion is in the maven not in the magic.

Peggy Noonan observes about the Republican Presidential race to date.

The worst trend in politics that fully emerged during phase one? People running for president not to be president but as a branding exercise, to sell books and get a cable contract and be a public figure and have people who heretofore hadn’t noticed you now stopping you in the airport to get a picture and an autograph. In an endeavor like this you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You’re not held back by any sense of realism as to your positions, you don’t have to worry about them being used against you down the road because there won’t be a down the road. You can say anything. And because you do you seem refreshing. People start to like you—you’re not like all the others, who are so careful. You rise, run your mouth for a month and fall.

While it’s terrible leadership, it’s fabulous persuasion. Jeepers, getting national exposure through multiple media channels over several months! Books! t-shirts! Fridge magnets. Speaking gigs. Celebrity appointments to boards, committees, public events! Persuasion is democracy’s greatest tool . . . and test.

Who’d think running for President would be a persuasion play?

A maven!

P.S.  When I was in the Fed explaining a potential persuasion play over a conference table, the folks in the room looked aghast at me for my suggestion and I told them, there are no values in persuasion, only change. They laughed. Noonan displays similar sincerity here and while I would not dispute her as a citizen, as the blog persuasion expert I must observe: Tah, to you!

Persuasion knows the Other Guy is free to choose.

If you’re a Do Gooder a key application of Do Gooding is with  intolerance, discrimination, and prejudice.  You want Other Guys to play nice regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ice cream preference, and on and on with the litany of ways we differ from one another.  Hmmmm.  How do we get the Other Guys to Do Good?

The Sincere approach is to know that as a Do Gooder you’ve got Right on your side, so go forth boldly, Do Good speaking Truth to Intolerance and away you go, the Good, Done.  Except such Do Gooding rarely Does Good and indeed, as we will see, makes things Worse.  Almost like an ancient Greek tale, er, meme, where Do Good leads to Done Bad.

Consider this extended example from a test brochure given to Canadians to combat prejudice.

Cracking Down on Prejudice in Our Society

In today’s society, you must control prejudice. In other words, being Canadian means having an anti-prejudiced attitude.  For instance, The Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act prohibits discrimination in employment based on the grounds of race, color, ancestry, place of origin, religious beliefs . . .  Employers have an obligation to create a ‘no prejudice’ workplace, and companies face legal liability for workplace prejudice or discrimination.  The same standards are being set in the education domain.  In fact, a recent government policy initiative by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada requires that educators demand anti-prejudice classrooms. Teachers and students caught displaying racist attitudes and behavior can face serious consequences, such as termination or expulsion . . . There are also social perks to controlling racism – for instance, low prejudiced people tend to be better liked than racists.  The better we are at reducing prejudice, the more we are likely to fit in with today’s antiprejudice norms.  Research studies reveal that people with prejudiced attitudes are at risk of being excluded or ostracized.  In one recent study, most people reported that their social groups at work and at school disapproved of prejudice and racism, and people feared being looked down upon if they made prejudiced or racist remarks . . .  In today’s multicultural society, we should all be less prejudiced.  We should all refrain from negative stereotyping.  It is, after all, the politically and socially correct thing to do, and it’s something that society demands of us.

Now, you may chose to rewrite portions of this excerpt that you find heavy handed, charmless, or bleak, but if you don’t change the persuasion force behind the words, you will fail at Do Gooding and make things worse.  The key problem with this brochure is the Attributional impact it has.  The motivation for tolerance comes not from an Internal Attribution to ourselves, but rather from an External Attribution from social norms and potential punishment from other people.

Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht (pdf) randomly assigned Canadian students to different brochures in their persuasion experiment that tested Attributional force – Internal versus External – for its effect on attitudes.  Participants either got that External Attribution like the excerpt above or an Internal Attribution brochure like this.

Why it’s Important to Reduce Prejudice in Our Society

As a society, we hold the virtues of tolerance and nonprejudice in a very special place – they are important because they increase open-mindedness and social justice.  Social justice is  the vital ingredient in a free, fair, and peaceful society.  When equality and equity among human beings are achieved, there is less reason for any group or individual to be unhappy . . . It is also important to be nonprejudiced because it is so     interesting to interact with and learn about people from other cultural and social groups.  We live in a wonderful and diverse cultural community.  That diversity makes our society great because it brings a wealth of knowledge and experience together. When we let go of prejudice, the rich diversity of society is ours to enjoy . . . Not to mention, being open-minded is a real advantage to our mood and well-being.  When there is less racial and cultural tension, people are happier and healthier, and better able to do the things they enjoy . . . You are free to choose to value nonprejudice.  Only you can decide to be
an egalitarian person . . . In today’s increasingly diverse and multicultural society, such a personal choice is likely to help you feel connected to yourself and your social world . . .

Again, you may rewrite what you find saccharine, effete, or silly, but as long as you maintain that Internal focus on self motivation for behavior, the manipulation will produce the desired effect.  Consider this bar chart from just one experiment.

Now, more importantly, the statistical outcomes.

As illustrated in Figure 1, participants in the autonomy-brochure condition displayed significantly less prejudice than did those in the no-brochure condition, F(1, 66) = 14.49, p < .001, eta2 = .18. Conversely, those who read the controlling brochure actually demonstrated greater prejudice than those in the no-brochure condition, F(1, 66) = 4.34, p < .04, eta2= .07. As hypothesized, using control to motivate prejudice reduction backfired, and was more detrimental than not motivating participants at all. The support of autonomous motivation to regulate prejudice, however, caused a reduction in prejudice.

Sure, it’s statistically significant – here’s your sign – but note the effect sizes in those eta2 values.  They translate into Medium+ Windowpanes, around 30/70.  And, see the detail.  The Internal Attribution brochure produces an obvious benefit over the No Message Control and the External Attribution brochure produces a less obvious, but still near Medium Windowpane harm compared to the No Message Control.  Thus, attribution moves people in opposite directions compared to Control, one producing greater benefit, the other greater harm.

Legault et al. ran a second experiment to replicate and extend the basic finding and also conducted useful moderator studies with path models to refine the conceptual model, but I want to hit the main point.  Doing Good requires more than a pure heart, social courage, and a brochure.  Sincerity alone can make things worse, casting yourself into the ancient Greek nightmare where you kill what you love.  If you do not understand and apply persuasion principles properly you will kill your father, marry your mother, but live forever in tale, narrative, or meme!

As we’ve noted several times in the Persuasion Blog and the Primer, Attribution Theory is a powerful persuasion play that is almost always available as either an active tool or an important element in understanding the Local.  How do you want the Other Guys to explain their world?  Failure to ask this question or to answer it correctly dooms change whether from Do Gooders or Do Badders.

Realize here that the External force of that first brochure not only activates an external locus of control, but could also easily elicit Reactance, that Like Hell!, knee-jerk response people display when they perceive an unfair restriction on their actions.  Scan over the comments at the Free Republic website, a conservative net community, about this very study and see examples (most ironic – gee, conservatives with a sense of humor?) of that reactant effect.

Now, if you are a zealot, you find satisfaction of some sort when your political adversaries react against you, but, hey, you aimed at changing people, you knucklehead, and all you succeeding in doing was alienating not only adversaries but a bunch of Other Guys as well.  You may sniff about the Evil Opposition, but then, of course, you are running afoul of the Rule:

Great Persuaders Don’t Need Rich Uncles, Kindness from Strangers, or Third Party Vote Splitters.

Here the Rule means only muggles complain about their opponents as if you can win only when you have no competition.  But, then, that’s the basic tension between Sincerity and Persuasion.  When you know you have Truth or Beauty or Justice it is difficult hide it under Peitho’s robe.  You don’t hide your light under a basket!  Yet, as this report demonstrates, along with other examples from literature as described in the Blog and Primer, beacons of light are often unpersuasive and worse still can easily activate more dissent, confusion, and conflict.

You need to understand the difference between what you value and how you persuade on those values.

Legault L, Gutsell JN, Inzlicht M.  Ironic Effects of Antiprejudice Messages: How Motivational Interventions Can Reduce (but Also Increase) Prejudice.  Psychol Sci. 2011 Dec 1;22(12):1472-7. Epub 2011 Nov 28.

doi:  10.1177/0956797611427918

Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican primary in a walk, beating second place Mitt Romney by 10 points. Social conservative voters picked a man with three marriages and admitted adulteries. The persuasion gravity of a politician’s Woman Problem has no hold today on Mr. Gingrich.

Perhaps, this persuasion gravity does not hold in South Carolina.

Perhaps, Gingrich did Inoculate enough on this issue, at least with South Carolina voters.

Perhaps, three marriages and adulteries are not a Woman Problem. You need to get caught close to the act rather than years later. As the flamboyant Edwin Edwards of Louisiana observed, voters would not turn against him unless he got caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy.

Perhaps, you can resist persuasion gravity in one primary, but no more.

There Are No Laws of Persuasion.

The persuasion standard for handling the politician’s Woman Problem remains Bill Clinton. He inoculated himself in the 1992 primaries and made it all the way to 1998 and the Blue Dress before reality overwhelmed his formidible, but ultimately limited, persuasion play on this deadly topic. Currently, Newt Gingrich faces a kind of Woman Problem with his marriages and adulteries, but Gingrich has chose not to Inoculate. Instead he’s blaming the media.

CNN moderator John King asked Newt Gingrich if he would like to address his ex-wife’s report earlier in the evening on ABC that he had asked for an “open marriage.” His answer: “No.” He then went on to denounce CNN and John King at length with barely restrained anger. He denied his ex-wife’s charge and offered only brass-knuckle contrition. Talking about how everyone in the audience had known personal pain, he concluded: “To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”

You know you’ve got a Woman Problem and it is likely to make headlines so what can you do? Gingrich, like Cain, waited for the headline, then denied it and added a media attack. Clinton, by contrast, used his knowledge to get ahead of the headline and Inoculate before it appeared.

Prior to the eruption of the Woman Problem, Gingrich was surging in South Carolina polls, pushing hard at front-running Mitt Romney. More importantly, Gingrich knew the details of his Woman Problem. If Gingrich’s persuasion tactic of deny and blame works, then he should finish the SC primary close to Romney (5%). If past history and persuasion theory is any guide, however, there’s a good chance Gingrich will finish well behind Romney and at least one other candidate in this primary, then suspend his campaign in February to collaborate with Herman Cain on an outsider insurgency to stop Romney.

The Rules! There’s a Difference between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; With Persuasion the Illusion Lingers. Of course, There Are No Laws of Persuasion, so maybe Gingrich is onto something new! We’ll see soon.

Pressure proves both the persuasion and the persuader.