This recurs with enough regularity to reveal the rhymes and repetitions of human nature.  Harold Camping and his supporters at Family Radio are . . .

. . . predicting that mid-May of this year will bring about Judgment Day — the time when, according to some, the earth will be destroyed because of mankind’s sins and all Christian believers will ascend to heaven.

Yet another Doomsday religious group is predicting precise knowledge of the Apocalypse – May 22, 2011 this time – and telling the world all about it.  And, you can easily search the news to find the just as predictable responses from everyone else to this.  The more interesting part of this story is the persuasion play.

You see, Leon Festinger learned of a Doomsday Group predicting the end of the world for December 21, 1954.  Festinger and his students became participant observers in the group, seeing it as a fertile test bed for their theorizing about Cognitive Dissonance.  Festinger felt fairly certain the world would not end as predicted and wanted to see how the group would respond to this disconfirmation of beliefs.  Common sense would expect believers to feel embarrassed and foolish then come to their senses and sheepishly rejoin the real world.  Dissonance, however predicted that the disconfirmation would serve to reinforce their beliefs following Festinger’s now familiar formulation:  You love that for which you suffer.

And, lo and behold, while some of the Doomsday Group did leave the fold in a state of dismay, many demonstrated that Dissonance Reduction outcome of actually feeling more convinced of their doomsday beliefs.  These people continued to proselytize publicly and were more zealous than before.

Some folks foolishly believe that this effect only applies with religious themes, but the crucial element is not Last Things, but rather how strongly a belief is connected to your self concept.  When you are like Louis XIV, the Sun King, and L’Etat Est Moi and Me Is The State, anything that threatens a key belief actually threatens your self concept.  And since you cannot change your mind about your self concept, when the belief is threatened, you will find ways to bolster that belief.

I would point to the current, obvious, nonreligious example of Global Warming zealots who are immune to any information and use all disconfirmations to rally and reinforce the Doomsday claim that End Times are near, not from an Angry God, but from Human Greed and Consumption.  Beliefs about climate change and capitalism have become a central structure in their self concepts and disconfirming news is more of an attack on them personally rather than just the news about something going on. Nothing changes their belief; disconfirmation only strengthens them.

Dissonance Theory describes, predicts, and explains all the various guises and masks of Doomsday thinking whether motivated from the sacred or the secular, faith or science.  When L’Etat Est Moi, Moi must survive and in so doing ensures the survival of the Etat!

Just consider these images.

Here’s a guy who wanted to lead an Islamic revolution.  Can there be anyone more sincere?  Yet.  He dyes his beard.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.


The most important Rule of Persuasion is this:

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

If you cannot get past yourself then you will likely be a miserable persuasion agent.  But, it is not natural to put your focus on the Other Guy because, after all, you are the most important person in the world as far as you are concerned.  How do you learn to get around yourself so you can follow this Rule?  Consider this field study.

Kuhn and Crowell provide an interesting report of 11 and 12 year old kids getting training in Persuasion as part of their regular school work for its impact on persuasion skill.  Kuhn and Crowell describe it as a philosophy class, but the point of it is argumentation with a strong emphasis on the Other Guy perspective, so by my lights it is also persuasion.  Here’s the heart of the training.

The two intervention classes met as intact groups for a twice-weekly 50-min class, identified as a philosophy class. Each school year was divided into four quarters of about 13 class sessions each.  A unique topic was introduced each quarter as the basis for that quarter’s work.  A 1st-year topic, for example, was whether parents should be allowed to home-school a child, a 2nd-year topic was China’s one-child policy, and a 3rd-year topic concerned whether adult court, juvenile court, or teen (peer judge) court was the best means for adjudicating juvenile crimes.  (All 3rd-year topics were three-sided.)  Participants chose their sides on a topic.  Topics had been pilot-tested to achieve approximately equal numbers of students who favored the different sides.  The topic cycle began with small-group team work among students on the same side (pregame) and proceeded to electronic dialogues between pairs of students on opposing sides (game).  Next, small-group preparation preceded a whole-class verbal debate that served as the capstone experience of the sequence (endgame).  A debriefing session concluded with a final individual essay assignment.

As described here, there is no training in argumentation and debate theory (and there’s a huge literature on that one), just a series of activities in a guided Discovery Learning approach.  Kids simply get a lot of practice in arguing on different topics and from different perspectives and through a variety of channels (computer mediated interactions, face-to-face class discussions, individual written essays).

Now, what happens to these kids?  Kuhn and Crowell gathered several outcomes to assess the program.  They also included two different kinds of control groups, one a classroom in the same school that did not get this program, and the other composed of classes of the same age, but from a different school who also did not do this program.  All of these kids, intervention or control, got the same outcome measures and were then compared.

The key measure I’ll report here is from that final written essay.  Each was scored for the arguments it contained and the category of argument it used:  no argument, own-side argument, dual-perspective argument, or integrative-perspective argument.  The point of the training was clearly aimed at those last two categories with the focus on the Other Guy.  Here’s a graph of the outcome.

The body of the graph displays the mean number of dual-perspective arguments by time and condition. Y0 is the beginning of the study, and Y1, Y2, and Y3 are the ends of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd years of the study, respectively.  The graph clearly shows that Something Happened with the treatment kids compared to the controls, but appearances, especially in persuasion, can be deceiving.  What’s the quantitative analysis?

There was a significant interaction between condition and time, F(3, 67) = 6.11, p < .001, ηp2 = .216. Simple-effects tests showed that the experimental group included more dual-perspective arguments than the comparison group at Y2, t(69) = 3.60, p = .001, and Y3, t(69) = 3.89, p < .001.

That “ηp2″ thingie is Greek for eta squared which is the type of effect size you use for ANOVAs if you’re properly trained and don’t slurp your soup from the spoon.  Hey, 21.6% explained variance is a very healthy effect size, equivalent to an r = .46 which is about a Large Windowpane of 25/75.  If I handed you the stacks of essays by class, asked you to read them, and then told you to assign each stack to either Treatment or Control, you’d have no trouble.  Thus,  It Works!

This program illustrates three broad persuasion points.

1.  Persuasion is a skill and you get better with practice.

Again, I’m only going on the brief description in the report, but there was no strong and formal curriculum and instruction in this activity.  Kids went through a set of guided activities and learned from each other and themselves.  Just that guided practice is enough to develop a skill and you see that in the various outcomes Kuhn and Crowell collected.  All of the various measures showed on big similarity:  More training, more outcome.  No matter how you measure the “persuasion skill,” the practice produces more of it.  Now, quality is another matter, but you’ve got to develop the swing, the footwork, the timing and on and on, first, and this program accomplishes that goal.

2.  Guided Discovery will get them where you want to go.

This is a classic application of the Role Playing persuasion strategy from Janis and King’s work in the 1950s.  You get people in that debate format and move them through arguing only My Side then arguing the Other Guy’s Side.  Janis and King used Role Playing to create change in the Other Guy, but as we see here, it can also be used to train persuasion skill in all Guys.  In essence the various guided Discovery activities are a kind of Role Playing for each kid.  When they try on the Role, they develop perspective.  They start seeing and thinking like the Other Guy.

3.  The Persuasion Box here is tricky.

This program ran with bright little kids from economically and educationally challenged backgrounds in a school run through Columbia University.  Pretty rare air, these kids.  They are smart and already hooked into a smart University.  Wonder where some of them will end up 6 or 7 years compared to their compadres who were eligible to join this program, but stayed with their buddies on the block?  These kids probably love the classroom and are thrilled silly every day in every way.  How much impact does all this ability and motivation have on the success of the program?  What kind of All Persuasion Is Local adjustments will you have to make in my farm town school in Holden, Missouri?  Think about it.  This practice works, but you must translate into Local terms.

Let’s get out of here . . .

Kuhn and Crowell provide an excellent report on a simple intervention that trains persuasion in young kids.  The program clearly works.  It is a simple educational intervention that aims the student at activities that will naturally produce the kind of interaction useful for skill building.  You don’t need to over-teach this thing.  I imagine that some instructors would be tempted to bring more than a little Sunday School morality and insight to the little ones when they come up with nonstandard ideas in a “philosophy” class – and you know I’m not talking religion here; a Skeptic would be as deadly as a Saint.

Hey, everybody:  It’s about the Other Guy!

Lou Reed still reads (YouTube) the scene and tells us more than we may want to know.

Consider the mortality benefits of just getting your lazy butt off the sofa and walking, just walking, 30 minutes any 5 days of the week.  Here’s an edited description of a meta analysis on walking and mortality from Woodcook, Franco, Orsini, and Roberts.

In this systematic review and meta-analysis we quantify the dose-response relationship of non-vigorous physical activity and all-cause mortality.  We identified 22 studies that met our inclusion criteria, containing 977 925 (334 738 men and 643 187 women) people.  We found that 2.5 h/week (equivalent to 30 min daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) compared with no activity was associated with a reduction in mortality risk of 19% [95% confidence interval (CI) 15-24] . . .

Hey!  A 20% reduction in mortality which according to the ever ready, ever useful Windowpane is a . . . is a . . . well, let’s see here.  Small Effects clock in at 150% and this is 120% so this is . . . not even a Small Effect.  In fact it is less than one half of a Small Effect, something like 48/52 in Windowpane numbers.  (klong)

But, man, doncha just feel like it’s bigger than that?  Jeepers, you’re out there huffing and puffing and thinking about those lazy fat couch potatoes and you’re all bundled up in the cold (gee, today in Morgantown it is 6 degrees with a slight wind – man, that will make the northern laps fun this afternoon – Klong) and those lazy good for nothing slackers are warm and toasty on the sofa eating potato chips and drinking beer and I’m out here huffing and puffing and dodging and waving at my neighbors driving by (and in 30 minutes I’ll see a lot of my neighbors) and all for a 48/52 advantage over those lazy fat couch potatoes (KLONG).

We call that Dissonance Reduction in persuasion parlance.  You come to love that for which you suffer and since exercise causes suffering, you will learn to love it or you will quit.  And while you are suffering for the exercise, you will ask yourself, “Self.  Why are you doing this?”  As you do your attributional search you will find no one but your Self to blame, ahem, to reward, for that Internal Attribution, and you will start to love that for which you suffer a little bit more.  And if you exercise like a good little girl or boy, following all that Smart Expert Knowledge, and you read this post, you will feel the klonger of Dissonance, that “Why the hell would any idiot do something for an effect only a statistician could find or invent?” and that will create more suffering for you.

Realize the persuasion cost of that satisfaction you’ve felt while you’ve been doing the Smart Thing, the Cool Table Thing, thinking all the while that you were going to live forever or at least much much longer than those fat happy couch potatoes (who only act happy, but really aren’t) and now to realize your working on a 20% RR that is less than one tenth of a standard deviation of additional life span which works out to about one year of life . . . when you make to 78.9 rather than 77.4.

Let’s break out of our Selves right now and think like persuasion mavens with the Rules.  It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid, not you.  What about the Other Guy here?

1.  Lifestyle is an extremely minor part of a long life.  Anyone who pitches it as Salvation is either in the throes of Dissonance or can’t read the Methods and Results section of a research report and probably both.

2.  Lifestyle works on the Other Guy’s psychology much more than the Other Guy’s body.  Think about the persuasion implications of that.

3.  You can get a lot of persuasion traction with the Cool Table folks on lifestyle.  They believe it like an article of faith (and given the scientific evidence on lifestyle effects on mortality, isn’t that more like theology than biology?).  Don’t confuse them with the facts; their minds are already made up.  Support them.  Join them.  Tell them how smart they are.  Then move them where you want them.  Join my Advisory Board.  Introduce me to a Big Gun.  Let’s work together on Lifestyle and this other little idea I’ve got.  In other words, use Lifestyle to reassure and buttress their self esteem and world view, so they can Manage their Terror over death and change.

4.  Use Lifestyle plays as a Persuasion Box on Other Guys to set up the real, the important, the proven, change you seek.  Everyone just Knows how critical lifestyle is to Life so to leave it off the Table invites controversy.  Make it bright and shiny, make it shake and jiggle for them – the Cue they need right now.  When they walk into the Box and grab the Cue, then run the persuasion play on the right TACT.

[What's real, important, and proven?  In health and safety - substance use and abuse from tobacco to alcohol to illegal drugs; safety actions most notably seat belts; adherence to treatment for serious health conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, etc.; competent care before, during, and after pregnancy.  Like that.  Of course, you can use this to set up plays for a new iGizmo, insurance plan, cook book, or SUV.  Think about it.]

5.  Back to you . . . live your own life as you see fit and enjoy it.  Assume that the Cool Table is completely wrong about Lifestyle.  So what?  If you like what you are doing keep doing it and take away the better benefit of knowing that you are in control of your life and not a fool who falls for an Expert.  Measure your life for yourself.

Let’s learn from David Bryne of the Talking Heads and this cover of the classic R&B song, Take Me To The River.  The song is an ironic mix of sex and religion, salvation through loss; in other words, Dissonance as metaphor.

Properly washed, let’s now consider practical persuasion possibilities.

You want to save the world from itself by improving lifestyle.  Behave right to live long.  And you know how to use a laser beam to detect the Smallest Ripple above random variation, then Nudge on calorie counts or restricted diets or on and on with those subtle, nuanced, and small Effects that will change the world as we know it.

Consider, then, this meta analysis by Chida, Steptoe, and Powell.  Chida et al. collected dozens of high quality prospective studies published in peer review sources since 1977 that followed tens of thousands of people over many years.  This is good stuff.  A careful review of the literature to find high quality research, then an even more careful quantitative summary of that research.  Here’s what Chida, Steptoe, and Powell tell us.

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.

One of those beautiful little effect sizes that is actually statistically significant and not like that Global Warming nonsignificant Trend.  This is the real deal.  Significant and Small!  And, underline the finding that the effect still holds when you remove the effect of things like smoking and drinking or even SES.

And there’s more.

Just like we noted in an earlier post on a single study on the effect of religion on mortality, this meta-analysis confirms that mere behavior confers more protection than actual belief.  Chida, Steptoe, and Powell find that the average effect for beliefs on mortality is a nonsignificant 0.95 hazard ratio, while the effect for attendance only actually improves to 0.73.

Think about this.

We’ve got data here that is at least as good as anything we’ve got on diet and exercise and clearly shows a significant, practical, small effect on life and death.  Why don’t we include this one in Health Care Reform We Can Believe In?

As I noted earlier, the State can support religious activity.  We are not requiring that people believe anything, just that they show up at a particular building and sit around with other people.  Mr. Obama has continued the Faith-Based Initiatives (PDF) of that knucklehead Mr. Bush, so the idea must be okay, right?  And, we’ve got the same kind of science to support this policy that we do for diet and exercise, so we’re good on that one.

Now, go back to the River with the Talking Heads and their considerations of religion and sex, salvation through loss, that Dissonance as metaphor.  Feel the tangle of science and religion, policy and intervention, persuasion and zealotry.  How do you sort this all out?

If you want to save the world from itself, then shouldn’t you promote or support religious behavior as the path to longer and healthier life?

If the science behind the Faith-Based Effect here seems wanting to you (prospective, self report, very small effects), then do you need to question the same science (often retrospective, more inaccurate self report, very small effects) on diet and exercise, for example?

Now, for those who feel no Klonger here, think about the practical uses of the Faith-Based Effect.  If you want to promote longer and healthier lives, why not add Faith as another path to that salvation?  Consider the persuasion angles to this play.

1.  If we are talking about life and death, Faith is a great persuasion play precisely because of death.  Thoughts of death can easily interfere with change as people stop listening before you get started.  Faith can be a tool for buffering and bolstering death, especially from a Terror Management Theory perspective.  Start with Faith to mitigate all those death fears, then roll out your persuasion play to change the lifestyle.  You will encounter less resistance.

2.  Millions of Americans are deeply religious even when they engage in unhealthy behaviors.  Faith gives you a different line of discussion about change.  Instead of being seen as the Nanny, you are in their Church, maybe even on the same Pew.  You can start on a vast expanse of common ground.

3.  Assuming you find the proper way to do Persuasion Faith, you probably will have to use less resource to generate change.  These kind of plays illustrate the Rule, Less Is More.  Just start with the right religious approach, make sure the Other Guy is properly engaged in Faith, then get out of the way.  The Gravity of their Theology will pull them where you want to go if you know what you are doing.

4.  Recall the Rule:  If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.  If you have any doubt about your ability to sing with Their Choir, don’t even open your mouth.  A badly done Faith play would be a disaster of Biblical proportions.

Now, let’s get out on another live cover from the Talking Heads.  Great stage performance and a little more upbeat.  Of course, the best version is just the song.