There’s something happenin’ here.
What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Let’s turn Buffalo Springfield inside out and follow their classic, For What It’s Worth (YouTube), into climate change. The Wall Street Journal has published a signed editorial with sixteen scientists who affirm that Global Warming does not exist and that CO2 poses no threat to the environment.

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The sixteen signers then note the risks for public disagreement with Global Warming advocates. They cite one outstanding case.

In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

Of course, Buffalo Springfield anticipated this outcome when they sang.

Paranoia strikes deep,
Into your heart it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid,
Step out of line and the man comes and takes you away.

This may be the largest public retort to the scientific consensus claim from Global Warming advocates. While there have always been scientists who disputed those advocate claims, they tended to do science rather than persuasion and felt no need to sign silly petitions as if they were voting on gravity. Now, at least 16 are willing to make a high profile persuasion play in public.

Even still, the Buffalo Springfield lyric hits it.

There’s something happenin’ here.
What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Something is happening both in the science and persuasion of climate change, but it ain’t exactly clear. This editorial is a terrible challenge to the Scientific Consensus Cue so beloved of advocates. They now must devolve into a credentials swamp, shouting My Experts Are Experts and Your Experts Aren’t! an argument no citizen wishes to hear. When advocates are fighting over CVs, they have lost whether they realize it or not.

The safest persuasion play for advocates is Silence. Don’t even acknowledge the signed editorial exists. Just keep flowing on the great wave of Truth. Ignore that Other Guy Behind the Curtain. Persist with the Al Gore PowerPoint Show and all those confident claims of Scientific Consensus. This editorial and each contrary voice changes nothing.

That’s the persuasion play. And, best of all, it requires no science!

Stop, children, what’s that sound,
Everybody look what’s going down.

If you are Weatherman 2.0, you know that things aren’t going your way even with a congenial President and Senate and those two golden, but wasted, years of 2009 and 2010.  The Weather is still getting worse, but worser still no on is listening to you.  That email foolishness.  Al Gore’s Green fortune.  All those lamer scientists publicly disagreeing with the Scientific Consensus.  And, now, come to find out that the Weather Channel is killing you, too.

Joslyn, Savelli, & Nadav-Greenberg present an illuminating four  study package that demonstrates how weather forecasts generate mistrust and confusion in consumers through an emphasis upon Worst Case reporting.  The problem stems from well known anchoring effects.  Let’s read their conclusion.

These four studies extend the well-known anchoring effect to worst-case scenario forecasts informing weather-related decisions. It is clear that people’s understanding of future weather conditions is influenced by the kind of uncertainty information provided in the forecast. Participants with the worst-case scenario had a biased understanding despite having the same single-value forecast as those with other formats. Remarkably, the anchoring effect was observed when the low likelihood of the anchor was clearly specified and when a better standard was available . . . Many forecast providers believe that the worst-case scenario is the uncertainty information most understandable and beneficial to general public end users.  Indeed, the worst-case scenario may well reduce the amount of information people must process by focusing on values that are critical to the decision at hand. However, the research reported here suggests that this reduction in uncertainty information can seriously mislead the user. It appears to convince people that wind speeds will be higher and temperatures will be lower than what are indicated in the forecast.  One may be tempted to think that such a bias is advantageous in potentially dangerous situations because it could convince otherwise reluctant people to take precautionary action . . . The research reported here suggests that the worst-case scenario leads to a misunderstanding of the forecast, which could have serious long-range impact.

While Joslyn et al. focus literally upon the daily weather forecast and forecasts for extreme events like hurricanes, the implications for the Global Warming Wars should be apparent, if only to me.  People think about the information they get and how that information is presented can produce unintended consequences.  If you take the time to read and understand this research, you realize the larger implications for the Climate Change Chorus and how their ineffective communication has played a major and perverse role in making things worse for their own case.  The emphasis upon that Worst Case Scenario is the go-to Frame (or Meme or Narrative or Whatever) with a simplistic emphasis upon a single point – average temperature – rather than boundaries or limits or ranges.

Stated another way, the persuasive communication from the Climate Change Chorus and the emphasis upon the Worst Case and the single point estimate, generates biased thinking from people that actually reduces the believability and effectiveness of the communication.  The more the CCC talks, the worse it gets.  Thus, even if science proves that human activity has caused climate change and that climate change will produce negative outcomes for people and (last one!) reducing carbon consumption will make things right, then the CCC communication makes that better world less likely through their pounding and relentless emphasis upon the Worst-Case Scenario.  In so doing, the CCC artlessly creates an anchor, a standard of comparison, a line of judgment, that guarantees less concern, worry, or risk.

Hear a different Chorus?  It’s Greek.  And ancient.  It’s chanting:  Killing what you love.  Killing what you love.  Killing what you love.

Mavens of all Rainbows, learn from failure.  Even if the sky is falling, shouting that The Sky Is Falling may only ensure that everyone goes to the beach.  When its gonna rain anchors, people use a different umbrella.

Joslyn, S., Savelli, S., & Nadav-Greenberg, L. (2011). Reducing probabilistic weather forecasts to the worst-case scenario: Anchoring effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 17(4), 342-353.

doi:10.1037/a0025901

P.S.  Jeepers.  See any applications with warning labels and their Single Point Estimates for Worst Case Scenarios?  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere, kids.  Just because it feels so right to you doesn’t mean you can change the Other Guys with it.  No wonder only zealots persuade like this.

P.P.S.  Of course, if the CCC stopped with the Worst Case Scenario and Single Point Estimates and switched to Boundaries and Ranges, it might make their case even worse.  They’ve already admitted that the presumed increase in temperatures isn’t statistically significant which is another way of saying Nature is in her Container.

Please consider these two graphs. First, for men.

Now, women.

More Life, to quote Roy Batty, is the Big TACT from the Lifestyle Drum and Bugle Corps and their parades for biking and broccoli, lifting and low fatting, grunting and chewing. I’d prefer a graph with standard deviations, but the semi-interquartile range is a pretty handy measure of variability as long as you remember that SD cuts would be farther out than the 25th or 75th percentiles are. Effect size considerations from the SIQ range are bigger than the Windowpane.

Nevertheless, you see patterns. Men punch out sooner than women at all ages. Women show greater variability. And, sigh, the downward trend for both men and women.

Now, realize visually how piddling most of those diet and exercise admonitions are against all this variability within the smaller and tighter semi inter-quartile ranges. Most admonitions deliver less than Small Windowpanes, just a couple of years at best and even that is questionable given the Tooth Fairy design of the studies with convenience samples and self report measurement of how many ounces of red meat you eat in a week or how many drinks of alcohol you had today or how many METs you cooked off running, lifting, or stretching. Everyone is stretching here, including the Tooth Fairies.

Longevity is not the Strategic Persuasion here, folks. In fact, longevity is probably the worst scientific Argument you might offer to Other Guys about their lifestyle. And you can tell that Other Guys are no longer listening. Consider a torrid example torn from today’s headlines.

Paula Deen is diabetic!

And while the Corps would have you believe that her Southern high fat comfort food kills like cigarettes, no credible scientific source will publicly declare Deen’s cooking caused Deen’s diabetes. And with good reason. Go to PubMed and look up: meta-analysis, Type II diabetes, and risk factors. Chase down the Methods and Results sections and you’ll find those Big Parade, But Small Effect Sizes for diet no matter how you frame the question. Proving Deen’s diet caused her ailment is like trying to determine whether Anthony Bourdain is high on liquor or marijuana in Amsterdam just by looking at him.

How about a counter-example.

Remember Jim Fixx? He is credited as a godfather of running for health in the 1970s. Back when running was definitely not the Cool Table, Fixx literally wrote the book on all the physical and psychological benefits of running. Then at 52 while on his regular run on the road, he dropped dead of a heart attack.

So. No one recommends running, right?

Whether expressed as colorful graphs or two over the top media examples, the Falling Apples on longevity shout, Variation! The Observational Tooth Fairies would have you believe that they can read the self reports and discern death from an extra serving of alcohol or red meat or fried chicken when clinicians looking at patients cannot accurately predict death. No one knows.

While the researchers were finally able to single out 16 indexes that hold promise in helping doctors predict how long a patient might live, there was “insufficient evidence at this time” to recommend any of them for widespread clinical use. None of the indexes had been tried with groups of individuals other than the initial test group to confirm reliability, and every single one had a potential source of bias. Some studies were never able to follow up on the final outcomes of a substantial subset of patients; others used researchers intimately involved with the development of the prognostic tool, and not impartial observers, to validate findings.

The variability in life and death precludes accurate prediction beyond the folk tale take that men die sooner than women and older pass sooner than younger.

You Cannot Persuade A Falling Apple.

This perspective from a clinical physician nicely illustrates the tension between learning from science and learning from direct experience.

When I entered medical school in 1997, I joined a generation of doctors that was supposed to practice evidence-based medicine. First in small groups, and later during clinical rotations, we learned to interpret the medical literature and apply the conclusions of randomized, controlled trials to our clinical decision making. Working within this new paradigm, we were going to rise above the apprentice-based training of our forbears and make decisions on the basis of gold-standard, Level I evidence.

The scientific clinician. Huzzah!

But real life has intruded on the carefully catalogued odds ratios that I memorized as an intern. I’ve come to appreciate that the influence of a randomized, controlled trial — no matter how well conducted or generalizable — pales in comparison with that of the audible bleeding of a profound postpartum hemorrhage. As I tell residents and fellows, in the human mind, adverse anecdote — what I’ve come to call Level IV evidence — is more convincing than even the tightest of confidence intervals.

You always trust your own experience more than data. Persuasion counts on that.

Randomized, controlled trials may be the gold standard, but their results can take decades to make their way from the pages of peer-reviewed medical journals to actual effects on routine care. Adverse anecdote can transform a clinician’s practice patterns in an instant.

The well told story, the compelling anecdote, the flashbulb memory – whatever you want to call that powerful single experience – is perhaps the strongest persuasion play of all. If you can design a Box that provokes an intense memorable, sensory, and affective response, you can create a Change that it is extremely difficult to change.

The easiest example for me to offer explodes out of Dissonance. Make people think they freely chose a path that leads to self relevant, but aversive, consequences and that collision will produce some of the largest and most enduring change you can find in the persuasion and influence literature.

Now, let’s pivot off this personal anecdote to the larger context: Changing medical practice. John Ioannidis, with his colleagues, continues his one-man crusade to get physicians to act more scientifically. We’ve consider Ioannidis’s work before with his investigations of Scientific Science and he now shifts his view to how physicians and medical science resist, of all things, science. Ioannidis asks medical science to consider how much practice is unproven, yet persistent. He considers how often medical science tests the commonplace.

Rarely, some investigators find the courage to test established “truths” with large, rigorous randomized trials. When this happens, empirical evidence suggests that “medical reversals” may be quite common. In an evaluation of 35 trials that were published in a major clinical journal in 2009 and that tested an established clinical practice, 16 (46%) reported results consistent with current beneficial practice, 16 (46%) reported evidence that contradicted current practice and constituted a reversal, and another 3 (9%) were inconclusive.

Please re-read the last sentence in that quote. In those 35 scientific tests of established practices, nearly half disconfirmed the practice, finding instead evidence of harm or no effect. One might scientifically challenge this evidence, noting it’s not a systematic review and focuses only upon research published in 2009. But, if you’re sharp enough to raise those concerns, how do you understand a field that calls itself scientific, yet can find at least 16 standard practices that are worthless? Maybe these are the only 16 rituals and by dumb luck they were all tested and published in the same year.

Or maybe you can see the persuasive power of personal experience as revealed in the opening example of this post. See this tension, too, in the recent and on-going uproar over the value of various medical tests as with prostate cancer. You’ll recall that a US Taskforce decided against routine screening for prostate cancer, citing a considerable number of gold standard RCTs as contrary evidence. Then, the unsurprising chorus of disagreement from physicians who found their experience more compelling than the scientific review of that Taskforce.

You see the primary clash between persuasion and science, between human nature and falling apples in these examples. People who aspire to science constantly find themselves trapped by their human nature as especially illuminated through persuasion science. They have a field committed to science that conducts standard practices that are worthless at best and sometimes harmful at worst. When confronted with large, careful, and public disconfirmations of those practices – as with the prostate screening example – they find narrow exceptions, errors, and inaccuracies and drive through the truck of their personal experience.

You can feel a wind of warning here. Where do you fail to follow your science and instead persist with what you know best and trust most, your experience? But, more importantly, understand how your knowledge of persuasion science aids your development as a scientist. The science of persuasion describes and explains why science resists itself.

Human nature always forgets falling apples until the fruit falls upon it.

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.