In a field study, we collected data in a restaurant and manipulated bite size by providing diners with small or large forks. We found that diners consumed more from smaller rather than larger forks. Utilizing motivation literature, which ties into the unique factors present in a restaurant consumption setting (e.g., diners have a well-defined goal of hunger satiation because they invest effort by visiting a specific restaurant, choose from a menu, and pay money for the meal), we present our rationale for the pattern of results.

Sounds pretty obvious, right. Small forks cue Big eating since each bite is Small. Big forks cue Small eating since each bite is Big. Easy-peesey. Here’s a graph to illustrate.

And, this is not a trivial effect.

We assessed the influence of fork size on the weight of the food left on the plate (less food on the plate indicated more consumption) while controlling for the weight of the initial food served, food price, meal occasion (lunch vs. dinner), appetizer (yes vs. no) and alcohol consumption (yes vs. no). This ANCOVA showed that the use of the larger fork resulted in more food left on the plate (i.e., less quantity consumed) than the smaller fork (Mlarge = 7.91 ounces vs. Msmall = 4.43 ounces; F(1, 98) = 7.80, p < .01, partial η2 = .07).

That η2 (eta squared) of .07 translates into a Small+ Windowpane, about 40/60 which would probably be obvious to an observant observer who was looking for an effect. Thus, if you were a dishwasher for this restaurant, you could probably see the difference on the amount of food left on plates between the Small and Big fork conditions. Hey, 4 ounces versus 8 ounces is a lot of spagetti and meatballs.

So the Small fork causes people to eat more because each bite is too small and so they take more bites and more food. The Big fork actually has the effect of reducing caloric consumption. Cue up the Food Police! If we can put calorie counts on menus why not fork size specifications!

Except.

Moreover, in a controlled lab study we demonstrate that when these factors are absent, the pattern of results is reversed.

What? Reversed? Yes. And practical, too.

Using ANCOVA, we assessed the influence of fork size on the weight of pasta left on the plate while controlling for the initial weight of the pasta served. The results showed that those assigned to the large fork condition left less pasta in the bowl (i.e., consumed more pasta) than those in the smaller fork condition (Mlarge = 4.09 ounces vs. Msmall = 5.19 ounces; F(1, 78) = 4.73, p < .03, partial η2 = .05).

This eta squared is another Small+ Windowpane, about a 40/60 difference. And again, someone who was really looking could probably see the practical difference here as in our sweaty dishwasher cleaning up the plates.

Small forks cue Small eating? Didn’t the first study report Big forks cue Small eating? What the hell is going on here? Which is it? A fork is a fork, right? The Food Police are not happy. Cancel that march on the White House.

This is a cross over interaction where a relationship is positive under one condition then negative under another condition.  Stated another way, it depends.  Stated under persuasion labels, the play depends upon the box or what’s the Local?

The trick here is the motivational set of the eater. In the first study with Small Fork, Big Eats:

In our consumption context, we observe that diners visit the restaurant with a well-defined goal of satiating their hunger, and, because of this well-defined goal, they are willing to invest effort and resources to satiate their hunger. Since research has shown that free choice captures realistic behavior more accurately than forced choice situations (Dhar and Simonson 2003), a restaurant offers diners several methods to exercise free choice in satiating their hunger. For instance, diners select a restaurant of their choice, choose an entrée (or entrées) from the menu of offerings, pay for their food, and have the option to take home leftovers. Therefore, people invest effort in order to satiate their hunger.

When the Other Guy has the goal of Satisfying Hunger, then we get Small Forks, Big Eats. But, in the second study with Small Fork, Small Eats:

Eighty-one participants took part in this study for partial course credit. They were told that this was a food consumption study, and each participant was taken to a separate table. They were then offered a preweighted bowl of pasta salad with either a small or a large fork and a bottle of water. The same forks from the restaurant study were used. A pasta salad was served, since several bites are required for consumption rather than a single forkful. Participants were left alone and allowed to consume as much as they wanted.

When the Other Guy has the goal of fulfilling the requirements of a study, we get Small Forks, Small Eats. The effect of fork size depends upon why the Other Guy is using the fork. For Hungry Other Guys fork size means something different than for UnHungry Other Guys doing a marketing study.

Mavens, understand persuasion by the function of a variable, not its structure, content, or appearance. How, not What. You can always spot the amateur on this play. Understand the function or how the thing does what it does, not what it is. See the difference between Doing and Being.

Wow. Philosophical Persuasion Theory!

More entertaining is the Cool Table media comment on this article. You can read the NYT, WSJ, Huffington Post, and Time for their details, but here’s the main point: They missed the main point! Each media comment on this study catches only the first study with Small Forks and Big Eats and completely misses the functional truth of the cross over interaction.  Those Cool Table players drop their maven masks to reveal muggle mugs underneath.  They each and all think Small Forks, Big Eats, so buy a Bigger Fork to lose weight!

Want to join the Cool Table? Carry a Big Fork and Eat Softly.

Want to Change the Other Guys eating? Determine Their goal, then fork them appropriately.

It Depends!

All Persuasion Is Local.

Arul Mishra, Himanshu Mishra and Tamara M. Masters. (2012). The Influence of Bite Size on Quantity of Food Consumed: A Field Study. Journal of Consumer Research , Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 791-795

DOI: 10.1086/660838

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.

My Headline Persuasion Rule should drive any serious persuasion effort and it separates the mavens from the muggles instantly. Muggles extemporize, displaying either or both arrogance or authenticity. Mavens think a long while first. And they think about the Strategy, the Big Goal, because they know if you don’t get the Big Goal right, nothing else matters. Today I’ve got a serious, real world example of that strategic planning for persuasion.

Consider the strategy inherent to these questions.

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

This, according to a published article based on face to face interviews with key Israeli leaders is how they are thinking about responding when and if they believe Iran will possess nuclear weapons. The long article develops their strategic planning over the past ten years and the following tactics. In many ways, the article is a blueprint for thinking and acting, strategically and tactically. I highly recommend that anyone who pretends to persuasion maven status read it.

I observe and approve of the clear-eyed or hard-headed focus on concrete outcomes. The strategy produces observable, countable, physical changes. There’s no flowery self-persuasion as if you need to justify the strategy to yourself. It directly aims at doing explicit activities at an explicit group of Other Guys. A persuasion plan falls naturally out of the strategy behind these three key points.

The three key points also provide a great hierarchy of concerns. The first concerns sheer ability and enhancing that. The second concerns allies and public opinion. The third seeks alternatives to the first point. You know how to prioritize with this hierarchy and you also understand you need to address all three simultaneously.

The article then develops how this strategy has played out and is playing out in tactics, some of which I consider as persuasion plays rather than power plays. Even events that involve killing people function more persuasively than just the removal of a key Other Guy. Such violent acts frighten some Other Guys who remove participation or support for the Iranian project – that’s delay and damage. These acts also encourage internal dissenters and opposition. Finally, these acts force potential allies to think about the Iranian project.

It’s also interesting to note how talkative these Israeli leaders are right now. Normally you associate silence with Israel on issues like this. They do or don’t do what they do and always refuse public comment on everything. The fact of their public talk demonstrates a more clear communication application of persuasion than the persuasive effects of killing lead scientists. Consider this quote from Ehud Barak, the defense minister of Israel.

At various points in our conversation, Barak underscored that if Israel or the rest of the world waits too long, the moment will arrive — sometime in the coming year, he says — beyond which it will no longer be possible to act. “It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay,” he said. “Not for us, not for Europe and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands — the statesmen and decision-makers — and into yours — the journalists and historians.”

Here the Israelis are using fairly traditional persuasion – interviews with journalists – as a persuasive tactic in the service of the three key points. This interview and in particular this quote speaks directly to the second key point regarding allies. We see an Argument from Barak regarding the Iranian nuclear project and what should be done and that Argument is aimed squarely at allies, especially the US.

Regardless of your opinion on this issue, please see the persuasion planning and execution in it. Focus on the three key points that express the strategy and their implications for persuasion. Learn how to devise strategy that is this clear, behavioral, measurable, and operational.

Every field that aspires to science uses numbers to prosecute its business. If You Can’t Count It, You Can Publish It! So, numbers, particularly in the form of statistical analysis are a crucial part of science. Yet, as I’ve demonstrated numerous times in the Persuasion Blog, some science is mere sophistical statistics, those persuasive presentations of p < .0something, the rhetoric of research. The worse the science the better the persuasion, right?

Of course, this is just one fool’s opinion and he’s cherry picking examples to fit his argument. Show me something other than your sarcasm, Steve.

Okay. How about this demonstration of sophistical statistics.

We related the reluctance to share research data for reanalysis to 1148 statistically significant results reported in 49 papers published in two major psychology journals. We found the reluctance to share data to be associated with weaker evidence (against the null hypothesis of no effect) and a higher prevalence of apparent errors in the reporting of statistical results. The unwillingness to share data was particularly clear when reporting errors had a bearing on statistical significance.

This summary gives it up nicely. Three researchers reanalyzed the published statistics in 49 papers in either the 2005 issues of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, two well respected psychology journals. These particular papers were chosen because another research team had contacted the authors of the studies in a previous project, merely asking for a copy of the datasets used in the publications. Some of the 49 authors provided the data, some didn’t. After waiting five years (5 years!!!), the current team pulled the studies and checked the results sections for errors and inconsistencies.

As the researchers noted in the Abstract they found that authors who would not disclose data had more errors of statistical analysis and that the tests of statistical significance were much more likely to be extremely close to the p < .05 level. Here’s a pie chart that displays errors by data shared or not.

Even among researchers who shared the data, there were errors in their analyses, but just eyeballing the differences between the two groups, you can see that folks who refused to share data (after five years!) made more of all kinds of errors. And, the differences are Medium to Large Windowpanes, 35/65 to 25/75 differences, so they are obvious, practical, relevant. What’s more, authors who did not share had data with marginal results; they were more likely to report p values at or near the traditional .05 alpha while authors who shared data found results with much smaller alphas (> .001). Here’s a bar chart to illustrate.

You can see that the gray bars represent authors who did not share and that they had more errors at or near .05 and .01, traditional, almost ritualistic, markers of effect. You can understand why they were reluctant to share.  If you found results, but didn’t share your data, chances were good the results were small effects that you had to finagle to achieve even statistical significance. No wonder these authors found good reasons to withhold their data even after five years of waiting.

Oh, and if you’re not familiar with the publication ethics of publishing in these journals, you need to know that all authors have to sign a contract when they publish stating that they will share data when it is requested. This is not a matter of personal preference or taste; it is a professional standard of behavior with your signature of agreement and consent on it.

Authors who don’t share data are not doing good science. Their inaction violates both the letter and spirit of a contractual agreement they made when publishing. They obviously withhold data because they know they engaged in sophistical statistics and if anyone else ran the data, they’d expose the rhetorical research.

So, through a thoughtful research project on statistical analysis in peer review journals we actually learn a lesson about human nature and persuasion.

All Bad Science Is Persuasive!

Wicherts JM, Bakker M, Molenaar D (2011) Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results. PLoS ONE 6(11): e26828.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026828

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.