Tag: public affairs

We go through phases in my work where we spend way too much time fighting rumors and accusations.  It rarely seems to do much good.  People believe all sorts of silly things, sometimes things that if true would violated the laws of physics, but they believe them. Attacking rumor with mere truth is sometimes worse than doing nothing.  Our comments are taken as confirmations of the rumor. After all, the old saying goes that “where there is smoke, there is fire,” and many people seem to figure that strenuous denials indicate that something important has come out.  “Fair” people will look at both sides with equanimity, thinking that the truth must be in the middle.  It rarely is. If you see a discussion between someone who believes the world is flat and one who tells you it is round, they both do not have good arguments and you should not conclude that truth lies in the middle, maybe earth is shaped like a cough lozenge.

Human belief is a complicated system.  I have come to understand that there are some arguments you cannot win, no matter how much truth you possess. The way to prevail is  to run around them.  Bring the weight of attention onto something else.  Change the frame.  These are all things smart persuaders do, yet we still get stuck in the denial game.  Sometimes we have to play that game, but it should be low key. Put the facts out there, but don’t play on that unfair field.  My personal favorite tactic is to get someone else to ridicule the opponent’s stand, but this is hard to do and can created backlash.

I read a good article about this recently in the Economist explaining that some researchers from Kellogg School of Journalism & at Stanford have come up with research that shows with some academic rigor what public affairs professionals know is a rougher and more intuitive fashion.   

The researchers experimented by planting rumors among undergraduates.  With each repetition, they found that skepticism diminished, increasing the chances that the students would believe them.  So what do you do?   The best thing to do is flood the zone with positive messages.   This takes the fuel out of the rumor fire.

Early in my career, I read a book by Herb Schmertz, the head of PR at Mobile. It was called “Goodbye to the Low Profile.”  As his title implies, Schmertz advocated a kick-ass relationship with critics. He felt that businesses were letting their adversaries get away with attacking them and it was not working for them.  There were lots of rumors and innuendo spread about energy companies, then as now.  Schmertz mentioned one dramatic example of countering disinformation, when he described how Mobile debunked the myth that energy companies had tankers full of oil just outside American harbors waiting for prices to rise. Mobile took journalists up in helicopters and challenged them find them.   Of course, they couldn’t.  

Schmertz never really solved the problem free riders. Everybody in the industry benefits when somebody takes on critics, but the firm that does the heavy work not only has to pay the expense of the counterattacks, but also makes itself a target for activists and is likely to bring in political pressure.  Most firms opt to keep as quiet as possible and hope that the false charges don’t cost them too much.  The idea of a “good news flood” addresses this.  It doesn’t provide much of an opportunity to counter attack and it can be justified as image building or even advertising.

The thing I remember most about the book was the saying “Yes, we have no bananas.” Schmertz chose the words from an old and familiar song. (I remember it sung by Jimmy Durante, but evidently it was a big song by many.)  The fact that I still remember it shows the usefulness of a memorable handle. That was one lesson I took.  But the underlying explanation was also useful. The idea is that you always bridge from the negative to the positive. If you say, we don’t have any bananas; it is just a negative statement.  “Yes, we have no bananas” says the same thing.  But it brings a little positive levity. Nobody is fooled, but it takes the edge off.

The good news flood is a more effective and practical way to do this. It frustrates critics, since if done well it changes the game and marginalizes them.  Sometimes they are honesty angry because they think you are not answering their questions, but nothing says you have to do that. There are always many ways to look at anything.  Their way is only one and probably not the best. When I read more on the subject of persuasion, I found out that this was called reframing or redirecting.  It is a potent tool, especially if you actually have good news to tell.  You don’t have to take the frame you are handed and you should always test any frame for validity. Some questions cannot be answered satisfactorily as stated. The classic example is when you are asked to answer yes or no to the question, “Do you still beat your wife.” An even more pernicious formula is when you are asks something like, “Why do you hate [name the group]? There is no way you can bring facts to bear on those subjects. The questioner knows this. It is not honest.   If you have to respond, talk over him/her to a wider audience.

Reframing is in order.

I am making a presentation about public affairs at FSI in a few weeks.  It is a short presentation to mid-level officers. Below is some of the raw material thinking I have been doing about irrationality and reciprocity in persuasion. I figure that all of the stuff below will distill into one or two short paragraphs, but thinking it through is useful and I think better when I can write and ramble.  Since I have it written out, I figured I would post it.   

We like to think the truth will always come out, but isn’t necessarily so. Similarly, people are often not persuaded by facts or even their own experience. Persuasion just is not logical in the way we want. 

If people do not always (or even usually) respond rationally to arguments and persuasion, they do tend to respond in recognizable patterns. Marketers and salesmen have known this intuitively – and used it effectively – for many years. Only recently has science or at least academics, recognized and tried to explain the phenomenon. Here are some of the books that talk about that. There is some overlap with a list I made earlier about decision making that you can see at this link. 

I won’t try to convey all the information in all those books on the lists above. Suffice to say that people respond differently to identical sets of propositions or incentives depending on how they are stated, framed or presented and that people’s preexisting predilections, prejudices and perceptions determine not only which arguments are most persuasive but also which facts are considered salient or even heard at all. That is why attempts to “set the record straight” usually only work with those already inclined to believe you. If the bad news is that people do not make decisions rationally, the good news is that they make their irrational* decisions in patterns that can be understood if not perfectly predicted. The bad news that comes after the good news is that these patterns can also be manipulated by those whose motives and goals we abhor, so the lesson is that we are playing this game, whether we like it or not. 

So if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to our success in the Cold War because accurate information was in very short supply. Today in all but the dwindling coterie dictatorships in the world’s most benighted places, information is already available.  It is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives – that counts. As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what even science is beginning to explain. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success. 

The first persuasion decision you have to make is whether or not to engage at all. No matter how urgent a problem, you should not engage unless you have a reasonable chance of success.   There are times for aggressive action, times for more passive approaches and times when you just have to hunker down until conditions improve. It is hard to know when the times or right and even harder to manage the transitions among them, which is why people who are good at knowing make the big bucks and are sought after or reviled (depending on which side they are on). 

There are some folks who say that you should be out there always and they are right that you should never fold entirely if it is something you care about and you have the capacity to stay.  But standing in front of an irresistible wave not only depletes your resources but also makes you less able to fight again another day. It is much better to let the wave expend its energy and then come back in.

Once you are engaged, think of it in a negotiation paradigm, not usually a negotiation between you and an adversary, but more of the win-win with you among a large number of participants.  Most people involved are not direct participants, but they are often the ones you want to persuade.   The committed radicals are not the targets of your persuasion.  There is no argument you can use and no concession you can make that will persuade them.  Your job is to talk over, around or through them.  Luckily, few people are really committed radicals and you can find some common ground with almost anybody.

Let’s talk about common ground. What if you have some monumental disagreement with somebody?  You might think that you cannot make any progress until the big thing is solved and then lament that the big thing is unsolvable. This is the wrong way of looking at it. In negotiations, it might be possible to set aside the big thing and work on a series of mutually beneficial smaller one.   Sometimes the momentum from successfully addressing the little issues makes solving the big one possible.  Just as often, it makes the big issue less relevant.  Most big problems are never “solved” in the context in which they were created. They are just overtaken by events. The situation might change so that it just doesn’t matter.    

Some families have a rule that you cannot discuss religion or politics. They know that agreement on these issues is nearly impossible, that a dialogue will just create more tension and that they can be safely avoided at family gatherings. 

Denial and avoidance are perfectly good tactics. Many things really do not need to be talked through and resolved and much diplomacy involved making sure sleeping dogs are not disturbed.  Not everybody likes this strategy and there will be persistent calls to “get it out in the open”.   There may be a time for this kind of frontal assault, but if dialogue will merely sharpen differences without resolving them and entrench individuals in their positions it is pernicious.  In the case of any contentious issue, there are also always a fair number of people who are professionally aggrieved.  Their goal is to keep the dialogue alive and fresh as long as possible.  In a rational world, dialogue would almost always produce better outcomes, but we don’t live in a perfectly rational world (see above).

If we are wise to avoid the frontal assault, what do we do about hard issues? When possible go around them, avoid the grievance professionals when possible and deny them a forum when you can. In public affairs, as in negotiation, you never want to be stuck on one issue where you cannot divert or make tradeoffs. One of the strengths of diversity is that it waters down grievances. If you have two opposing groups with one intransigent issue, you have a problem. But you have an interesting community if you have a dozen such groups.   

So in addition to denial, add dilution to your public affairs tool box.

Some people think it is naive to talk about win-win negotiation.  They say that somebody has got to come out on top. Avoid such people if possible because working with them will often lead to such an unhappy result. For most other things, however, we can all get more of what we want.  That is the whole basis of free exchange and cooperation in general. People all do not want the same things most things you get from a free exchange will be worth more to you than what you gave up.  The same goes for the guys on the other side and the same goes in persuasion as in negotiation.

The problem comes with the natural and good human desire to be generous. Win-win doesn’t mean giving away more than you should.  It doesn’t mean sacrifice. Those things are lose-win. It means that you get what you want AND I get what I want. Nobody should go into an engagement unless he/she believes that. But we do.

One of the dumbest things you can do is to make needless concessions.  It is not generous to give away your important positions. It is just dumb and it makes nobody really happy. Everybody will think that you are insincere. Either you didn’t really believe in your own position in the first place or you are lying about your concession, or –even worse – you are patronizing. There are to be a mutuality, a reciprocity.

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. You want to be able to give to your fellow man and expect that he will do the same when you are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if you don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. You might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected.  At first they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor.  And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.

A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give.  Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. You notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts you can receive is advice and knowledge.  Let others share their culture and experience.

I have had my biggest successes in public affairs when I genuinely wanted to learn something. My first assignment when I got to Poland a few years back was to write a report on the Polish media. I interviewed dozens of reporters, editors and academics and they became my best contacts, often sending me updates or referring to my questions even months and years later. The most influential thing you can often do with an individual is listen carefully to what they tell you and come back a while later being honestly able to say, “I was thinking about what you said and you were right.” This interest cannot be easily faked.  I have been “played” by people who have taken the course and try to feign interest in my esoteric pursuits or ask my advice. When they praise the insights, but repeatedly fail to act on them, trust disappears. Of course, maybe I have run into people who are just so good at it that I couldn’t tell.  I suppose that would be successful persuasion.

——————-

*   I use the term “irrational” cautiously. “Rational” decision making is overrated and under examined. We make decisions based on a variety of preferences and emotional factors, some of which we cannot state. When they are reduced to their “rational” components, they may no longer make sense. There are things that really cannot be reduced to rational parts. The lyrics to “Some Enchanted Evening” actually sum it up well, “Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” Or we can quote GK Chesterton “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” If we seek only rational decisions, a computer can do it for us much better than we can.

Influence means changing behaviors. Changing attitudes, raising awareness and altering opinions are all important but ONLY to the extent that they lead to changed behaviors. Research shows that the link between most attitudes and behaviors is sometimes weak and sometimes not present at all. (Most of the people who hate us don’t try to harm us and many of the people who try to harm us don’t hate us.)   

Those were some of the surprising things I heard at a presentation yesterday. The guy said that we have to look for the drivers of behaviors, which may be very different from what we think they are what people say they are or even what the people involved themselves believe they are.

He gave the example of a middle aged man who buys and expensive car. If you ask him why he wants that Corvette or Jaguar, he will probably tell you (and believe) that it is because of the performance, the fine leather seats, the comfort and reliability etc. What he is really doing is trying to impress others.   

Many times the drivers of behaviors involve social inclusion. People want to be part of a group and/or improve their status within it. The reasons they give are often rationalizations.  It is hard to find the accurate reasons by asking the people  involved, since they are often deceiving even themselves, but ask the neighbors and acquaintances. The middle aged owner of a muscle car thinks he is just interested in the vehicle.  His neighbors know that he bought it to show off his wealth or impress women with his still youthful and powerful outlook.  

Our public diplomacy goal is to have deep influence on large groups and this is very hard. Nobody else really does this. When you look to the advertising world, you see that they are usually trying to influence shallow, short term decisions. They want to sell a product or service and that requires little in the way of long term influence. Politics is not much better. The whole campaign culminates in a single transaction, which costs the person nothing and requires no long term commitment.  As politicians learn to their sorrow, the extreme love the voters profess for them on Election Day usually will not translate into long term behavioral change and will not even guarantee a repeat of the same behavior two or four years down the road.

This is why public diplomacy remains an art and not a science. It is complicated by the fact that we are working in other cultures, but knowing the culture is also not enough. (I am always suspicious of those “experts” who claim to know what 1.2 million Muslims or a billions Chinese are really thinking.  Experts like that are a blight that should be avoided.)  We Americans know our own cultures very well, but how many of us can accurately predict, let alone influence the behaviors of our compatriots six month in the future? We have to understand before we can influence, but where to start?

It is good to look at what people have been doing for a long time and accept that they have a good reason for doing what they do. It may not be a correct reason from our point of view.  It may not even be objectively accurate, but it is a driver of behavior because it serves some useful purpose from the point of view of the person doing it.  

So the first task is to identify the driver of behaviors we want to encourage or slow down and then address them, recognizing that the ostensible driver is probably not the real one.   Our confusion about the stated driver and the real ones is a reason why many of our outreach efforts produce the results they do.   

A terrorist might say that he wants to kill to avenge some earlier perceived wrong, but he is not telling the truth (even if he believes it).  Put in a pragmatic way, removing his ostensible grievance would not change his behavior, although it might impel him to revise his grievance list.  I thought of last week’s talk by Ghaffar Hussein on understanding radicals.

So … what do we do?

First we admit that it is not easy. Public diplomacy is not a science, but it can benefit from some scientific methods. The first should be to have some firm behavior based objectives. A goal to “change attitudes” or “raise awareness” is not sufficient. I have to admit that it would be hard for me to come up with objectives for many of our general public diplomacy programs, but the task is easier when we are talking about countering radicals.  We might define goals such as “cut donations to radical groups,” “reduce recruitment,” or “eliminate offers of safe havens.” After that, we need to formulate a hypothesis about how this might happen as a result of our work. This would be something we could test.  We don’t do this very often and the speaker  offered that some of our attempts at Muslim engagement don’t really do much of anything, since the real drivers of behavior are not our attitudes toward Islam, and even if they were we would not have the authority or credibility to address them.   

The proliferation of information on the web has proven a wonderful laboratory for social research, since you can see relationships, sometimes literally graphically. The web has shown itself to be a decent measure of non-web behavior, but so far is less useful as a driver.  Some of this has to do with us. Very often we are not present in the places where influence is exerted and if we are there, we are not authoritative enough to make an impact.

Influence and authority are not fungible. This is a bit of a change on the web versus earlier times. You used to have influence or authority because of the influence or authority of the sender. We listened to the official BECAUSE he was the official.  Here the USG is acting from a position of disadvantage. Most of the people we want to influence don’t respect our authority in the subjects at hand. Star power has also greatly diminished. A celebrity can draw a crowd, but influence only follows from having something compelling to say. Now the power lies in the reception of the audience. And it is not only how many listen to you, but more importantly WHO.   Most people are not influential.  You want to get the respect of those who are. You have to appeal to the influencers and to do that you have to have something THEY will consider new or useful. 

Technologies can help us identify the influentials and the links among them. We can see the content, topology (links) and dynamics of networks in ways and detail we never could before.  LES (latent Semantic analysis), the stuff Google uses, does a great job identifying patterns. Language reveals biases and ideologies and so these systems are very useful.  But the computer cannot read.  It just sees a bag of words and sorts them based on their proximity. We need to see or create useful taxonomy and there is no structured or permanent taxonomy, so we just cannot let it go by itself. There is no garden w/o the gardener and nobody has yet invented a perpetual motion device.

Once again we come back to the human factor.  Humans influence humans. Our systems can supplement and enable human expertise, but they cannot replace it. We still have to set the goals and monitor the progress because if we don’t know where we are going, we probably will end up someplace else. Our technologies will help us get to the wrong place faster.