Early warnings about messages others will soon hear often increase resistance to those messages. In short, forewarning sabotages persuasion.
We’ve all done it. We find out that someone is about to make a pitch of dubious value to a friend or family member. And so we warn them. We tell them what they will probably hear in the next hours or days, and we urge them to be wary of accepting those claims.
This process of issuing what amounts to a pre-message warning about a subsequent message is called inoculation. It’s linguistic origin is in the medical idea that the body’s defenses can be tricked into responding as if it is infected. Those antibodies created when a benign form of a disease is introduced can have the effect of immunizing us against the real thing. Similar immunizing of a potential victim against harmful persuasion can have the same effect.
To see this at work in a structured setting recall courtroom dramas that have included scenes where the prosecution and defense take turns making opening statements. Following real life, those statements typically warn the jury about the questionable claims the other side will offer. “You will hear the Defense claim that the defendant was not at the scene of the robbery,” the Prosecution begins. “But don’t believe them. Listen carefully. They have no real evidence that the defendant was elsewhere.” And so it goes. It’s not that different from my actions as a grade-schooler when I broke a window in my house. The glass was in the way of an errant throw of a baseball to one of my friends. Thanks to his slippery hands and inability to jump ten feet I needed to be first at the car door when my parents came home. I was anxious to tell my side of the story before they heard a version that would put all the blame on me. Even children are natural persuasion strategists.
Most of the available research suggests inoculation is effective. Early warnings about future messages that will come from others substantially weaken those messages. So it generally makes sense to plan ahead when you know you will be in a struggle to win over the views of others.
Although this may sound like a strategy predicated on negative messages–to not accept what will be coming someone’s way–inoculation can actually be quite positive. It’s mostly how we discourage kids from taking up the cigarette habit. The Truth Campaign’s warnings about how tobacco products are “nicotine delivery systems” made to taste like candy reliably trigger a potential smoker’s natural desire to not be someone else’s pawn. It’s one of the winning strategies in a “drug war” that can claim few persuasion successes.
This summer as candidates prepare to enter the presidential sweepstakes, expect to hear some inoculation messages. Any candidate with unwanted personal baggage (legal, health, or family problems are the most common) will announce them in advance of the fall debate season. All candidates want to inoculate the American public against a steady drip of leaks or embarrassing revelations. By mentioning their problem early, the hope is that it becomes old news by the time citizens are ready to pay attention in the Fall.
Ownership of the thing itself—an urgency that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a fading passion.
I wonder about the future of the personal library: those numerous shelves lined with books and music that still line the walls of many of our homes. Owning a physical copy of the work of a writer or performer was, until recently, a sometimes obsessive pursuit for devoted listeners and readers. For many these displays of neatly organized works are a badge of honor, meant in part to suggest membership in certain aesthetic tribes within the culture.
I’m writing in a room cluttered with stuffed bookcases. It’s the same in other parts of the house, where CD cases sit on table tops and stand upright on shelves. We are clearly vestiges of the Edison past. In the early days of recording the idea of capturing sound was completely engrossing. Thomas Edison was as much in awe of the idea as everyone else. Add in the possibility of owning a disk of a performance that could be played at will, and the nation collectively swooned at the chance. Shellac cylinders and flat disks soon became their own fetishized possessions. Every middle class parlor had a record player and a growing collection of relatively expensive 78 r.p.m. records. Jump ahead several generations well into the 1990s and teens were still heirs to this passion of record collecting. British novelist Nick Hornby enshrined three clearly recognizable obsessives in his wonderful 1995 book, (and, later, a film) High Fidelity. In our own ways we were Jack Black: voracious readers of album liner-notes, and dead-certain of what to display with pride and what to hide.
Ownership is its own reward: something many of us still feel as we purchase a book we will read and perhaps re-read at a later time.
The personalized library has been memorialized by the wealthy with its own room in turn-of-the-century mansions. The rest of us starting out as impoverished students usually exercised the less baroque option of bookcases made from bricks and boards. In either case books were considered intellectual and decorating necessities. Their presence meant that you were a serious collector. Robert Pirsig on one shelf and Miles Davis on another conferred status.
Now the tide has receded. To more younger consumers in most places (except Japan, with its continuing love of CDs) these music and print libraries seem to be an anachronism, like the player-piano rolls I remember as a child collecting dust in a corner of my grandmother’s lace-curtained living room. Digital “natives” are just as happy essentially leasing access to commercial libraries, such as those offered by Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple and others. Even the e-book, which is sold as the digital equivalent of a hard copy, is never quite the owner’s in the ways that the paper version is. It can’t be easily loaned or resold because its storage is usually in a proprietary “cloud.” Digital “immigrants” used to owning works are not quite convinced that we will have access to the work in perpetuity. A cloud-based purchase of an author’s book or a composer’s symphony seems less permanent.
Communication scholar Joshua Meyrowitz partly explains what has changed in his use of the phrase, “the Association factor.” When we own a hard copy of another’s work—when it is in our physical possession—we more readily identify ourselves with it. It’s an artifact tied to our identity, an outward representation of our place on the human map. So if I am carrying around a copy of a particular novel or have a copy of music cd sitting in the living room, I’m probably prepared to defend its presence in my space. I’ve “associated” myself with it. By contrast, a person may feel no responsibility to defend a song that presents itself to houseguests on Spotify. The lease of a channel of media content seems less personal than outright ownership, even though custom music sources have the advantage of opening our ears to much larger libraries.
My own adult children are mostly consumers of these digital services, and just as passionate in their own ways about their music and books as earlier generations. But ownership of the thing itself—a fact that kept postwar teens in book and music stores for hours on end—seems to be a passing signifier of the avid appreciator. No doubt that for many modern consumers walls of CDs and books look archaic. Why hold “hard” copies if they are all available in digitized files? Perhaps the only answer is that some books and performances are too precious to not hold in one’s hands.
