Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

The Seductive Rhetoric of Conspiracy

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Singular explanations that cast entire communities in the same mold are a reminder that we articulate what we need more than what we know.

The stories we tell ourselves can be breathtaking in their credulity. Who could respond otherwise to an account by an old John Bircher that would have us believe a member of the Senate died because the Soviets planted radium in his chair;1 or that cartoon animators were collaborating to turn Daffy Duck into a shill for communist propaganda;2 or that Princess Diana was intentionally rubbed out by the royal family,3 or that there are about 80 “Communists” in the current House of Representatives?4 or that the KKK is “a leftist group.”5  Singular explanations that cast entire communities in the same mold are a reminder that we articulate what we need more than what we know.

On their face, characterizations of collective motives are always implausible. Groups of humans are never really of one mind. Anyone who has worked in a multi-layered organization or tried to get definitive answers from a committee probably carries some of the shrapnel thrown off from their fractured responses.6 To be sure, humans are social animals. But it doesn’t follow that they behave with the uniformity that the grammar of our descriptions implies. We are simply not well suited to think or act in complete concordance with others. The need to define the boundaries of our own worlds is strong, and a language of simple pronouns propels us into delusions of uniformity.

On those occasions when groups seem to be functioning as one, we are willing to pay handsomely to watch it happen: at a football game, attending a performance by a great orchestra, or perhaps watching a play, where what the writer and actors intended more or less unfolds as planned. The attractions of perfect coordination are undeniable. Synchronicity creates the impression of coherence. And from the illusion of coherence we look for shared intentionality.

The more enlightened assumption is surely to expect natural divergence. Descriptions of behavior have more credibility when they are understood in their uniqueness. There is even something pleasing when unimpeachable fact sabotages the smothering weight of a glib assertion. Good histories often provide this function: for example, when reminders of the impressive civil rights legacy of Lyndon Johnson defeat the instinct to place him in a rogue’s gallery of regressive Southern “pols,”7 or when we discover that Hollywood was largely invented by Eastern European Jews who set out to create fantasies of middle-American normalcy.8 Unassailable details like these have a way of wringing out the excesses of condensed and fantasized narratives.

The justifiable caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our rhetorical nature.

Even so, the well-grounded caution against defining others in categorical terms is nothing less than an offense to our rhetorical nature. Talk gains importance from the mostly false imprimatur of categorical certainty. We always need to find a way to marvel again at how language sets down the tracks of thought. Discourse is enabled by the descriptive uniformity made possible by the language of “them.” Add in the trio of “us,” “we” and “they” and we have the core terms that can map the boundaries of alien territory. Against the realist’s impulse for practical observation, there is a countervailing compulsion in our public discussion to find forms of generalization that will add force to our arguments. Aggregating “their” presumed motives tantalizes us with the kind of intelligibility that allows making sense of factions that matter, including those from whom we want to stand apart. It’s our nature to enter the fray of ordinary conversation often ignoring caveats about what a gloss of simplified characterization misses.

Interestingly, we are always willing to describe the uniqueness of the causative factors in our own biographies. We cherish our individuality and implicitly ask those around us to acknowledge it. But our search for universals that can be applied to others is unquenchable.

All of this takes on more urgency in an election year, when the tight compression of candidate’s comments in our news media encourages what amounts to speaking in gross overgeneralizations.  Arguments and evidence tend to vanish from our discussions, replaced only by highly inaccurate characterizations of individuals by age, gender, their own religious traditions, political affiliations, and their home regions.   We usually know these risks.  Even so, we look for uniform intentions as a pathway to easy understanding of complex phenomena.

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Adapted from Gary C. Woodward, The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs (Lexington Books, 2014).

1. Steven Goldzwig, “Conspiracy Rhetoric at the Dawn of the New Millennium: A Response,” Western Journal of Communication, Fall, 2002, 492.

2. Karl Cohen, “Toontown’s Reds: HUAC’s Investigation of Alleged Communists in the Animation Industry,” Film History, June, 1993, Ebsco Communication and Mass media Complete, accessed April 17, 2012.

3. Nicholas Witchell, “Fayed Conspiracy Claim Collapses,” BBC News, April 7, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7326311.stm, accessed April 2, 2012.

4. This was the belief of former Congressman Allen West. United Press International, “West: 81Democrats in Congress Communists,” April 11, 2012, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/04/11/West-81-Democrats-in-Congress-Communists/UPI-77841334174749/, accessed April 30, 2012. West narrowly lost his re-election bid in 2012.

5. Jeffrey Lord on CNN, quoted in Salon, June 10, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/06/10/good_lord_what_a_fiasco_cnns_shameless_trump_surrogate_is_poisoning_our_national_discourse_partner/

6. For Franklin Roosevelt, the villains were the Departments of the Treasury, State, and the Navy. To “change anything” was nearly impossible, he noted. See Emmett John Hughes, The Living Presidency (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), 184.

7. Robert Caro, “The Compassion of Lyndon Johnson,” The New Yorker, April 1, 2002, 56-77.

8. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own (New York: Crown, 1988).

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

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The Mistake of Communication as Chemistry

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In some ways the reduction of the fabulously complex mind to the connectivity of neurons is akin to describing a piece of music in terms of the physics of air pressure.

Twenty five years ago interest in the subject of communication was largely confined to a limited circle of teachers and researchers in the fields of rhetoric, marketing and psychology.  In addition, there has always been a uniquely American fascination with provocative topics like political “brainwashing,” advertising and the contagious cultural fads of the young. But over the period of the last quarter decade the circumference of the borders of communication, persuasion and related topics has grown to such an extent that it is even pushed into formerly distant fields such as ethnography and neurobiology.  Especially in the latter field it now common for researchers to track “neural pathways” activated when subjects are exposed to everything from “shooter” video games to deodorant ads. Adherents to this approach are sometimes so confident of the possibilities in linking all human action to physical first causes that a few have even issued warnings to psychologists and psychotherapists that the days of talk therapies are numbered.  So much for the idea of the individual as a truly free agent. The underlying assumption is that brain chemistry will eventually make personality transparent.

Factor in the alleged existence of brain “plasticity” which makes it possible to adapt to digital media and the dominant daily activity of Americans of attending to screens, and it becomes clear why nearly everyone is now in the thrall of the neurobiology of social influence.

To be sure, expanding explorations of how we try to affect each other is always going to be a good thing. But the growing fashion for seeking answers using brain imaging devices seems badly misguided. Mapping the “brain activity” of individuals while they view movies, play video games or scan web pages involves all kinds of dubious simplifications. There is no question that we have much to learn about specific brain locations and routes that are awakened by certain kinds of media and presentational forms. And while there is ample evidence that some messages and activities influence hormone releases that effect mood and feelings, the mistake of such mapping offers the false impression that a relatively new “science” will give the analysis of persuasion a level of certainly that it has never had.

It badly misses the mark to assume that persuasion can be understood as a function of chemical and electrical processes in the brain. After all, human communication is about the engagement of the mind, with all of the personal uniqueness that comes with it. The brain is indeed the physical site where thinking—cognition—takes place.  But unlike nearly all other body organs, the brain has no single function.  Instead, it encompasses a world of possibilities that are ultimately realized when an individual’s biography and memory are brought into play. It facilitates thought and perception, but in ways that are always intimately tied to the experiences of the individual.  A person’s cognitive presence involves a rich mixture of early influences, their own social history and attendant memories.  All may be possible because of brain synapses, but their significant effects have to be measured on their own terms: what meanings we assign to messages, how we feel about a subject, what we “know,” and what we believe about our intentions and those of others.  In short, an individual’s interpretation of another’s words and actions is an outcome flowing from an infinite set of social, circumstantial and physical origins.  It’s this interpretative function that makes communication so much more interesting to approach in biographical rather than bio-chemical terms.

In some ways the reduction of the fabulously complex mind to the connectivity of neurons is akin to describing a piece of music in terms of the physics of air pressure. To be sure, it is easy to measure sound this way, converting pressure into frequencies that can be displayed on an audio analyzer. But to study music or persuasion by focusing on their physical processes has the effect of mistaking the conditions necessary for their production with the deeper complexities of their essence.

Neuroscience researchers will often concede as much.  But journalists trying to catch the next intellectual wave need to be reminded that a competent analyst of  communication must first be an interpreter keyed into the unique worlds of audiences, who construct significance and meaning from the mysterious depths of their own rich experience.

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Adapted from the Introduction in Gary C. Woodward and Robert E. Denton Jr., Persuasion and Influence in American Life, Seventh Edition (Longrove Ill.: Waveland, 2014.