Tag Archives: communication boomerangs

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When Results Fall Short of Expectations

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , ,

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A number of years of writing and teaching has forced me to be a student of the unexpected ricochet. That’s pretty much the whole game if you are playing racquetball, and it has a lot of relevance to communication.

second thoughtsThe actual court for the game is simply a 20 by 40-foot white box with walls that function as a playing surfaces for several players hitting a hard rubber ball. It’s typically smashed so hard against the playing wall that it comes back at speeds and angles are hard to predict. Those missed shots off the walls, ceiling or floor are how you score points against your opponent. Those who have escaped the sting of that small missile can be thankful. It hurts. A bruised French player must have coined the word “ricochet.” But it also evokes the unanticipated associations, meanings, slights, and bogus significations possible every time we open our mouths. More than most kinds of human endeavor, persuasion is fraught with effects that are unforeseen. No wonder it is so difficult.

From a number of meta-studies we know that the odds of getting someone to alter their attitudes even after a flurry of good reasons have been presented is—on the best days—no better than maybe one in ten. After explaining this theory of “minimal effects” in a class, a student glumly asked, “What’s the point? Why bother? The challenge hardly seems worth the effort.”

The short answer is that we have no choice. We are hard-wired to connect. And, by the way, who says that convincing another person to give up an attitude or a cherished behavior should be easy? We’ve worked hard to put our lives together in some sort of coherent way; we are not going to rearrange them on a whim.

It’s best to consider what can go wrong. In persuasion theory, unexpected effects are called “boomerangs.” The idea is important to remember because even well-planned campaigns to change others’ behaviors can easily veer off course. I teach this logic, and encourage my students to wear their newly acquired skepticism as a badge of honor. Having a healthy level of doubt about predicted effects is a life skill. Recall Elon Musk brandishing his chain saw in the Oval Office, or hoisting his arm in some sort of Fascist salute, or demonstrating  the toughness of his truck’s windows as one breaks.  All were surely not what the unpopular Musk intended.

Consider some additional cases, mostly true:

  • You show up to give an invited presentation to a group and (a) there is no screen for the PowerPoints you counted on, (b) there is nowhere to plug in your video projector, (c) there is no podium for your notes and (d) and a crew of ten men and machines are busy re-paving the parking lot next door.  Under these circumstances, how effective do you think will can be?
  • Your advertising agency has prepared a gay-friendly ad campaign that tested well and is now running in three national media outlets. Everyone on the creative team basks in their certain rewards of their progressive messages. But a respected leader in the LGBT community condemns the ads for “promoting old stereotypes.”  Condemnation of the ads is getting more attention than the ads themselves.
  • At a business lunch with a potential client you innocently praise the good service you once got from a large national retailer, only to be chided for supporting a chain whose owners are “political reactionaries.”
  • You meet a new set of Michigan in-laws for the first time, not realizing that for this family of General Motors employees, your new Ford visible to all in their front driveway might just as well be a load of manure.
  • You are Bridget Jones at a literary party in the midst of introducing the work of a hack you brazenly oversell as the author of “the greatest book of our time.”  This happens just as you catch  looks of dismay from the faces of Jeffrey Archer and Salman Rushdie, just a few feet away.

When it comes to communication, it is reasonable to worry about things going wrong. You will probably be pleasantly surprised, but it pays to be a little bit of a pessimist.

Attempting to Drive From the Backseat

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,
Source: Commons Wikimedia.org
 Commons Wikimedia.org

Using social media can be like trying to drive a car from the backseat. I suppose it can be done. But you may not end up where you intended. 

Commercial television networks usually follow a rule to withhold scheduled airline advertising if there has just been a crash involving a commercial carrier. The proviso is in place at the request of the carriers, who have no interest in having their ads appear next to reports of carnage on the ground.

It makes sense that any presenter of material would want to know as much as possible about the rhetorical neighborhood where their material is about to appear. Most of us share the same concerns of the airlines that a message needs an environment that is supportive and more or less congruent with what we have to say.  For example, no one wants to have what we assume is a private conversation with a person who we know to be on a speaker-phone in a room full of people. To send our thoughts without regard for when and how they will be seen is a recipe for trouble.

This kind of situation-specific behavior is a hallmark of our social intelligence, which includes the ability to adjust to the needs of a given social situation. The failure to do so is also source of a lot of comedy, as when someone says the wrong thing in the wrong place. Think of Amy Schumer or Groucho Marx almost anywhere.

It has always been a cornerstone of effective persuasion to “know the audience and the setting.” The logic that goes with “reading the room” is obvious: if our goal is to be an effective supplicant, our words should blend effortlessly within the situational context. For example, politicians know that disaster looms when a private conversation happens to be captured by a live microphone. This kind of event was Mitt Romney’s Waterloo for his 2012, when a private message to contributors about lazy Americans “entitled” to be on the dole was recorded by a server in the hotel meeting room.

It strikes me that the same kind of challenge is present in social media. We send messages. We comment. We post. But the circumstances for the presentation of our thoughts are mostly beyond our control. Comments viewable by the public or even just “friends” are frequently placed within a thread of other reactions aggregated by an unknowable combination of logarithms and sheer coincidence. And the effect—especially in platforms such as Facebook—may not be what we expected. Facebook “notifications” of someone’s updated “status” deliver us to pages of photos and comments posted by others that can leave us uncertain about what is new or different. To a friend who seems to be successfully on the mend from a serious operation it’s easy to offer “Congratulations!” and miss a newer post about unwanted medical complications. More than once I’ve been misled into offering a comment that could appear to others viewing the site as insensitive or simply foolish. Without a lot more time on the page (which is, after all, what any site hopes for) I could not have known what others have said on the same topic, and what triggered a thread that pulled me miles away from making a rhetorical bulls-eye.  In communication terms, this is known as the problem of a “boomerang.”  Comments intended to have a positive effect do just the reverse.

The problem is reflected in the words of marketing experts who have noted that it’s difficult for an advertiser using Twitter to know exactly who among their over 300-million users they are reaching. This is a long way from the ability of marketers to track the web habits of web-based retailers, who can know exactly what a consumer is looking for and when they are motivated enough to “click through.”

The open-ended nature of social media represents a sea-shift away from ability to identify and target a specific audience. The very fluidity of these platforms is partly what makes them exciting.  But there is little doubt that they impair our abilities to fully adapt to a specific set of human targets, with the consequent effect of posts and responses that off-message and even offend. The result is sometimes a catalog of potential slights: ignoring, offending, bewildering and failing to acknowledge the people with whom we wish to connect. There is irony in the fact with increased ease of making connections we have also made it easier to misunderstand what others are saying.  The best advice, therefore, is to always proceed with caution.

Comment at woodward@tcnj.edu