Research studies suggest that ‘immunized’ audiences are surprisingly resistant to later appeals.
Our cat has the daily trauma of making decisions about whether to cross the threshold of the front door to come in or out. It’s her call, and it’s always a tough decision. She prevaricates, pauses, reconsiders, and, when coming inside, frequently looks back as if she will never see the great outdoors again. We wait while she decides. And then we wait some more. I’m told it’s called “threshold anxiety,” a pattern not uncommon among cats. This behavior may explain why they have so successfully evolved. It seems like a waste our of time. Even so, there is a kind of parallel in our behavior. Experimental research on what motivates people to change shows that we are also a wily species prone to stay put.
To humans, an attractive gateway to a new attitude almost always looks like a trap. We don’t like to rearrange the mental furniture that is in our heads. And so we stay as we are, even when what is on the other side of the threshold looks so inviting.
There is a persuasion strategy that builds off this tendency. Used at the right time, it’s almost foolproof.
The effective appeal is called inoculation. An inoculation message is a warning to not be taken in by certain communications from a different source that soon will be heard from. This tactic is entrenched in many forms of persuasion—from political campaigns to court trials to prevention messages in health campaigns. The theory predicts that a persuader who delivers a message of caution about a future ploy to win us over can “inoculate” us to resist. When trial lawyers begin their opening statements to a jury noting that the other side “will try to convince you . . . ” they are inoculating. Likewise, when a friend tells us that another friend is making the rounds looking for volunteers, we may be motivated to arm ourselves with a good excuse to say no. The first warning increases already-high levels of audience skepticism, thereby ruining the second persuader’s chances. The warning is a trigger to freeze in place.
In persuasion research there aren’t many strategies where you can bet the farm on an outcome. But you can pretty much count on an immunized audience to not be effected by a later appeal.
There is strong evidence to suggest that exposure of preteens to inoculation messages work well.
Think of inoculation in terms of its metaphoric origins. Just as immunization can prevent disease by introducing a benign form that triggers the body’s defenses, so it seems equally possible to do much the same in a persuasive message. For example, there is strong evidence to suggest that exposure of preteens to anti-smoking messages work if they play out scenarios that suggest manipulation. For example: “films and friends may try to convince you that smoking is cool,” or “cigarette companies try to make you addicted so that you will be a customer for (a shortened) life.” Older teens? Not so much. It’s clear that a prime condition for effective inoculation involves being the first in line to issue a warning. Older kids have been inoculated in a different way. They have heard so many warnings that they have become immune to new lectures.
If it doesn’t seem quite fair to be an earwitness to the unraveling of one man’s perfectly ordered world, the compensation of hearing the “Johnson Treatment” first hand is justification enough.
From a communications perspective President Lyndon Johnson was a fascinating figure. Most political communication scholars mention his speeches, particularly the disastrous ones defending the Vietnam War and the successful ones on civil rights. Indeed, his address to a joint session of Congress arguing for voter rights legislation in March of 1965, is one of the towering achievements of the presidency. He virtually shamed his southern colleagues into relinquishing their stranglehold on voter access, especially in the south. Johnson’s rhetoric could be lumbering and labored. And he could be terribly insensitive. But in that speech the angels sang, and the nation finally got a Voting Rights Act that would enfranchise millions.
Johnson the communicator is also remembered for another reason that can be summed up in three words: the Johnson Treatment. To put it simply, the former Senate Minority Leader was an incredibly persuasive man in one-to-one meetings with his colleagues. To go through the experience was to be subjected to a nonstop barrage of arguments, pleadings, commands, threats and intimidation until the target could take no more. Some of what he did was genuine persuasion. Some was simply hammer-lock coercion building off Johnson’s power in the Senate, and later, as the accidental president.
We know this from first-hand accounts of those who faced the Johnson gauntlet. But we can also hear what the treatment sounded like.
It wasn’t just Richard Nixon who recorded many of his White House conversations. Johnson taped many of his own phone calls. And so we have a record of endless day and late night conversations, sometimes with Johnson just thinking out loud (especially with his Senate mentor, Richard Russell). But among the calls are a number where Johnson is demanding compliance from a cabinet member, a senator, or some other victim in the far-flung federal establishment. We can hear the insistent gale force pressure of his words overwhelming a surprised minion, some of whom were not happy to be strong-armed.
“Sarge was reluctant to accept the post; LBJ refused to take “no” for an answer.”
Sargent Shriver
Such was the case with a fateful 1964 call to Sargent Shriver, who was then living his dream job as head of the Peace Corps. Shriver loved the agency, with its mission of humanitarian work performed by a growing cadre of the young and idealistic Americans. But Johnson had bigger plans for the Marylander and former Kennedy administration official. He wanted Shriver to head up the ambitious but unbelievably complicated effort of the administration to wage a full-scale “War on Poverty.” If the idea itself was inspiring, Shriver surely knew that it would be a hornet’s nest of overlapping and competing federal programs. It promised all the organizational headaches that were mostly avoided in the much smaller Peace Corps program.
Here’s the call, which starts with a pause while White House operators bring the two together:
If it doesn’t seem quite fair to be an earwitness to the unraveling of one man’s perfectly ordered world, the compensation of hearing the Johnson treatment first hand is justification enough. The call is reminder that persuasion is not always polite, fair, or pretty. But fascinating?
Yes.
By the way, by most accounts, Shriver brought credit and success to the mammoth undertaking of the administration’s War on Poverty.
