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.
Gary Cole’s Bill Lumbergh in the film, Office Space
When there are differences of opinion, the richest forms of communication still allow those with contrasting views to walk away, without penalties.
The word “persuasion” is the preferred term to identify moments when one individual or group attempts to alter the beliefs or behaviors of another. But the word is frequently misused, especially if one “persuader” has used extra-verbal inducements to get what he or she wants.It’s interesting that when Aristotle wrote his own study of persuasion 2500 years ago, he noted that the use of knives and torture counted as “inartistic” forms of influence. He didn’t miss much. He would no doubt marvel at the additional bludgeons we moderns use to threaten physical or psychological harm. The modern equivalent of torture might be the denial of fair compensation, extortion, the possibility of a bad job review. The ways we can cow each other are nearly endless.
Properly used, “Persuasion” occurs when an individual freely assents to what another asks. No coercion. No risk of retribution. No organizational advantage has figured in the outcome. Everything else that may look like persuasion is really what could be called “compliance-gaining,” as when a boss “asks” an employee to work late.
This is not just an academic distinction with little real-world application. The difference actually matters. To fully understand persuasion we need to know who or what is actually doing the heavy lifting. The use of threats, power or position are all coercive, a fact that takes away a receiver’s opportunity to truly exercise their own judgment.
As a student of this subject, I’m not especially interested in the idea of compliance. In communication terms there’s not that much going on. There’s no grace in using force or a power advantage. In such cases the unequal distribution of power does most of the work. It’s like shooting animals within a fenced game reserve. It’s easily done, but not very sporting.
What is interesting is how we manage to perpetuate the delusion of free choice. My impression is that managers often see themselves as having a knack for engaging with employees, as with the smarmy Bill Lumbergh in the iconic film, Office Space (1999). The soul-destroying demands made by Gary Cole’s character are covered in a sticky syrup of forced collegiality. Lumbergh may believe he has the pulse of the office, but the film knows better. As this clip from U-tube shows, he doesn’t have a clue.
By contrast, there’s real pleasure in participating in communication where every side retains the right to walk away with no penalties. That fulfills our faith in a democratic values, especially another person’s right to their opinion. That’s why democracies are called “open societies.”
The problem is the indiscriminate mixing of persuasion and compliance-gaining as more or less the same thing . For example, journalist Steven Greenhouse misses the point when he notes in a recent Atlantic article that Wal-Mart “persuades” its employees to be anti-union. What his otherwise useful reporting actually describes is pure coercion. Try and unionize and you are simply out of a job, or your unit is shut down. Similarly, courses and texts in “leadership” often trade heavily in the language of equal-to-equal communication, ignoring explicit organizational hierarchies. All of this is represented in phrases like “team-building” and “group problem-solving:” the kinds of things we are likely to hear from faux-egalitarians like Lumbergh.
No one wants to be the apparent autocrat issuing orders. Most of us would like to be seen as good listeners open to the ideas of others. But openness needs to be earned by accepting the right of an audience member to say no, without penalties.
