Tag Archives: persuasion

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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retochetRacquetball is more than a sport. It’s a good model for the unanticipated associations, meanings and slights that are possible every time we open our mouths.

A number of years of writing and teaching persuasion have 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.

The actual court for the game is simply a room-sized shoe box that functions as a playing surface for a hard rubber ball and several players.  It’s typically smashed so hard against the playing wall that it comes back at speeds and angles even a supercomputer couldn’t predict.  Those who have escaped the sting of that small missile can be thankful.  It hurts.  the word“ricochet” must have been coined by a bruised French player. 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.

Try the different analogy of competitive running. Our inability to anticipate effects usually means that a person’s resistance to change is pretty much on its last lap before the possibility of personal transformation has even left the blocks. 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 one in ten.  After explaining this theory of “minimal effects” in a recent 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.  Gaining assent from others is why we are mostly social rather than isolated creatures.  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.

The point is how functional it actually is to be ready for the worst.

In persuasion theory, unexpected effects are called “boomerangs.”  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.

Consider some cases, all 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 nine 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 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 oversell as the author of “the greatest book of our time.”  This happens just as you catch a look of dismay cross the faces of Jeffrey Archer and Salman Rushdie, just a few feet away.

There’s a saying that “even paranoids have enemies.”  When it comes to communication, some of us need the prerogative to worry about everything, to be the pessimist who is certain that life will not work out as planned.

The Rhetoric of Hubble’s Imagery

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NASA image
Source: NASA

The pictures are a useful reminder that the sciences are not immune from making choices that will sway supporters and stakeholders.

The Hubble Telescope that was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery 25 years ago has had a remarkable run as a celestial observer. Almost everyone has seen images that have transformed what we thought was the vast blackness of space into a virtual garden of constellations and stars. The empty sky of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) has been replaced by the color and depth of an exuberant expressionist painting.

What many may not know is that NASA and other space agencies “colorize” pictures coming from satellites and probes. They do to our solar system what Ted Turner and TNT television once tried to do to the classic black and white film, Citizen Kane.

Elizabeth Kessler notes in her book, Picturing the Cosmos,1 that NASA has a strong bias for essentially photoshopping their images with the kind of earth-tone colors we associate with the Southwest. Raw images show up first at the space center in what is functionally black and white.  One astronomer Kessler cites observes that at the distances involved “true color becomes largely moot, since we can’t perceive it in the first place.”(p. 153). And so NASA loads Hubble pictures with a chromatic palette that reflects our continuing romance with images of the untamed West. The best known reference points are the famous larger-than-life Rocky Mountain and Sierra paintings done a 100 years ago by Thomas Moran and  Albert Bierstadt.

The Sierras Wikipedia.org
Bierstadt’s The Sierras                        Wikipedia.org

As early as 1983, New York Times writer and photographer Malcolm Browne complained about what was then the fairly new practice of essentially dressing up views of our galaxy:

“Some of the lies perpetrated by astronomical pictures are unavoidable or even useful. False-color images enable scientists to discern all kinds of things that would escape notice in an ”honest” photograph. But there is a trace of deliberate mendacity having nothing to do with scientific purpose in some of those pictures. The very scientists who gave us those great Voyager planetary photographs, moreover, are among the culprits; they have candidly acknowledged that the vivid, enhanced-color pictures we saw of the Jupiter and Saturn flybys were distributed in deference to popular taste. Neon-tinted pictures very likely get better results than drab ones, when budgets come up for review.”2

Gas Pillars of the Eagle Nebula--NASA
Gas Pillars of the Eagle Nebula–NASA

To be sure, a professional rhetorician like myself should be the last person to complain about the idea of adornment.  And I won’t. A basic presumption of a word-person is that we always construct the world we need using the vast treasure of colorizing language.

The lesson here is simple. The pictures are a useful reminder that the sciences are not immune from making choices that will sway supporters and stakeholders. The presumed black-and-white simplicity of sorting the “subjective” from the “objective” begins to melt into converging Jackson Pollock swirls when the processes of scientific discovery are presented in the interpretive languages of text and imagery.  We may aspire to be hard-headed empiricists.  But we are all necessarily transformed into advocates when we become narrators of our work to the world.

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1Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescrope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

2 Quoted in Anya Ventura, “Pretty Pictures:” The Use of False Color in Deep Space, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, October 29, 2013.

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Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu