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Chapter review: Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Fail to Produce Responsive Governments, 2016

(Note: the argument in Democracy for Realists about the "average citizen" being too confused by the complexity and intricacy of the world to have a reasonable grasp of it, basically recaps Walter Lippman's classic argument to the same effect in Public Opinion (1922). In the end he concludes we need experts in communications-- propagandists he depicts as benign-- to interpret the world and spoon feed the masses the limited knowledge they can handle. Dewey and Lippman argued about this. Lippman said democracy is impossible, Dewey denied such a conclusion while recognizing that for it to succeed the mindset prevalent in our society would need to change. Hence his educational theories.) -- PD, comment here, Aug. 27, 2021 

If some form of pragmatic rationalism is to ever have a chance of making a significant difference regarding the human condition, public education will need to be significantly reoriented to focus on how the human mind works and fails to work and how it can be and often is deceived and manipulated. -- Germaine, Aug. 29, 2021

Chapter review

Levers of Influence: (Power) Tools of the Trade is chapter 1 of Robert Cialdini’s 2021 book, Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini is a leading expert on persuasion science. Some of his research was discussed here before. The book (446 pages, 41 pages of notes) is written for a general audience and is easy to read.

Cialdini starts out by noting that evidence from social science is settled that both humans and other higher animals often, maybe usually, respond to input information in what he refers to as an automatic “click-run” mode. This kind of behavior is formally called fixed-action patterns. These behavior patterns range from simple to very complex. A key trait of click-run mode behavior is that the behaviors in the pattern almost always play out is exactly the same pattern or sequence of behaviors. As Cialdini puts it: 

“It is almost as if the patterns were installed as programs within the animals. .... Click, and the appropriate program is activated; run and out rolls the standard sequence of behaviors.”

What is really interesting about click-run is what triggers the initial click. It often isn’t much at all, e.g., a patch of the right color instead of the same color as a whole animal threatening the turf of another animal. With humans Cialdini points out that the word “because” in a request for a favor is the trigger, not the reason for the favor that follows the trigger. Thus ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I'm running late and need copies right away’ is ~94% effective, ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine because I need to make some copies’ is ~93% effective, while ‘can I cut in line at the copy machine’ is only ~60% effective. The trigger is the word because, not the reason given.

Cialdini argues that humans have no choice but to rely on click-run, mental shortcuts and other tactics that reduce the cognitive load needed to navigate a world that is too complex for anything more than a superficial understanding or even a false impression of some understanding:

“Such automatic, stereotyped behavior is prevalent in much of human action because in many cases, it is the most efficient form of behaving, and in other cases it is simply necessary. You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex ever on this planet. To deal with it, we need simplifying shortcuts. .... Without the simplifying features, we would stand frozen--cataloging, appraising and calibrating-- as time for action sped by and away.”

In addition to click-run mode, humans can respond to information by a process called controlled responding. This mode is slow and requires conscious effort. This requires both a desire to be more thoughtful and an ability to think the information through. There is a strong human tendency to operate in click-run mode when the effects of something are relatively modest or impactful on other people, but not themselves. Thus controlled responding tends to kick in and act as a safety net in situations where personal stakes are significant. 

We all know where this is going - the profiteers

Cialdini notes that complexity and time are not on the side of mindsets oriented to controlled responding: “I have become impressed by evidence indicating that the form and pace of modern life is not allowing us to make fully thoughtful decisions, even on many personally relevant topics.” Too often, issues are too complex, time too limited, distractions too intrusive and fomented emotional responses too strong for people operate in controlled processing mode, so we default to click-run mode. 

Professional influencers are aware of all of this. Propagandists have been aware of most of these things at least since the early 1900s. Some or most of these aspects of the human condition were intuited by careful observations of people ranging from Plato in ~400 BC to master propagandist Edward Bernays in the early 1900s to Walter Lipmann in the 1920s to modern corporate marketing and the Republican Party today.

Cialdini comments that most people know little or nothing about click-run mode and how it can be triggered to coax people to believe and/or do things they might otherwise not. He sounds a warning: “it is vital that we clearly recognize one of their [click-run] properties. They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone does know how they work.” He points out that humans share with other animals this aspect of behavior and the vulnerability it imparts on people and other animals.  

Businesses are acutely aware of this aspect of human behavior and they know how to hit triggers that lead to more sales and higher profits. We are rarely aware that we have been manipulated. For example, salespeople in clothing stores are instructed to always guide customers first to the most expensive item and then to a less expensive item. That is because once we have accepted a more expensive item, a lower cost item seems less expensive that it would if that had been the first thing the customer decided to buy. Some (most?) real estate salespeople show new home shopper a couple of undesirable but over priced properties and then show a couple of nicer properties. This contrast makes people more open to higher prices for a nicer home. 

Car dealers and salespeople use the same low-high contrast tactic, called perceptual contrast, to coax people into buying expensive options after a price on the car has been agreed to. By contrast with the cost of the car, the cost of various options or upgrades look cheap and are offered inly one at a time. They can easily add a lot to the final price the customer winds up paying. Cialdini sums this sales tactic up nicely: “While customers stand, signed contract in hand, wondering what happened and finding no one to blame but themselves, the car dealer stands smiling the knowing smile of the jujitsu master.” 

Questions: 

1. It is mostly legal, but is it immoral to trigger click-run behavior patterns or use tactics like perceptual contrast to coax people to buy and/or pay more than they otherwise would have? If one business doesn’t adopt such tactics, a competitor could or would, putting the less manipulative business at a disadvantage. 

2. Roughly, what amount of commerce in the US is driven by manipulation that increases buying and selling over mostly unmanipulated commerce, e.g., ~45%? Of that, how much is waste in the sense that added purchases turned out to be not needed, e.g., ~85%? 

3. Is the moral situation any different for politics compared to commerce, at least when they are mostly independent? What about when business buys legal favors from governments to more aggressively exploit consumers, at least in situations (i) without discernable beneficial impacts on society, or (ii) with discernable harmful impacts on society, e.g., freedom from pollution regulations?

Where the fascist Republican Party stands on voting rights: In staunch opposition

What the aftermath of the 2020 elections in

Georgia led to in 2021: voter suppression laws, election rigging laws

and protests against those laws 

The Washington Post reports in an opinion piece on how the debate went in the House of Representatives on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As one might expect, it was ugly. WaPo writes:

This week’s House debate on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed on a 219-to-212 party-line vote, was a reprise of past legislative wars on voting rights. It was a disgusting sight to behold.

The Lewis Act itself is straightforward. It strengthens the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against the onslaught of voter suppression measures that many states passed following the 2020 elections. It also restores enforcement mechanisms that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013.

But when the Lewis Act reached the House floor Tuesday, a host of Republicans weighed in against the measure hurling objections that were as old and as specious as arguments made by Southern lawmakers against the original Voting Rights Act.

Fifty-six years ago, faced with compelling evidence of blatant discrimination against Black voters — as well as a nationally televised attack by Alabama state troopers on the peaceful participants in a march from Selma to Montgomery that left civil rights leader John Lewis with a cracked skull — Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued that passing the Voting Rights Act would make Congress “the final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law," Thurmond said. “For it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency in the year of our Lord, 1965.”

Sen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) denounced the act as a “head-on rush to the destruction of the basic rights of the individual states and the liberties of the American people to satisfy the demands, the clamor, and the expediency of the day.” He continued: “Never in my more than 40 years in Congress have I seen a measure come before this body that has had such built-in potential for the destruction of our constitutional system and the breakdown of law and order as the pending bill.”

Fast-forward to 2021.

House Democrats had compiled compelling evidence that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act prompted states with discriminatory records, that were previously covered by the law, to enact measures that restricted voting. They had also collected data showing that Republican-led state legislatures have been passing restrictive election laws that disproportionately impacted Black and brown voters.

Confronted last Tuesday with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help correct those wrongs, House Republicans fell back on Thurmond and Hill’s line of attack.

“If you vote for this legislation, you are voting for a federal takeover of elections,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). “You are removing the people elected at the state and local level to run elections from making decisions about how elections are run, including voter ID laws, and putting an unaccountable, unelected election czar at the DOJ, the attorney general, in charge of all election decisions in this country.”

Said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): “This bill is not about expanding voting rights; it is about Democrats consolidating their political power. That is why they are focused on this. They are focused on consolidating their power and, I think, taking it away from the states.”

“[The Lewis bill] is a radical, unprecedented federal power grab by unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington that every conscientious American ought to oppose,” said Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“This bill would comprehensively transfer the power to govern elections in this country from the sovereign states to the federal government permanently and everywhere,” said Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Once again, the fascist Republican Party (FRP) relies on lies, hyperbole, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning to attack free and fair elections. As argued here before, the party has no choice but to suppress votes and rig elections. The FRP is out of step with the American public. Demographic changes have been against it for decades and the party has been acutely aware of that fact for decades. RINO hunts have left the party ideologically cleansed, intolerant and a shrinking small tent. Increasingly, it cannot win free and fair elections. It has to subvert democracy to stay in power.

In their arguments against free and fair elections, FRP House members have no choice but to (i) ignore what has happened since 2013 when the FRP Supreme Court gutted enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act[1] (or argue that never happened in effect), or (ii) claim as some do now that states have the power to run elections as they see fit and there is no actionable racial or political discrimination going on.  

FRP Senators have been mostly quite because they have political cover to say nothing. Mitch McConnell has made it clear that the John Lewis bill, is “unnecessary.” He promises it will be filibustered into oblivion in the US Senate. Saying it is unnecessary to protect free and fair elections might be about as close as FRP leadership will ever come to saying (1) there is no racial discrimination going on, and (2) there is no partisan discrimination going on against Democratic voters or candidates. All the party is trying to do is get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid.

Free election: roughly, easy voter access to voting with minimal reasonable voting requirements

Fair election: roughly, an election not subject to laws that allow the FRP to overturn the vote for partisan advantage without a valid reason(s), i.e., a rigged election 

Questions: 

1. Is the FRP merely trying to get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid? Or was Biden's election valid and something else is going on here, i.e., is the FRP in congress racist and/or fascist (single-party rule oriented, autocratic, etc.)? If not either, what is it? 

2. What about rank and file voters who vote for those people? 

3. How serious a threat to two-party rule and free elections does FRP opposition to free and fair elections pose, lethally serious, serious, moderate, low or trivial to nonexistent?

4. If there is no racial discrimination or opposition to free and fair elections as the congressional FRP leadership at least implies, why oppose federal laws that reinforce free and fair elections, while state FRP legislatures are passing dozens of state laws that directly attack free and fair elections?

Footnote: 

1. For context, Wikipedia says this about the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

As initially ratified, the United States Constitution granted each state complete discretion to determine voter qualifications for its residents. After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments were ratified and limited this discretion. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) prohibits slavery "except as a punishment for crime"; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) grants citizenship to anyone "born or naturalized in the United States" and guarantees every person due process and equal protection rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provides that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These Amendments also empower Congress to enforce their provisions through "appropriate legislation".

To enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in the 1870s. The acts criminalized the obstruction of a citizen's voting rights and provided for federal supervision of the electoral process, including voter registration. However, in 1875 the Supreme Court struck down parts of the legislation as unconstitutional in United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese. After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, enforcement of these laws became erratic, and in 1894, Congress repealed most of their provisions.

Southern states generally sought to disenfranchise racial minorities during and after Reconstruction. From 1868 to 1888, electoral fraud and violence throughout the South suppressed the African-American vote. From 1888 to 1908, Southern states legalized disenfranchisement by enacting Jim Crow laws; they amended their constitutions and passed legislation to impose various voting restrictions, including literacy tests, poll taxes, property-ownership requirements, moral character tests, requirements that voter registration applicants interpret particular documents, and grandfather clauses that allowed otherwise-ineligible persons to vote if their grandfathers voted (which excluded many African Americans whose grandfathers had been slaves or otherwise ineligible). During this period, the Supreme Court generally upheld efforts to discriminate against racial minorities. In Giles v. Harris (1903), the court held that regardless of the Fifteenth Amendment, the judiciary did not have the remedial power to force states to register racial minorities to vote.  

In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Supreme Court also held that Congress had the power the pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under its Enforcement Powers stemming from the Fifteenth Amendment.

From that bit of history, one can clearly see that conflicts over race and the scope of government have plagued American governance and society for a long time. Those same conflicts are still with us today.

In the pre-Jim Crow era, lynchings were more likely in the lead up to an election. This relationship disappeared once Jim Crow laws were in place. Southern politicians replaced violence to suppress black voters with laws that had the same effect. While these laws fell away following the Civil Rights Era, with the recent rolling back of much of the Voting Rights Act, there is a return to legal means for voter suppression.

HAVE we lost our starry notions on the way?

 Yesterday posted a thread on my channel about the joys of growing up in the 1970s.

https://snowflakesforum.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-70s.html

Now, the era was not a joy for everyone, clearly.

The 1970s were a tumultuous time. In some ways, the decade was a continuation of the 1960s. Women, African Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians and other marginalized people continued their fight for equality, and many Americans joined the protest against the ongoing war in Vietnam. In other ways, however, the decade was a repudiation of the 1960s. A “New Right” mobilized in defense of political conservatism and traditional family roles, and the behavior of President Richard Nixon undermined many people’s faith in the good intentions of the federal government. By the end of the decade, these divisions and disappointments had set a tone for public life that many would argue is still with us today.

https://www.history.com/topics/1970s/1970s-1

I was too removed from all the political upheaval at the time, being in my own head space, but the reason I am pointing this out:

SO many are viewing THIS age as the "worst of times", yet my views, which I have expressed often, are quite different.

In the 60s and 70s, there was a movement afoot to change attitudes, but we still had to deal with assassinations, unjustifiable wars, rampant racist which included lynchings, and further back - McCarthyism.

But for me, the difference is more basic, at eye level. What we have NOW is social media, 24/7 news cycles, every word spoken, every policy advanced, is dissected to meet a narrative. Are things bad now? YOU BET YOUR BIPPY THEY ARE? BUT worse than the 50s, 60s, 70s?

Now I see gay couples walking hand in hand, I have witnessed the election of a black President, I see Muslim kids walking to school side by side with non-Muslim kids. 

AND the talk around the coffee table? You know, the "everyday" chatter? 

Believe it or not, NOT about stolen elections, NOT about Cuomo or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Granted, what I am hearing is anecdotal, but day to day, among my friends, family members, fellow townspeople - the talk right now is Afghanistan, still about Covid, concerns about the "weather" and what a shame about what is happening in Haiti.

HAITI! Yet how often does THAT make the news? Or gets discussed on social media?

So is NOW worse than it was back in the days of Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation, Vietnam, gay bashing, and fears of nuclear war?

YET, I would argue that:

Those were the days, my friend

We thought they'd never end

We'd sing and dance forever and a day

We'd live the life we choose

We'd fight and never lose

For we were young and sure to have our way

Now we just dwell on angst and anxiety, or so it seems, we have lost the ability:

Where we used to raise a glass or two

Remember how we laughed away the hours

Dreamed of all the great things we would do?

MAYBE:

Then the busy years went rushing by us

We lost our starry notions on the way