Persuasion and Influence

There is more to communication between minds and the world than just information, and I want to think a little bit about this to figure out where the interesting edges are.

So, I think that I have a foundation to build on in defining what information is not. In thinking this through, the concept of information in the sense that I had previously understood it started to fray a bit at the edges. Information is what you get when you integrate or interpret something. The something itself (a message, communication, data, report, document, book, etc) is not, on its own, information.

If a book falls in a forest, does it transfer any information? 

So, it's not really a question anymore that the sort of symbolic data and things that computers deal with are information or not: they are not. The interesting question now relates to this: "What exactly does interpreting (of communication) mean?"  Since it seems like nature's information processing is right at this junction between a mind's existing contents and the contents of the mind after interpreting something, what happens in there?  What is it about a brain that we can make information out of the world?

Thinking about this, I ran across this: Steve's Primer of Practical Persuasion and Influence hosted on West Virginia University's Web site. Different Steve. Anyway, look at all these persuasion techniques. The whole concept of "persuasion" is meaningless if you are talking about so-called "information technology" (other than trying to fit the concept into Power Point, but I digress). You don't persuade a computer to think anything. The computer is a dutiful slave that follows orders perfectly, whether you want it to or not.

But looking at the list of persuasion techniques, you see several concepts that no computer is able to do:

• Have an attitude, especially one that changes its responses
• Have different modes of thinking, each different in kind
• Interpret content or act differently depending on whether others are doing it, what a self-held opinion of the source of the content is, whether something is perceived to be owed to the source of the content, and after evaluating whether something is rare or not.
• Have stages of learning that influence how content is perceived.
• Act differently based on an internalized explanation for why the world is a certain way.
• React to inconsistent information with an internal state (dissonance) that begins a quest to restore consistency.
• Build defenses to attacks on current thinking.
• Hold viewpoints against which new information is judged; adjust judgment based on ego involvement.
• Desire something because there is a barrier to attaining it.
• Change an answer based on what the previous question was.
• Interpret communication based on these variables: Intent, organization, examples versus statistics, weaknesses in the other side, repetition and redundancy, rhetorical questions, fear appeals, and evidence.
• Relate actions with correlated (yet unrelated) stimuli.
• Respond to reinforcement.
• Respond to observations of others' behavior.
• Respond to orders from an authority.

I'm not making any value judments on persuasion techniques here, just noticing that these techniques and studies offer us insight into some of the ways that human beings interpret information. It's all in the interpreting. That's when information is created. So, persuasion is a process of manipulating the message to cause the recipient to interpret it differently. This means that the manipulations themselves show us something about the internal processing that occurs when we internalize stuff from the outside world (that is, when we co-create information).

Computers work on a static view of "information" (symbols): Here's a value, there it goes. Interpretation might happen through a pre-programmed set of instructions, but even then, you have created a scaffolding for pro forma processing, not interpretation.

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:22:45 AM.