Phishing for Phools

In 1984 Robert Cialdini published Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion in which he described six compliance techniques--Reciprocity, Commitment, Social Proof, Scarcity, Liking and Authority-- that are widely used to influence behavior. Advertisers use them, government agencies use them, corporations use them.

Last year (2015), thirty-one years later, economists and Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Robert Schiller have to a large extent recast and expanded upon Cialdini’s ideas in their book, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception.

While Cialdini’s formulation focused on how individuals respond to “professional compliance” techniques, Akerlof and Shiller offer a more general account of why free markets “make fools of us” by capitalizing on human weaknesses.

According to Cass Sunstein’s review (New York Review of Books, 10/22/15) Akerlof and Shiller distinguish between phish and phools. Phisherman such as banks, drug companies, real estate agents, automobile salesmen, and cigarette companies take advantage of human failings to do something that is in the phisherman’s interest, but not in the phools.

Human failings are any number of human errors such as overconfidence, loss aversion and short term, rather than long term bias. Sunstein writes:

Informational phools are victimized by factual claims that are intentionally designed to deceive them, …psychological phools [are] led astray either by their emotions…or by cognitive biases…

They also believe that phishing for phools “is the leading cause of the financial crises that lead to the deepest recessions.”

In his review Sunstein’s central message is that give and take of free markets are distorted by phisherman. They lead people to smoke by sowing doubt about current research; they lead people to underestimate the harmful effects of alcohol and overeating; they induce individuals to buy a product they don’t need or is unhealthy.

In these respects, the so-called “invisible hand” can readily go wrong. As a result, some kind of regulation is required to curb the phisherman’s power. It remains unclear what form regulatory interventions might take and how they can ever be implemented, let alone legislated given the current mood of this country.

In Akerlof and Shiller’s view “companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it.” Corporations seek to maximize their profits and in most cases will exploit every opportunity to do so.

In short, once we understand the extent to which individuals succumb to phisherman techniques, we will have yet another reason to call free market economics into question.

Sources of Influence

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated….John Donne

Imagine a scale of influences upon a writer where at one extreme, a subtle unconscious return of a forgotten sentence or passage by a writer is used by another writer. At the mid-point of the scale, a writer quotes or reworks the words of another writer with due citation or acknowledgement. Lastly, at the other extreme, a writer copies or plagiarizes the work of another writer, without any citation or acknowledgement.

According to F. K Taylor the first is known as Cryptomnesia that he defines as the return of a memory without its being recognized as such by a writer who believes it is something new and original instead of the work of someone else.

In his widely discussed essay The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem suggests that many writers and artists may have exhibited a form of Cryptomnesia. “The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon…”

He wonders, for example, if Nabokov’s Lolita might in fact have been based on an unacknowledged memory of an almost identical tale written by Heinz von Lichberg published forty years before Nabokov’s novel. In addition, he claims unrecognized “appropriation” has occurred in a good deal of Dylan’s and other songwriter’s music.

David Shields recent “manifesto” Reality Hunger is an example a work that falls at the mid-point of influence where an author quotes or remixes the words of another writer with some citation or acknowledgement. Shield’s book is made of up 618 numbered sentences or paragraphs that are largely drawn from other sources. He claims that a collage of this sort overcomes the tedium and boredom in reading novels which he believes are outmoded and have come to the end of their line. We need to get this word out to all those devoted readers of literary fiction.

I read Shields book or more accurately I tried to read it and I found it utterly boring, indeed, I had to push myself to get from one sentence to the next and ended up skimming the second half as quickly as I could. Readers need or want or expect stories. As Joan Didion put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” There is no story in Reality Hunger. And it is not especially edifying either.

While Shields did cite the sources of his quotations, he only did so at the insistence of his publisher in order to avoid allegations of copyright infringement. They are also placed at the end of the book that, in my view, greatly interferes with the reading experience in contrast to footnoting them on the same page where they are quoted.

At the other extreme are examples of outright plagiarism where a writer literally copies all or portions of the work of another writer without acknowledgement or citation. Lethem cites, as an example, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that he claims “incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism.” Still Lethem admits this method did nothing to detract from the enormous excitement and thrill he experienced in reading the novel.

In the final analysis, most works of literature appear to be a “mélange” of quotation, remixing, and “original” writing. Can it be otherwise? It is all but impossible to know the sources of our ideas, what we draw upon in composing our work, or how we came to compose the lines we end up writing.

Giorgos Seferis, the Greek poet, put it this way: “Don’t ask who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” And it may very be as Helene Hegemann, said in defense of her controversial novel, Axolotl Roadkill that incorporates a great many passages from other works, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,”

Lethem concludes his essay on this note: Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture….The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least, the price of a rare success.

In the surprising and lengthy final section of his essay Lethem provides a Key that "names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)…Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order, to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.”

Note: I am indebted to Jonathan Lethem for the John Donne passage that he quoted in his essay, The Ecstasy of Influence, published initially in Harper’s Magazine, February 2007.

Nudges

Those who study social influence have learned that it is sometimes much more effective to use modest rather than strong pressures to change a person’s behavior. The well-known foot-in-the-door technique is an example. Obtaining a person’s agreement to carry out a small request first is more effective in gaining their subsequent compliance to a large request than asking them for a large request first.

Other research has shown that a person’s interest in pursuing an intrinsically enjoyable activity is often undermined by rewarding them for it. Similarly, superfluous threats for engaging in an undesirable behavior can sometimes increase rather than decrease its occurrence. In a word, deliberate attempts to change a person’s behavior are often most effective when a subtle, low-key approach is used. While a heavy-handed approach may induce immediate compliance, it rarely leads to a lasting change.

The studies by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein reviewed in their recent book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness are consistent with these findings. They report that very subtle, almost undetectable alterations in the environment can exert considerable influence on behavior.

Placing an image of a fly on the urinals of the men's room at the Amsterdam airport reduced “spilling” on floor by 80 percent.

In a cafeteria replacing the large tables that seat many people with small, tables for two led people to eat less. This nudge is based on research indicating the amount of food people eat in a restaurant increases as of the number of people at the table increases.

And when the high calorie deserts (pies & cakes) are placed well back in the desert section of the cafeteria or in another line, they are chosen less often than the low calorie deserts (fruit) that are placed in the front. A simple rearrangement of many food items like this is said to increase or decrease their consumption by “as much as 25%.”

A vending machine that uses the traffic light system to label various food options reduced the selection of junk food items (soda & chips) by 5% when users learned there was a five cent surcharge for those marked with a red light. In contrast, sales of the green light items increased by more than 16%.

When the parking spaces in the city of Florence, Italy were reduced in size so that they accommodated a car about the size of the Smart, there was a sharp reduction in the number of large sedans, utility vehicles, and trucks that entered the central city.

Providing feedback to a highway driver about how fast they are driving by posting a large miles-per-hour roadway monitor tends to reduce speeding behavior. Providing moment-to-moment feedback to a homeowner about the cost of energy they are consuming tends to reduce their consumption. When this feedback is adjusted for time-of-day rates, further reductions in usage occur.

In a word, a simple redesign of the normal environment or the use of very low-key, often unobtrusive, techniques can often play a powerful role in changing behavior.

Advice is like snow: the softer it falls…the deeper it sinks into the mind.

---Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ian McEwan's Saturday

I marked forty-five separate passages in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, an intellectually rich novel about a single day in the life of Henry Perowne, a British neurosurgeon. http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/saturday.html Perowne is a deeply reflective man. He muses, ruminates, broods and wonders about one thing or another--the nature of his discipline, his family the routine chores that occupy his day, and the troublesome times in which he lives during the early years of the 21st century. The changing conditions of the contemporary world are a constant worry, as is the apparent decline of Western values and ideals. McEwan describes “the drift, the white noise of [Perowne’s] solitary thought” and at one point characterizes his state as a “folly of overintrerpretation.”

In turn, I was led to reflect on those same topics as I paused to place my marks in the margin and then to ponder his musings and the extent to which I agreed with them or not. As a result, although it was not a very lengthy novel, it took me forever to read—a pleasure devoutly treasured by this reader. McEwan speculates a good deal about the origins of human behavior and difficulties of identifying them with any precision. Since I have been concerned with those very same issues throughout my professional life, I marked a goodly number where McEwan writes about this issue.

Parental Influence

It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape.

We hear much doubt expressed today about the direct impact of parents on their children's personality and adult behavior, indeed, whether or not they matter at all or matter as much as their peers. It is said, for example, that parental influence on their children has been overestimated. Studies of identical twins (reared apart or together) are cited to show that genetic factors control about a half of a person's intellect and personality. Other studies of fatherless children are said to be consistent with this evidence. Rearing a child without an adult male in the household appears to have very little particular impact on children. Instead, factors associated with income, frequency of moving, and peer relationships are said to matter more.

My own feeling is that these claims say less about the influence of parents on their children and far more about the methods used to obtain the evidence, especially the methods used to assess adult behavior and personality. Frankly, I do not believe these methods tap the important dimensions of human personality and intellectual ability. Nor do I think the findings have a very high degree of generality

I also believe whatever influence parents have on their children is not likely to be very specific. Instead, their influence has much more to do with very general personality and character dimensions rather than specific behaviors, table manners included. We learn from our parents very general aspects of character and motivation. We learn to value learning, not any particular discipline. We see what it means to be generous and helpful, not any particular instance of these acts. In short, our parents provide exemplars for those deeper aspects of human character and feeling that find are expressed in the sort of person we become.