Book review: Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I started reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion after Tyler Cowen called it "one of [his] favorite social science books." I can see why: although some of Cialdini's points have become relatively commonplace since the book's initial publication in 1984, Influence still provides an engaging blend of social scientific scholarship, anecdotes of Cialdini's undercover ventures as a "compliance professional," and something like the self-help genre in Cialdini's advice on resisting each of the compliance techniques he describes under the headings reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.

I'll supplement this main review post with some snapshot reactions to a few of Cialdini's points that prompted me to think of specific tangential issues. For now, two overarching thoughts:

First, this book provides a valuable counterpoint to works of behavioral psychology and economics that emphasize the internal biases that affect individual decision-making. Although those works sometimes address social factors and Cialdini sometimes touches on the classic behavioralist issues (loss aversion, endowment effects, etc.), Cialdini's focus on influence and compliance is still refreshing.

Second, the more practical side of Influence, especially the information that flows out of Cialdini's undercover work, raises issues akin to those of publicizing methods of picking door locks. Cialdini is handing out the keys to human consent. Cialdini's direct advice is almost entirely defensive--he tells the reader how to ward off the tools of compliance, not how to deploy them--but it is easy enough to imagine ways to gain influence. For one example, I am highly confident that the techniques Cialdini describes, carefully applied, could help professors positively influence students' evaluations of their courses--an extremely valuable skill. I leave the reader to consider the implications of that possibility.

Book review: Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko, The Millionaire Next Door

The Millionaire Next Door is one of the most interesting books about money you'll ever read, partly for the reasons the authors intend and partly for reasons they unwittingly reveal.

The book's primary insight involves the separation of income and wealth ("wealth" meaning net worth over a million dollars, a standard that may now be out of date). When people speak of the wealthy, they almost always define that category in terms of annual income, which we often infer from the visible signs of wealth, but Stanley and Danko reveal the limitations of that approach. Most millionaires, it turns out, are people who don't have the cars or houses or clothes we associate with rich people. Instead, they tend to be people with medium-high to high incomes whose habitual frugality lets them accumulate a lot of money. The book presents a series of case studies comparing people of similar ages and incomes who have different net worths: on one side are PAWs (prodigious accumulators of wealth), and on the other are UAWs (under-accumulators of wealth). Often, these differences come down to professional lifestyles: lawyers and doctors tend to be in communities where financial showiness is valued, for instance, while owners of blue-collar businesses actively avoid that showiness.

I had heard the broad outlines of this argument from a friend, so it was fascinating but not surprising to read the details. What really got my attention, however, was one of the case studies that compares two doctors, one saver and one spender, who have similar (very high, in this case) incomes. In a departure from the usual concerns of the book, the authors suddenly mention that the spender is very concerned about federal income tax rates, whereas the saver is not. The reasoning: the saver has a great deal of wealth separate from his annual income, and he lives well within his mean. The spender, on the other hand, regards extreme consumption as the sign of wealth, and he has so much debt from houses and cars that he needs almost every dollar of his huge income to keep pace with his consumption.

The book is written by anti-tax conservatives, as is sometimes explicit and routinely implicit in their framing of issues, so they don't dwell on this point. The implications, however, are clear. When people on the left talk about tax rates for "the wealthy," they equate wealth with income. That equation leads to the assumption that "the wealthy" aren't affected by an increase of a percentage point or two in the top marginal tax rate. What the book makes clear is that the wealthy in terms of net worth are almost entirely unaffected by small changes in the marginal tax rate, but there are a lot of wealthy people in terms of income who perceive themselves, at least, as facing fairly dramatic lifestyle changes based on those changes. And that's why--in addition to principled arguments--so many people who appear to be above economic worry are so passionately and personally opposed to even small marginal increases in tax rates.

The valuable thing about the book for liberals is that it's an analysis only conservatives would think to undertake: it examines only medium-high to high income earners to see how income does or does not become wealth. The results are sometimes mind-blowing, no matter your initial perspective.

A small observation about Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

I'm well behind the rest of the eggheaded world in reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I recommend it highly for reasons that are now widely known: it's an entertaining and memorable introduction to many varieties of food production. I'm delighted to understand the many inflections of the "organic" label, for example, and to know the etymologies of "corned beef" (salt used to be among the many grains known broadly as "corn") and "corn-hole" (actually, I'm not as delighted to know this one, but I'll never forget it).

But here's a moment from the book that has bothered me since I read it a few weeks ago. A hero of Pollan's story is Joel Salatin, who operates a 550-acre anti-industrial farm in Swoope, Virginia. Salatin's regionalism forms the foil to conventional farming practices in the book. Here is the passage I have in mind:


Before we got off the phone, I asked Salatin if he could ship me one of his chickens and maybe a steak, too. He said that he couldn't do that. I figured he meant he wasn't set up for shipping, so offered him my FedEx account number.

"No, I don't think you understand. I don't believe it's sustainable--or 'organic,' if you will--to FedEx meat all around the country. I'm sorry, but I can't do it."

This man was serious.

"Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism. I'm afraid if you want to buy one of our chickens, you're going to have to drive down here to Swoope and pick it up."

Which is eventually what I did.


Think about that, reader. Joel "really serious about energy" Salatin has an alternative to conventional methods of specialty food delivery: individual customers can drive to his farm to pick up one chicken!

I am trying to come up with a more madly wasteful means of delivering food than this one. Renting a coal-powered locomotive to haul a pork chop from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City, perhaps?

This may seem the picking of a nit, but I think the passage indicates an important blind spot in Pollan's argument and in much similar rhetoric: the "really serious about energy" folks sometimes talk about mass transit for people and foods in opposite ways. In the same way that relatively wealthy liberals who drive Camrys (we own two) feel superior to SUV owners, even if the Camry people drive 30,000 miles a year because they have jobs in two different cities and shop at Costco in a third (ask me how I know), Pollan fails to note the ways in which his values contradict each other. Whether we like it or not, the availability of Mexican asparagus in Iowa for two bucks a pound is a sign of astonishing energy efficiency in the means of delivery.

Which is more damaging: buying lunch at our local McDonald's or driving our Camry 55 miles to buy the ingredients of lunch from a farmer who herself drove 20 miles to a farmer's market? I suspect the latter, by a large margin, but I don't presume to know the answer. When Joel Salatin tells Michael Pollan to drive to his farm for a chicken, I wish Pollan would at least ask some questions.

Book review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling

I largely agree with Stephen King’s advocacy of the merits of J. K. Rowling: the Harry Potter novels—especially the later ones—manage a combination of imaginativeness and pacing equaled by few other writers. While acknowledging Rowling’s achievement, however, and counting myself among the deeply absorbed readers of the series to the end, I want to comment on my dissatisfaction with its last installment.

The primary flaw of this book lies in its cavalier dismissal of the moral complications involved in the use of extreme force. This dismissal violates the values of Rowling’s make-believe world, returning the reader to everyday relativism with an anticlimactic thump. From the beginning, the books led us to understand that the wizarding world operates with a code roughly analogous to, but fundamentally different from, human theories of justified violence and war. The wizarding system of morality draws a clear line between minor offences and three Unforgivable Curses: those that murder, torture, and enslave others. The rules of wizarding set the limits of legitimate violence with a specific, strong prohibition.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry crosses the line, unequivocally and shamelessly torturing an enemy with an Unforgivable Curse. The situation allows Rowling the opportunity to grapple with the moral difficulties of just war theory: if wartime requires good people to act immorally—even unforgivably, by conventional standards—how do we assess the human consequences of just war for the perpetrators as well as the victims of violence? The novel’s answer: no sweat! We win! The narrative forgives the supposedly unforgivable in advance, framing the action to encourage rooting for Harry to go ahead with it already, and then never hints at any consequences of Harry’s choice.

This choice to deflate the problem of unforgivable curses is one example of the novel’s larger inability to play by its own rules. Two other problems both contribute to the cheeriness of the epilogue, which trades epic complexity for cuteness. The simpler of these is the logic by which Harry claims the elder wand. The climactic duel between Harry and the incarnation of ultimate evil turn on the results of an ordinary skirmish in which Harry has disarmed Draco Malfoy and thus gained ownership of the elder wand, though Draco does not possess the wand at the time. By this reasoning, anybody who disarms Harry becomes master of the world’s most powerful weapon, but nobody seems interested in trying.

The more complex problem involves the logic of sacrifice. Harry’s ability to save a world by embracing his own death parallels the Christian myth of sacrifice in many ways, and, not coincidentally, it runs into some of the same logical problems. The Christian version of redemption by sacrifice has caused theological trouble for millennia. Why does the sacrifice of one being redeem the sins of others? Doesn’t that redemption require some kind of deal in which Satan accepts the trade? If so, why does an omnipotent God have to negotiate? If not, why does an omnipotent God have to sacrifice anything, let alone God’s only child? The story gains great emotional power from the idea of sacrifice, but explaining the necessity for and nature of the sacrificial transaction requires some seriously complex theology because common sense doesn’t do the trick. The complexity of the problem is a danger sign for the novelist who would take Christian sacrifice as a model for a plot.

Rowling’s version borrows the Christian mystery of sacrifices that protect other beings from evil, but Rowling removes the complicating factors that make the Christian story so interesting and troublesome. Harry is only mostly dead, for one thing, and his victory is disconcertingly complete. Whereas the whole series of Harry Potter novels drew its energy from the suggestion that dark wizarding came not only from Voldemort but also from every character’s susceptibility to temptation, the Battle of Hogwarts allows Harry a total victory. Voldemort’s literal death is unsurprising, but his metaphorical death in the elimination of evil people and even significantly evil thoughts at the end of the book provides cheap, simple satisfaction. The book sidesteps the central question of the Christian story of victory through sacrifice: why does evil persist after the redemption?

Hence the lack of occupations in the epilogue, where the central characters wallow in domestic bliss with no jobs or, more importantly, vocations. I know Rowling has assigned them work in post-publication interviews, but I’m enough of a formalist to say that’s cheating: the key issue is that the end of the last book doesn’t provide a substantive logic for continued conflict, and the epilogue flows smoothly from that lack of conflict. If you’re going to posit the continuance of evil (or, say, the homosexuality of a leading character), you need to make it work in the book—and the book ends, “And all was well.” As much as I enjoyed reading these books, and that is very much indeed, all is not well when an epic ends without grappling with the persistence of evil.

Book review: Martin Seligman et al., The Optimistic Child

The argument of The Optimistic Child: A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience--one that is both more and less powerful than Selgiman claims, as I will explain--runs something like this:

• When people encounter adversity, they are affected by it in varying ways according to the way they explain the adversity to themselves. Seligman (and his research team) call these narratives explanatory styles.
  
• People with an optimistic explanatory style characterize adversity as changeable and specific, with behavioral solutions. An optimist explains doing poorly on a math test, for instance, as only one instance with specific causes (such as not studying effectively or enough). The optimist's response to the situation is to focus on behavioral changes (such as studying differently or more) that will produce better results. The pessimist, on the other hand, sees adversity as permanent and personal and responds passively. To a pessimist, the same poor math score will prompt a response such as "I can't do math"; the explanation attributes adversity to an aspect of the person's static character and leaves no room for productive responses.
  
• As he explains the previous point, Seligman is careful to contrast his approach with the "self-esteem" movement, which he accuses of fostering falsely happy explanations that actually encourage children to develop pessimism as they perceive the insincerity of their parents and teachers.
  
• Returning to the linear argument: depression is marked by a pessimistic explanatory style.
  
• People can learn to recognize their own explanations, check their pessimistic self-commentary against reality, and develop a reality-based optimism.
  
• When children practiced changing their explanatory styles in studies developed by Seligman and his team in Philadelphia-area schools, those children appeared to enjoy long-term increases in optimism and therefore decreased risk of depression.
  

This seems to me a compelling argument in many ways. Most importantly, the opening chapters of the book give parents concrete, readily applicable advice about how to speak to children who have just experienced disappointment or failure. My guess is that most parents and other people who work with young children will find those early chapters well worth the small amount of time they require to read.

Most of the latter part of the book describes the Philadelphia experiments in detail and offers many practical materials for helping children identify and modify their explanatory styles. Readers other than parents and child-care workers will probably find themselves skimming or skipping much of this material; the meat of the argument is clearly stated early on.

I said above that I find this argument both less and more powerful than it claims to be. It is less powerful because Seligman does not articulate the extent to which the book itself is a piece of optimistic explanation of an adverse phenomenon, adolescent depression, that lends itself only partly to that optimism. Seligman only occasionally acknowledges the biologial components of depression--precisely the permanent, personal factors that would emerge in a pessimistic explanatory style. The data presented in the book is impressive, but Seligman does very little to help parents and teachers cope with the significant incidences of pessimism and depression that persist even in the groups trained by Seligman's team itself. As this book points out (very late), there is some evidence that mild pessimists perceive situations more accurately than optimists, and the book does little to counter suspicions that much pessimism and depression lurks just to the side of its explanatory model. This is not to take anything away from the remarkable achivement of offering any demonstrably effective techniques for countering adolescent depression, only to say that by the authors' own account, that effectiveness is limited more than the book's tone sometimes implies.

Those concerns arise only in the specific context of depression prevention, however. Seligman's argument is more powerful than it claims to be in the generality of its application. This book, quite unintentionally, explains concretely how teachers, managers, and colleagues can be simultaneously demanding and encouraging. I have said of my own best teachers that they managed to convey great faith in their students even, or especially, when holding them strictly to high academic standards. (I have seen a highly respected professor's response to a student paper opening, "I know you can write better than this!" Note that this is an optimistic statement, harshly critical of the piece by way of praising the person.) The same is true of inspiring managers and colleagues, of course; few characteristics are as socially valuable as the ability to speak frankly about ways that work can improve in the context of sincere personal support.

I therefore come to this odd evaluation of The Optimistic Child: it is a good book about childhood depression, though not as good as it might be. It is a much better book, especially in its opening chapters, about how to talk to people, from students to friends. I recommend that section highly.

Book review: Freakonomics

In a recent post on EconLog, Bryan Caplan wrote, "while there are many reasons why economics is the most successful social science, willingness to say what people don't want to hear is near the top." Such a willingness is certainly the chief merit of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt (the eponymous economist--ha!) and Stephen J. Dubner, an admiring journalist. Levitt's work addresses inflammatory issues such as abortion and urban gang culture; his conclusions are refreshing because he disdains ideological influence. His convincing argument that legal abortions have reduced crime rates, for example, will unsettle readers of all political affiliations; the hypothetical lives of aborted fetuses do not fit well into the pro-choice emphasis on pregrant women's control of their bodies, and legal abortion's power to reduce crime more than conventional measures (aside from increasing the number of police) radically upsets some conservative ideas of being "tough on crime." The abortion chapter of Freakonomics fairly begs to be misrepresented for ugly political purposes, as indeed it has been. The political risk of approaching these issues apolitically is cause for admiring the courage of the authors.

It is difficult, however, to avoid the sense that the most sympathetic reader will struggle to admire the authors as much as they appear to admire themselves. "An explanatory note" at the beginning of the book explains Dubner's view that "many economists" speak "English as if it were a fourth or fifth language" and Levitt's sense that the "thinking" of "many journalists" is not "very . . . robust, as an economist might say" (x, ellipsis in original). Happily for us, the note explains, we are reading the work of exceptions to these rules: "Levitt decided that Dubner wasn't a complete idiot. And Dubner found that Levitt wasn't a human slide rule" (x).

The authors' patting of their own backs will put off some readers, but it should not take away from the insights of the book. I mention it because this is not merely a matter of tone: in fact, authorial self-congratulation is the thesis of the book. One of the great marketing triumphs of Freakonomics is the ability of the authors to persuade many readers that the lack of an overarching argument is a feature, not a bug--the explanatory note ends with a philosopher asking about Levitt, "Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going to be one of these people who's so talented he doesn't need one" (2). Or as Malcolm Gladwell puts it on the back cover, "Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America." The same idea is reflected in the title: "freakonomics" is a nonsense word, a term used in the book and even more on the authors' blog to stand roughly for stuff that Levitt has argued or that Levitt and Dubner find interesting. Returning to the book's lack of a unifying theme in an epilogue, Levitt and Dubner do make a claim for a "common thread" of "thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world," and they suggest that readers "might become more skeptical of conventional wisdom" for having read the book (205).

It is hard to argue with such broad claims, but it is worth pointing out that other books have similarly challenged conventional wisdom in ways that more actively assisted readers with their own investigations. Leaving aside the philosophical heavyweights in the skeptical line--Plato's Socrates and Hume, among many others--consider a few recent examples. When Bill James published his Baseball Abstract, he made claims like Levitt and Dubner's for the value of a general skepticism of conventional wisdom. Though James's works are not unified by theme, they do not take on all of everyday life, and focus on baseball allowed a new kind of analysis to flourish after James's example--and James's unconventional wisdom has taken hold, even as many later analysts have revised the specifics of James's claims. Or when Thomas Gilovich published How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, he not only transformed his readers' understanding of many everyday phenomena, but he also explained the specific mechanisms that caused conventional wisdom to go astray. And Gladwell himself, in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, offered not only a theory of counterintuitive "social epidemics" but also a mechanism of transmission through people called connectors, mavens, and salesmen that offered a widely applicable framework through which to understand other issues.

There is no equivalent framework in Freakonomics. The authors call this a lack of a unifying theme, but lack of thematic unity is a literary defect. The limitations of Freakonomics lie rather in the absence of larger scientific ideas: Levitt's argument about the relationship between legal abortion and crime rates is an argument only about that issue. The arguments of Freakonomics apply so narrowly that, while I do recommend reading the book for its key points--especially chapters three through five, on the economics of drug dealing, abortion and crime rates, and advice given to new parents, respectively--I cannot recommend reading it before the best works of the other authors I have mentioned, from Plato to Gladwell.