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This month’s Harper’s Magazine had an article on the smorgasbord of cognitive behavioral therapies: “The War on Unhappiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking” by Gary Greenberg:

…all these paths lead to the mountaintop, a miracle known to my profession as the Dodo Bird Effect: psychologist Saul Rosenzweig’s discovery, in 1936, that therapeutic orientation doesn’t matter because all orientations work. (Rosenzweig subtitled his paper “Everyone Has Won and All Must Have Prizes,” the verdict pro- nounced by the dodo in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) The Dodo Bird Effect has been borne out by numerous studies since, with one elaboration.

Which made me think of strategy advice from the website “What the Fuck is My Social Media ‘Strategy’?”, with gems like:

Expose new users to the brand through organic conversations

and

Harness social currency to drive buzz

The commitment, communications and critical thought necessary to meaningfully adopt any strategy will help more than whatever is contained in the plan itself. That, and as the Harper’s article continues:

The single factory that makes a difference in outcome is faith: the patient must believe in the therapist, and the therapist must believe in the orientation. For therapy to work, both parties must have faith, sometimes against all reason, that their expedition will succeed.

I’m thoroughly enjoying Douglas Rushkoff’s Life, Inc.—”how the world became a corporation and how to take it back”.

The following comes from the middle of a discussion of how marketers themselves are stuck in wealth bondage, and a critique of Malcolm Gladwell:

This [current] generation of ad strategists and corporation psychologists is well aware of the 1960s advertising legends David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett, but go blank when I mention the Creel Commission, Edward Bernays, or NAM. Two generations removed from public relations’ founding fathers, they seem oblivious to the biases that were so explicitly a part of their work. They use techniques that assume the primacy of the corporation, the universal benefits of mass persausion, and the incapacity of average human beings to make decisions in their own best interest. They behave as automatically as the consumers they hope to control, promoting a corporate agenda at the expense of agency.

When push comes to shove, they quote a member of the new intelligentsia, such as the New Yorker star Malcolm Gladwell, whose books pretend to offer sociology or more, but really just promote an updated view of the stupid masses witha few marketing tips thrown in. Gladwell’s best seller, The Tipping Point portrays human society as a field of iron shavings moving unconsciously between magnetic poles. All you need to put one over on the crowd is self-confidence, magic, and a few friends…

Revealing techniques like website “stickiness” and the power of “word of mouth” to sell products, Gladwell might well have been writing an update to Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, which revealed the advertisers’ arts to the reading public for the first time back in the 1950s. But Gladwell instead appraises these techniques from the cool distance of an anthropologist. Though not a scientist himself, he sees simple, scientific adjustments to culture via technology, media, and marketing as the answer to our biggest problems. Humans will respond accordingly. It’s all just chaos math.

The book then goes on to compare Reality TV to the Stanley Milgram Prison Experiment: thoroughly engrossing.

Interesting article from Ben Goldacre on homeopathy. In regard to medicine in general, he makes this point:

Prescribing a pill carries its own risks: it medicalises problems, it can promote the idea that a pill is an appropriate response to a social problem such as shyness or difficulties at work.

Neverwas dvd

It’s the holiday season which seems to make a lot of people think about beliefs. I’m thinking about this great book on my desk entitled Communication Planning: An Integrated Approach by Sherry Devereaux Ferguson and reading the section on understanding the psychology of audiences (Chapter 7).

Citing social psychologist Milton Rokeach the book outlines five belief types:

• Type A – Worldview beliefs: These beliefs constitute basic truths: physical (“This is a cat”), social reality (“I live in Boston”), and nature of the self (“I am a man”). These beliefs are nearly impossible to change.
• Type B – Personal beliefs: These are ego centered and internally formed. Usually self-evaluations (“I’m intelligent”), they can also be phobias or delusions (“I’m fat”).
• Type C – Authority beliefs: These beliefs are formed because of an outside authority, or in opposition to that authority (“I’ll accept that because the president said it” or “I’ll disbelieve that because the president said it”).
• Type D – Beliefs emanating from authority figures: These beliefs are formed indirectly by the actions of authority figures (People’s distrust of Richard Nixon led them to distrust the office of the President and of government and politics in general).
• Type E – Matters of taste: These are arbitrary or essentially inconsequential opinions. While these beliefs may be defended just as strongly as more central beliefs, individuals will more readily relinquish them them. (“This is the best ice cream”). Examples are product preferences or brand allegiances.

So what? Most commercial messages concern Type E beliefs and most advertising takes the form of linking Type E beliefs with more core belief types. For example:

• Linking Type E to Type B: These usually take the form of convincing the individual that use of a product or service will have a personal affect upon them (“Drinking this soda will make you popular” or “If you are athletic, you should use this deodorant”)
• Linking Type E to Type C: Connecting matters of taste to an authority is usually the domain of the testimonial or endorsement.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse — the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess — all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

From Malcolm Gladwell via Bruce Schnier

While it is undeniable that people who watch lots of vampire movies have nightmares with vampires, it is also true that people who work at UPS have nightmares about boxes (according to a former anthro teacher of mine who also once worked at UPS).

From Wired’s Geekdad Blog