War and Dis-Fluency

The Faceless Bureaucrat posted in a comment a link to this fascinating article from the Boston Globe ‘Easy=True‘ on an apparently popular theory in psychology called ‘Cognitive Fluency’. I find the idea interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, as a student of propaganda very much interested in how narratives are constructed, propagated, maintained, and channel behaviour of the target towards desired behaviour I am quite keen to think through how this fluency/dis-fluency concept might be applied to shaping the information environment of conflict:

The persuasive power of repetition, clarity, and simplicity is something that people who set out to win others’ trust – marketers, political candidates, speechwriters, suitors, and teachers – already have an intuitive sense of if they’re good at what they do. What the fluency research is showing is just how profound the effect can be, and just how it works.

And some of the more interesting ramifications of the new work come from the suggestion that disfluency, rather than fluency, can sometimes be what’s called for. Work on product marketing by Schwarz and Hyejeung Cho has found, for example, that while creating a sense of disfluency in potential consumers is likely to make them see a product as less familiar, it also makes them see it as more innovative.

Insurgents are superb marketers, intuitive or otherwise. As James Burke wrote of Osama bin Laden:

You may not like what he is saying. You may abhor everything he stands for. But you are listening… The truth is that Osama bin Laden is very good at what he does. He is one of the great propagandists … He has an awesome understanding of the holy triumvirate of political communication: the power of the image, the message and the deed. And he understands how they work together.

But has he cottoned on to this dis-fluency idea? Reading on:

In unpublished research, Schwarz has found a similar effect with marital happiness: Couples asked to come up with a short list of good qualities about each other reported higher levels of marital happiness than the other couples in the study – but so did those couples asked to come up with a long list of each other’s bad qualities.

‘Having to come up with many good things about your spouse is terrible, because it becomes difficult and then you think she’s obviously not that wonderful,’ Schwarz says. ‘Coming up with a few bad things about your spouse, that’s bad because it’s not that hard. Having to come up with a lot of bad things, since it’s hard, it means she’s not that bad at all. The difficulty that you have tells you that there are not many such things.’

Now I must admit that surely there are many reasons why scaling up from a married couple to a couple of civilizations is problematic and, honestly, I am struggling to see how the concept could be operationalized in the sort of context of confrontation/conflict informational domain which interests me. But there are smarter people out there than me. What do you reckon? Just thinking out loud, there are clearly a few things about the West which broadly speaking (and overgeneralizing, OK) people in the Islamic world perceive as very bad indeed (and vice versa, it must be said), but would they find it difficult to populate a long list? Is there a way that you might get a population to go through this mental process, experience the ‘dis-fluency’ effect noted above, and thereby help to shift their ‘hearts and minds’ a little in the right direction?

Secondly, this idea interests me as a teacher. I am often asked by students the extent to which presentation, e.g., grammar, syntax, spelling, etc, ‘counts’ in grading. Often this is the case with foreign students where quite often awkward phrasing and word choice make it difficult to follow what might be a really good underlying idea, and with dyslexic students. The answer is that provided students use the appropriate scholarly architecture well, it is the idea which is being evaluated not the style in which it is conveyed. But at the end of the day marking is also a subjective process, part of which involves asking yourself  ’am I convinced by this?’ The more convinced you are, the higher the grade. But if conviction is in part a function of fluency then style is contributing to the grade because something which is easy to read is seen as truer than something difficult. I think good teachers have always apprehended this; but it is useful to see the effect explicitly. So, note to self. Note to students: read The Elements of Style; observe the way good writers in your field write and endeavour to be like them; and get a proofreader!