The Diffusion of Rhetoric

 

There is a theory called the diffusion of innovation that looks at how to capture market share. A certain group of the public (innovators, early adopters) will be the first in line to get the first-ever iPhones. The last group, the laggards, won't give up their flip phone until Samsung stops making it.

Most others are somewhere in between. Maybe it's like Mark Granovetter's concept of the riot rock threshold.

"In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them."

So the first person to throw a rock has a threshold of zero. The second person has a threshold of one, he never would have thrown the rock until someone else did. On and on until you get to the hundredth person who never would have joined the riot if 99 people before didn't step in.

I think this model is helpful for understanding rhetoric. If there is a cause you care about, your message should depend on whom you are speaking to.

Activists, Unengaged, Stubborns, and Persuadeables

Say your cause is climate change. The early adopters are the Greta Thunberg's of the world, the people who care as much as you. Let's call them The Activists. You don't need to convince them of the severity of climate change, you just need to give them direction on how to mobilize and take action.

The second group is The Unengaged. They don't have a stance and don't really care. Your message needs to be one of education. If they understood more, some will care as much as you and will join your cause. (In the case of vaccinations, this is the group that isn't motivated to get a free life-saving vaccine until you entice them with a $1 million vaccine lottery.)

The third group opposes you. Maybe they think climate change is a hoax. Maybe they think the threat is overblown. Maybe they just oppose anything progressives support.

This group has two subgroups; those open to changing their mind and those who are not. For the latter, don't even bother. In fact, the best you can do is not piss them off so they turn into activists who oppose your cause and make life harder. For the other sub-group, your message is one of persuasion. You have to know their beliefs and have good counterpoints. Let's call these subgroups The Stubborns and The Persuadeables. 

Winning Converts

If these groups are anything like the rioters, the most efficient method will probably be to target the second group, The Unengaged. Not only are they the largest, but they likely have a domino effect. Once one of them becomes joins your cause, a second person, with a conversion threshold of one, will join him. Then another and another. As I noted in a previous post, the biggest change in support of Black Lives Matter came from people who had no opinion of the group (i.e. The Unengaged); there was little movement among people who opposed BLM.

But then again, it might make more sense to target The Persuadables. Jetty Taylor is a conservative who made frequent media appearances where he expressed his skepticism toward climate change. In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef describes how climate activist Bob Litterman was able to persuade Jetty by speaking his language. Now, Taylor is an activist for environmental causes. 

It might be easier to convince The Unengaged that you are right, but the most they will do is vote or donate in your direction. You cannot convince someone to become an activist, it's more of a personality type. That is why it might be more efficient to convert a Persuadable activist like Jetty, he will do more for your cause than 100 converted unengaged types.

The problem is targeting the message. If anyone outside The Activists hears an activist message, it will come across as preachy and condescending at best. At worst, it will mobilize The Stubborns to oppose you. Even a message for The Unengaged can sound preachy and condescending. For the uneducated on climate change, you need to create a simple story. The Stubborns and The Persuadables are often educated on the topic, or at least think they are, and will poke holes in your simple story and create their own narrative.

For The Persuadeables, you have to leave activism out of your message if you even want to engage. Then you have to know their side of the argument better than them. Then you have to deliver your message in a way that makes it easy for them to change their mind.

Controlling the Narrative

The other challenge is not letting The Activists take control of the narrative. They know the messaging that works for them, but they do not realize how ineffective it is against everyone else. They are unable to distinguish The Uneducated from The Stubborns so they think a simple message of education should work on everyone. They don't know how The Stubborns and Persuadables think.

Matt Yglesias wrote a great post called "Who is the racial justice case for zoning reform for?" He writes about zoning regulations and shows how they have empirically slowed economic growth, in addition to contributing to racial disparities. 

If your focus on racial justice, you can motivate The Actvists. If you focus on economic growth, you can motivate The Persuadeables who support free markets. But if social justice activists hear the latter message, they might oppose you since the benefits of housing conflict with their anti-market beliefs.

"the people I am trying to convince are generally ideologically motivated college-educated professionals ... They conceive of urban land use politics as pitting activists or regulators against developers and are disinclined to side with the developers...

"The problem is that the very same racial angles that help zoning reformers win intra-progressive arguments have the opposite impact on the right... A struggle against white supremacy sounds a lot more righteous than a struggle against inefficient regulation."

Someone who really gets this is David Shor; a socialist who keeps urging Democrats to stop talking about socialism. I've even seen him tweet that liberals should not publicly denigrate moderate Republicans because the few sane members left in the GOP might be holding society together.

Leveraging Unity

The diffusion of innovation chart is a nice visual but not a perfect metaphor for rhetoric because it only measures people who e.g. end up buying an iPhone, rather than all potential consumers. In the diffusion of rhetoric, you have to consider the impact of people who oppose you.

In that sense, there are two charts I like to think about. They both show sharp increases in the support and they also measure the decrease in pushback.

The first chart is support for Black Lives Matter. The blue line shoots up when the George Floyd video surfaces. The second chart is George W. Bush's approval rating. The blue line shoots up after 9/11.

Wesley Morris wrote a long thinkpiece about how we should use this moment when the national narrative is focused on racial justice. The most similar moment of a tragic event that created some unity was 9/11. Unfortunately for Wesley, the "moment" has been squandered. The 9/11 moment was not squandered, which makes me wonder why?

Nassim Taleb likes to say that you don't ask your barber if you need a haircut. Well, after 9/11 we collectively asked our barber (the military) if we needed a haircut (foreign invasion) and that is how we ended up in a very unpopular war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. This time when we asked our barber (social justice advocates) if we needed a haircut, they told us the answer was to defund the police. 

First, this was not a popular response. Second, the principles of democracy and the separation of powers prevented this unpopular idea from becoming policy. Bush, however, did not need to play by these rules. He did not need Congressional (or UN) approval to invade Iraq, which is a big hole in our democracy and a good example of what can happen when we try to leverage a nation's emotional unity.

So even though I had hoped the George Floyd video would lead to serious police reform (think "end qualified immunity" and not "defund/abolish"), I'm still happy with the way things played out. I would rather live in a world in which politics prevents meaningful police reform if it also prevents unnecessary wars. 

I also believe that reform is possible if we get the messaging right. (I wish I was as hopeful that we could end the president's power to unilaterally get us into a war.)

Blueprint

Here is how things should have gone. Activists cannot control the narrative, but you still need them. They are great at action and getting attention, but it has to be tactical.

The spokesperson to the public needs to be someone like Persuasion Man. It has to be someone who understands his audience. Racial justice advocates should have given a bigger platform to Killer Mike. 

Persuasion Man reads the polls and understands what ideas are popular, like unbundling the police or investing in social services, and sticks to those. You cannot allow people in your movement to be talking about abolishing the police or saying ACAB.

In the background, you have to target Persuadable activists and try to convert those with a big audience. They will do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

A Final thought re: The Unengaged

The controversy about teaching critical race theory or systemic racism in public schools is really an effort to present an education message to The Unengaged (school children not already indoctrinated by their woke parents).

It's important to correct any curriculum that still teaches falsehoods like "The War of Northern Aggression". But I've read many think pieces about how much of the details of things like lynchings and slavery are left out of our K-12 history, and how this needs to be corrected. What I don't see is a justification for teaching these details, other than truth for the sake of truth. Why not focus on the systematic oppression of Irish immigrants, antisemitism, or Native American slaughter? Why increase the spotlight on this one group? 

I think the answer has to do with rhetoric. 

I read an interview with Richard Rothstein about his book The Color of Law. He says we have to teach about systemic racism, specifically w/r/t housing, so the next generation can make the necessary changes. If more progressives share this view, then the reason for including the bloody details in K-12 curriculums is for rhetorical purposes; i.e. to create activists. The charts I posted above show that the bloody details of George Floyd's murder warmed support for BLM, just like the bloody details of 9/11 spiked fear of Islamic terrorism.

If so, even if the facts are facts, I can understand why conservatives push back. They don't want their kids to become liberal activists. These same conservatives can recite in detail all the worst features of Islam; misogyny, homophobia, female genital mutilation. If hawskish conservatives had their way, these details would be included in K-12 curriculum for the sole purpose of creating anti-foreigner activists.

Maybe this is why people say bias is written into any curriculum. Any facts you choose to present or leave out can cull an emotional response that orients the learner in a particular direction. 

(Of course, I don't believe this will have the intended effect. Kids are more influenced by their families and peers than what their teacher says.) 

This is how people adapt a war mentality; opposing activists think the fate of society depends on whether The Unengaged gets the message from The Activists or The Stubborns, when the reality is that their aggressive messages just make people hate both groups. The stakes feel so high that they end up talking themselves into illiberal ideas like censoring speech, fearing what will happen if The Unengaged hear disinformation or hateful rhetoric from the bad guys.

Hopefully my blueprint is a way out of this hellhole. Illiberalism is illiberalism, whether it comes from the left or the right.