It's something I've given some thought to, and honestly, it's mostly in the nature of making me doubt the way I make my living as legitimate and worth pursuing in the long run. Persuasion techniques like Cialdini's "shortcuts" strike me as little different from crass sorcery. Being clear on the goal of your communication and then thinking about how to get your audience on board with it sounds a lot like focusing your will and acting to achieve it, but if the goal is to sell a project or get a company to adopt a consulting proposal, is that worth it?
So, in practice, the way it has shaken out for me is that my esoteric work has led me to inject more skepticism/protection into my teaching - rather than saying "here's how to use Cialdini's shortcuts to get what you want" I more emphasize "here's how others use Cialdini's techniques to try to trick you, do you really want to let them?" I'm pretty savage on advertising in general.
All that said, I do think there's such a thing as legitimate influence/persuasion/advertising/marketing, but I think its borders are much hazier than many proponents insist, and that someone who wants to engage in such activities and remain ethical has to hold himself to a much higher standard than most business majors or MBAs would think. To put it more concretely, if I have a product I think is genuinely useful, it makes sense that I would use an understanding of what folks pay attention to and remember to get them engaged with it, but the moment you start doing so, you have to ask yourself if your product is really as good as you think, and whether making it easier to engage with is actually intruding on anyone's free will or not.
Lately, it's been bothering me quite a bit that I am pretty much literally a sophist - I teach rhetoric and justify it as a "tool that can be turned to different ends" and (mostly) disclaim teaching what ends its right to turn such tools to. I solace myself a bit by including a discussion of ethics, where I don't say "this is right and this wrong" but instead "here's a handful of ways of sorting out how to think of right and wrong, my preference is is this one (virtue ethics), but it's up to you to pick how you decide things in your own life." Maybe weak sauce, but when I discovered there was no required ethics content in the undergraduate business major at my school, I figured I could at least devote a lecture or two to it.
Anyhow, sorry for a long response to what may have been a mostly throwaway line. The short version is that I've noticed much of the overlap of teaching "effective communication" and "magic," and I've been left with the feeling that the default goals, ethics, and so forth of the former have a lot to learn from the latter.
no subject
So, in practice, the way it has shaken out for me is that my esoteric work has led me to inject more skepticism/protection into my teaching - rather than saying "here's how to use Cialdini's shortcuts to get what you want" I more emphasize "here's how others use Cialdini's techniques to try to trick you, do you really want to let them?" I'm pretty savage on advertising in general.
All that said, I do think there's such a thing as legitimate influence/persuasion/advertising/marketing, but I think its borders are much hazier than many proponents insist, and that someone who wants to engage in such activities and remain ethical has to hold himself to a much higher standard than most business majors or MBAs would think. To put it more concretely, if I have a product I think is genuinely useful, it makes sense that I would use an understanding of what folks pay attention to and remember to get them engaged with it, but the moment you start doing so, you have to ask yourself if your product is really as good as you think, and whether making it easier to engage with is actually intruding on anyone's free will or not.
Lately, it's been bothering me quite a bit that I am pretty much literally a sophist - I teach rhetoric and justify it as a "tool that can be turned to different ends" and (mostly) disclaim teaching what ends its right to turn such tools to. I solace myself a bit by including a discussion of ethics, where I don't say "this is right and this wrong" but instead "here's a handful of ways of sorting out how to think of right and wrong, my preference is is this one (virtue ethics), but it's up to you to pick how you decide things in your own life." Maybe weak sauce, but when I discovered there was no required ethics content in the undergraduate business major at my school, I figured I could at least devote a lecture or two to it.
Anyhow, sorry for a long response to what may have been a mostly throwaway line. The short version is that I've noticed much of the overlap of teaching "effective communication" and "magic," and I've been left with the feeling that the default goals, ethics, and so forth of the former have a lot to learn from the latter.
Cheers,
Jeff