While calling for empathy and character in leadership, Michelle Obama demonstrated both last night. Yet, she made clear that in the face of viciousness and cruelty, “going high” means being tough, honest and clear about the kind of leadership needed to save Americans from further Covid-19 damage and deaths and to protect democracy at home and around the world.
Maturity and humility, she reminded us, are so badly needed to replace infantile behavior and narcissism. America and the world can’t take much more of a president who thinks only of himself, let alone in the midst of a pandemic – a man more concerned about mail in voting than saving lives.
My father didn’t fight in Saipan for what Trump is doing to America. My father-in-law didn’t fight on the U.S. front lines in Europe for this either. We owe it to them and all who have protected their country at risk and sacrifice of their lives.
It is time to take back America before it is too late – to feed, provide jobs and assist people in need without apologies for caring.
Joe Biden made an excellent choice for a running mate. It would have been hard to go wrong with such a great short list of women. Kamala Harris has experience campaigning and winning. She’s brilliant, amiable, tough, always extremely prepared and can give as good as she gets.
John Minchillo/AP/Pres Association Images
But would Trump have floated the “nasty woman” insult he used on Hillary Clinton to describe Harris if he weren’t sure that enough people will be glad to let it stick? He knows that “nasty” when applied to women is particularly odious. Why? Because women are supposed to be liked. You don’t see Trump calling Congressman Jim Jordan “nasty” even though he surely ranks among the most hateful and divisive members of Congress. Besides, it wouldn’t have the same meaning by a long shot.
Sweet and charming women tend to be admired, but they’re also perceived as too weak to lead. Gender is a Catch-22 for most women — be highly assertive and competent and you’re cold and maybe a “bitch” or be sweet and “feminine” and you’re a pleasure to be with but unfit to lead. That reality hasn’t escaped those now formulating a strategy to attack Harris.
Malcom Gladwell captured the problem after the 2016 election:
It is very difficult for society to accept an ambitious woman — an openly ambitious woman…. We continue to expect that women will have a kind of modesty in positions of authority. It makes it easier for us to accept that they have moved into a man’s realm.
Part of America would still rather have a racist, sexist, barely functioning narcissist as president than an exceptionally prepared, tireless, impressive woman with their best interests at heart anywhere near the office.
Sexism goes underground sometimes, but it doesn’t go away. We need to be alert and not let it pass — not this time. Sexism and racism need to be pointed out loud and clear.
And the drivel that will surely come about how Harris dresses, styles her hair, the shoes she picks and other candidate death-by-a-thousand-cuts insults need to be labeled what they are – what “little people do” as Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said of Trump’s pathetic, misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris. Thank you, Keisha, that captures it perfectly!
If you stop by on a regular basis, you know I’ve been hosting authors who have published during the coronavirus. My new guest is Victor Pollak. Stop by here to learn about his historical account of how the cathedral of Chartres, France was saved during WWII.
Yesterday, I read “Irish Women Writing Fiction Were Dismissed as ‘Quiet’. Ireland Wasn’t Listening” by author Kathleen MacMahon. It reminded me of when my seventy-five-year-old Irish Aunt Peg asked me why a nice girl like me had written a book about persuasion. I was in my twenties. Persuasion In Practicewas my first book as a professor of communication. She considered it unseemly for a young woman from our family to write about influencing people. I merely smiled and explained that she was using persuasion at that very moment – that everyone does and we’re all best served to know how it works. I waxed poetic for a few moments about Aristotle’s work on influence. She shrugged and left the room.
I’ve never forgotten that moment. Perhaps on some level I’d inherited a bit of Aunt Peg’s admonition. Over the years since, I heard it again and again in various forms. The Harvard Business Review, for example, pressed me to tone down the “women’s angst” before publishing what would become a reprint bestseller, “The Memo Every Woman Keeps In Her Desk.”
According to MacMahon, until recently women’s writing in Ireland was dismissed as quiet. Quality of writing alone was never enough to guarantee a female writer a hearing. Edna O’Brien’s 1960 The Country Girls is a case in point. Despite O’Brien’s extraordinary writing skill, MacMahon posits “It was the novel’s scandalous theme – sex – that made all the noise.”
Things have changed. Irish women living in Ireland and elsewhere are regularly tackling weighty subjects in fiction. MacMahon provides an impressive list. I wonder how many of them had an Aunt Peg wondering aloud if they might want to tone down their writing a bit. But they persevered.
My latest crime mystery, Damned If She Does, deals with rape and the shame and secrecy that often follow. I probably lost half my audience just now in that sentence. After all, even today, if fiction focuses on rape, even as a subplot, it has to be a woman’s book. Right? The constricting albatross of “women’s commercial fiction” is still about our necks and there is little doubt that discomfort lingers with women writing about subjects that cut too close to the bone.
So “well done” to Irish female fiction writers delving unapologetically into the indelicate realities of life – not doing so for shock value but because life isn’t always pretty. And to women writers in cultures far less encouraging — I’m delighted to be in your company.
An assumption was made early on in the coronavirus pandemic response. It goes something like this: If we tell people that wearing masks and social distancing will protect vulnerable others, they’ll want to do both. Why? Because most people don’t want to be selfish.
Let’s look at this reasoning. First, wearing masks and social distancing from vulnerable people require empathy. That’s not too much to ask. Right? But wait. Empathy is not limitless. Nor, as psychologist Paul Ekman explains, does it always lead to compassionate action.
As a young researcher in preventive medicine working to encourage people to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, I developed a persuasive protocol. On paper it was beautiful. However, five minutes into the first hospital waiting room intervention a young woman exclaimed, “I can’t do any of this!” She knew the dangers of STDs, but her life didn’t allow the steps our team was promoting. Listening to her and others, we learned ways of making it possible for people to protect themselves on their own terms – with techniques and habits suited to their lives.
Often, making the assumption that people will do what you consider the right thing is a surefire way to miss the mark. I don’t mean to blame medical experts who are pushing for empathic actions; I’m simply waving a red flag about acting on untested assumptions. To effectively slow the infection rate of Covid-19, we must understand the various target populations involved, acknowledge the obstacles they face to changing behavior, develop customized messages that they’ll likely heed for the long term and be sure these are delivered by the right people.
It’s understandable that some public health officials see one size fits all as a logical approach to take when time is of the essence. Unfortunately, it’s not working. Effective persuasion isn’t about addressing what people should do, so much as what they can do. It takes listening and learning – and the sooner the better.
If you have children, ask yourself if they’ve learned in school what constitutes quality evidence. Have they participated in debates and learned to study the various sides of arguments? In a time when all of us are bombarded by messages, relatively few of us are armed with the skill of identifying credible ones.
Frankly, journalism hasn’t helped until recently. The pandemic has forced media to invite expert opinion. For years, particularly on televised news, we’ve witnessed true expertise take a back seat to proximate and some-people-say “expertise” – need a source, simply ask a handy journalist. As I wrote in the Huffington Post, journalists interviewing journalists was an abdication of responsibility. It contributed to the lack of demand for “hearing it from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak, and enabled opinion to pass for credible evidence.
Then there have been the attacks on those who teach, especially at universities, where attending typically provides students with a broadening of their minds, exposure to ideas, new and old, and a greater understanding of the world around them.
Add to this people in power who know little about leadership and care even less. They seek crowds of sycophantic fans. Are such followers stupid? Are they haters? These are easy explanations, but in most cases inaccurate ones. A good many ardent followers haven’t developed healthy skepticism of messages and sources. Why? Because they haven’t been taught and/or encouraged to do so.
Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in a time when the easiest way to save lives – wear masks – is rejected by so many? Is this anti-science? For some, yes. But it is also the result of knowing little about how the human mind works and how to recognize destructive habits.
For example, how many people are familiar with the term “cognitive dissonance”? How many are aware that once people publicly commit to positions, it causes discomfort and stress for them to consider changing their minds. And so, often they don’t.
To be fair, early on in the current pandemic people were told not to wear masks. If you did, someone on the front lines might be deprived of one. Then scientists began to advocate for masks – homemade ones or at least ones not needed by medical personnel. Had President Trump and other heads of state immediately worn masks and strongly advocated for everyone doing the same, masks would have become a way of saving lives – like seatbelts – rather than symbolic political advocacy.
Simply put, a good many of us don’t know our elbows from are backsides when it comes to understanding persuasion. We think our ideas are our own because they feel that way. We fail to explore their rationality because we’ve had little practice at doing so.
Those who study and teach communication, persuasion and negotiation know the power of these forms of influence. For too long these fields have been viewed as among the “soft sciences.” But, it’s clear that to save ourselves from all the ways our livelihood and the world itself can be destroyed, we need to make sure that when we know what can save us that we can also convince people to participate.
To fight this pandemic and the misconceptions surrounding it, we need clarity, conviction, consistency, compassion, and credibility in messages coming from those who’ve been handed the weighty baton of leadership. Add to this commitment and courage – the kind that allows us to question our thinking, garner quality evidence, assess options and move with determination to change.
These seven nouns starting with “C” are not new to social scientists. We need to make them more familiar to mayors, governors, senators, congresspeople and all those whose job it is to lead. Let’s couple social science with physical science and focus our collective eye on the prize – ridding our world of Covid-19 and thereby saving countless lives.
When I published the first edition of Persuasion In Practice, I was a newly minted Ph.D. in my late twenties. It’s still selling. Not Malcom Gladwell selling, but Public Opinion Quarterly described it as a “landmark contribution” to the field of communication. In the halls of academia for a young scholar, that was more than good enough. As my senior colleague, Ev Rogers, told me, it could have gone the other way had I written a bad book pre-tenure.
I’d studied persuasion for years by then and many more since. I came to understand what methods tend to motivate human beings to change their minds and actions. There is no one way, just as there is no single way to lead. Much depends on the context. But there are better ways – ones more likely to succeed in certain types of situations.
As Aristotle observed, we can often understand the workings of things by asking what ends they serve. And so we might start when trying to end prejudice by asking what purpose it serves. Sometimes that’s difficult to grasp. A conscious purpose can become an unconscious habit, lost deep in the recesses of our personal, familial or group history. At that point, it’s difficult for people to rationalize hatred and superiority and so often they don’t. To use a term commonly used today, “It is what it is.”
Lora King, Executive Director of the Rodney King Foundation, asks in a CNN short segment “Why are we still here?” and “What is enough?” when it comes to prejudice and the killing of young black men in particular. Can we finally rid society of deep-seated racism? Is this the point in time when the unconscious can be made conscious for the vast majority of people so that change can happen?
There are a number of ways to bring about change. One that should be included in any toolkit used by police departments reorganizing and revising training comes from persuasion research. Counter-attitudinal advocacy involves the preparation and delivery of a belief-discrepant message. This approach can engage a person in learning what it’s like to be another person, spend time “in their shoes,” and articulate that experience.
An example given by persuasion researchers Gerald Miller and Michael Burgoon is a father asking his teenage son to prepare a kind of report with all the messages he can muster against smoking marijuana. In the course of doing so, the son learns on his own why he should be wary of the weed. Of course, this example is different than attempting to alter deep-seated prejudice. And we know from other research that if people believe they’ve been forced to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, they’re less likely to change their views. Instead they reason, “They made me do it.”
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for learning that what you thought of another person is not how they are. In other words, even if asked or nudged to engage in this activity, learning and change can and often do occur.
Something similar was recently discussed by Virginia Heffernan and Elliot Williams in this Slate podcast – “Getting On The Same Page About Racism.” Heffernan suggests that police take courses in a language they don’t speak and that they become anthropologists of a sort learning before they become police about the history of the region and people they’re about to protect and serve. In the same podcast, Elliot Williams discusses the various types of events to which police are expected to respond. Instead, they should become specialists who have truly visited, studied and understand the particular types of problems they’re expected to address. This could go a long way toward altering a tendency to treat everything as a nail when you have a hammer in your hand.
Decades of studying persuasion can’t be condensed here, but one potential technique to at least substantially diminish prejudice is counter-attitudinal advocacy. It’s not the end all of persuasive approaches that need to be implemented to foster enduring change, but it’s one of many techniques supported by extensive research. There is an entire field of study devoted to bringing about change. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We simply need to know it’s there.
My thanks to author Debbie Burke at Killzone for the interview posted today on their site. TKZ is the home of 11 top thriller and mystery writers and publishing professionals. They cover the publishing biz, marketing how-to’s, and the craft of writing and each day open the doorway into the world of the working writer.
I was privileged to be their guest. Here is the interview. If you like getting behind the scenes – to learn how Damned If She Does and Shadow Campus came to be, take a few minutes to read this interview here
Due to their “exceptional” review of Damned If She Does, Kirkus Reviews has selected it for inclusion in its September magazine and website listing of “GREAT INDIE BOOKS WORTH DISCOVERING”!!
Both a crime mystery and narrative insight into the trauma and consequences of keeping sexual abuse secret, Damned If She Does reveals what Kirby Dick, co-director of the documentary “On The Record,” refers to as the “deep-seated misogyny and distrust of survivors.” As he notes, “MeToo did not change everything.” In Damned If She Does, did silence lead to murder? Does speaking out do more harm than good? Are women damned if they do and damned if they don’t?
When writing Shadow Campus and Damned If She Does, a major challenge involved not giving away the ending. Second to that was keeping each main character’s story engaging and on track. My technique for the former is to keep myself in the dark — essentially not determining who done it until nearly the end. That way, there’s little chance of spilling the beans. The second challenge is a bit more complicated. My general approach is to keep each main character’s story in my head much like we do with our friends. If you think about it, you know what most of your friends would and wouldn’t do in a variety of circumstances. Sure, there’s room for error, but the same can be said of fictional characters. Every now and then someone tells me with conviction what one of my characters will likely do in the next book. That’s always a pleasure to learn. It’s as if the characters live beyond the pages and no longer belong only to me.
I was writing Damned If She Does long before the MeToo era began. Meg, one of two lead characters, keeps a dark secret until she stumbles upon the dead body of the man who caused it all and quickly becomes the prime suspect. Four characters from Shadow Campus return in this second crime mystery, which I anticipate becoming part of a trilogy. The first book took place in L.A, the second in New York City, and the third, now partially written, will be situated in West Cork Ireland.
Excerpt from Damned If She Does: NYC in March
When they left MOMA, it was dark and lightly snowing. Meg’s cheeks reddened from the cold; her eyes brightened. Rashid breathed in Manhattan’s icy magic. Leafless tree branches adorned with miniature white lights, obscure an hour earlier, now reached their glowing branches skyward like secondary characters boldly stealing the show. Cars and taxis moved rhythmically, cooperatively. Buildings glistened. Rainbow hued pigeons, heads bobbing, dexterously scurried and fluttered in a precarious dance with preoccupied pedestrians.
“No place quite like it,” Shamus said.
Rashid slowly nodded as he looked up transfixed by snowflakes bright against the darkening sky, some joining like starlings in harmonic formations, upward and downward, inward and outward, as if having practiced together for years …
Interview with primary character, Shamus Doherty
Kathleen: Shamus, I’m delighted that you’re here. I know you’re a private person. Let’s start there. You finally said yes to this interview on the fourth try.
Shamus: You’ve put me in two novels. I guess you could say my life is no longer my own. Besides, my sister can’t seem to shake the notion that her brother is an introvert whose love life won’t blossom until he opens up. .
Kathleen: Any other reason?
Shamus: (smiling) Maybe I’m just a little worried about what you’ll write about me in the third book.
Kathleen: At this point, I may have little wiggle room. Our readers know you as well as I do. Some tell me what you’ll do next.
Shamus: You reap what you sow.
Kathleen: Let me ask you this: You’ve stolen the hearts of many female readers. They describe you as a “diamond in the rough.” What’s your response to that?
Shamus: Detective Jeffries says any charm I might have is wasted – that I’m oblivious to women noticing me.
Kathleen: Do you think he has a point?
Shamus: I think he’s just grumpy.
Kathleen: He is that. So, tell me, in book three you’ll be in Ireland. Are you looking forward to that?
Shamus: I’m not much for travel, but my Irish roots go way back. I think we can tell Meg that I’m branching out.
Kathleen: She’s going along, isn’t she?
Shamus: Yep. She’s been there many times and loves it, especially West Cork.
Kathleen: You’re becoming quite the amateur detective. Is that something you plan to turn into a career?
Shamus: It’s born of necessity. My dream is building beautiful homes. Maybe someday a degree in architecture.
Kathleen: I guess we’ll see.
Shamus: (Smiling) Unless you want to tell us now.
Kathleen: Thank you for being here, Shamus.
Shamus: Ah, you’re keeping it a secret. I knew it.
Kathleen: One last thing, Shamus. Is Denise in your future?
Shamus: She’s in my present. That’s really all I can say.
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