213 - Petrified Wood Principle

In revisiting Robert B. Cialdini's book "Influence" (the revised edition) I realized one mistake I've been making for some time when pointing out a variety of problems, which is the perspective from which emphasis is applied.

"The Petrified Wood Principle" describes a case where this difference was demonstrated, between placing emphasis on a "descriptive norm", which describes what people are doing, versus placing emphasis on an "injunctive norm", the rules that should be followed. In that case, when signs placed emphasis on the descriptive norm it resulted in 4x more criminal behavior than when they emphasized the injunctive norm. The most ironic aspect of the case was that the park returned to using the signs that demonstrably encouraged criminal behavior, despite the evidence.

The reason for the park's puzzling decision was that their belief was more important to them than the evidence. They wanted to believe that people weren't influenced unconsciously in the way that was demonstrated to them, and so they chose that belief over evidence to the contrary.

I never intend to become an influencer, but I know a few of my connections effectively are, and to them in particular, as well as everyone else in general, I'd recommend trying to remember and apply this principle. Principles that work at this unconscious level exert a potent and often overlooked influence, facing none of the conscious barriers, such as many competing narratives, which allows them to more easily integrate into a sense of identity.

It may also be worth noting that the same principles are known to bad actors, the most successful of whom tend to use the entire toolbox. In zero-sum systems this hands those bad actors the advantage over any parties who are unaware of such tools, or who refuse to apply them.

In terms of the raw numbers, incidents of criminal behavior tend to be extremely rare. Estimates for the number of developers creating malicious code placed the figure at less than 1 in 7,000, with many other forms of crime appearing in similar rarity. Disproportionate attention combined with disproportionate impact skew human heuristic and otherwise intuitive perceptions of the subject.

Disproportionate impact is well worth noting and factoring into decision-making processes. Disproportionate attention can reflect that impact, but a small number of groups and systems blow up that problem by orders of magnitude beyond any disproportionate impact. Often this explosion of disproportionate attention is engineered to go viral, for "attention economy" purposes such as cultivating influence. One report estimated the rarity of such people and groups, termed "superspreaders" of misinformation/disinformation on Twitter, to be as few as 11 in total.

Criminal behavior tends to be inherently rare, but it can be rarer still when presented from the proper angle of emphasis. This is a thankless adjustment to make, but an important one.