Dealing with Disinformation

When crafting a compelling message, your message often competes against something your audience already believes. When your audience’s current position is based on information that is not factually accurate, this can be referred to as disinformation.

Disinformation can be as benign as a competitor’s advertised claims, which you refute. Or it can be as profound and damaging as unsubstantiated claims that vaccines are designed to control those who take them.

Your audience’s level of belief around this information or disinformation is referred to here as their level of indoctrination. This level denotes the lengths your audience will go to cling to their belief, and we discuss the best approach.

Preparation

Regardless of the message you are crafting, whether it is a grand vision, a new innovation, your product or service, or a new perspective you are championing, the preliminary steps are the same.

We start with Clarity, understanding what and why you are communicating.

• What is the message you want to get across?

• What is the successful outcome of this communication?

• What is the cost of poor or no communication?

• What are the critical elements of this communication?

And many more questions to really understand what you want to accomplish.

The next step is Understanding Your Audience.

• Who do you want to share this message with?

• Who are looking for this information?

• Who are not the audience for this message?

• Who are the most important audience for you to reach? (Target audience vs. General audience)

Then for both Target & Wider audiences, you want to ask the following questions:

• What do they know already?

• What do they think they know?

• What is the common understanding?

• What is the common misunderstanding?

Ultimately, where are they in their thinking in relation to where you what them to be?

When going through this second stage of preparation, there are times you will find that the audience is currently in the thrall of some sort of disinformation. And that is what we will be looking at today.

So let’s start with our definition of disinformation. For the purpose of this article, we will be considering disinformation to be provably incorrect information believed as fact.

We will not be considering the motivations of the disinformation or the manner it was disseminated, except in reference to how we can combat the false beliefs held by the audience.

Given this definition, we are looking at communicating an idea that is in opposition to a mistakenly held belief of your audience.

The next step is to find out from your audience to what degree your audience is invested in this disinformation. For illustrative and practical purposes, I will break these into four levels.

The four levels of indoctrination

1. Unchallenged assumption or belief.

2. Belief based on authority or persuasive argument

3. Belief based on alignment with a worldview

4. Belief integral to identity.

This is not a clinical or scientific stratum but one we will use to frame our message or response. It is important to note where there may be an audience at several or all of these levels. In that case, you need to be aware of all of the levels but also be very clear about which levels you are going to engage in your message.

Before we look at each of these levels of indoctrination, let us first look at some ways to combat disinformation and misplaced beliefs.

The key to all communications designed to combat disinformation is to motivate the questioning of the belief based on that disinformation. The questioning can be motivated at any point around the incorrect belief or the disinformation itself. For example:

• What are the other positions or beliefs?

• Why do people believe this?

• Question the information (disinformation) the belief is based upon

• How does this belief align with past, or aspirational beliefs or values

• What is the motivation behind providing this information (disinformation)?

• Calling it out as a manipulation

• Present a different chain of information and beliefs, and invite comparison

• Invite the audience to choose their ultimate goal and consider which belief gets them to that goal

Which of these and other lines of persuasion will be successful depends largely on the level of indoctrination that the audience has. The more heavily indoctrinated, the more elements you must use to overcome it.

Unchallenged assumption or belief - Lightly held

This is the lowest level of disinformation influence. Something has been presented either by a trusted party or in a vacuum of other information, and the disinformation has been taken at face value. This disinformation has not undergone any sort of judgement, let alone a rigorous exploration of the facts. Rather, it has been taken at face value and never questioned.

This is the easiest to overcome and just requires some facts and a persuasive argument as to how these facts can be interpreted. If done well, the new belief will substitute the old belief and will be stronger than the old belief because it has been thought about.

Belief based on authority or persuasive argument - Moderately held

This moderately held belief comes from following a chain of reasoning (often based on disinformation), where the person has used some reasoning to get to this point of view. Often this chain of reasoning has been provided for them. They have used this reasoning to explain or even promote this point of view to others.

This requires a little more work. This person is a little more invested in their position. It often helps to ask them to step away from their position for a moment to consider a few things from a different point of view. You do not want to attack their position. Rather you want to bring them alongside and gently question elements of their position until the cracks begin to appear, and then pour more questions into those cracks.

Belief based on alignment with their world view - Strongly held, tribal

Tribalism is ingrained into our DNA. We are social creatures who seek a feeling of belonging and inclusion. Ironically inclusion is often most keenly felt when the exclusion of others is exercised. We all fear isolation and being alone to some degree. Those who fear this most keenly are the most likely to fall prey to a group using disinformation to promote an us and them mentality.

While the reasoned approach has some benefit here, it is not enough to overcome the tribalism that has been fostered in a group. At the same time as questioning the logic and facts of the erroneous belief, steps must be taken to address the inclusion and exclusion issues at play.

Often people in this position are likely to cling to the position long after the logic has been breached simply because they don’t want to be excluded from the group. So your communication must include an invitation to join another group (formal or informal), including the benefits of being a part of this group. They may fear expulsion from their current group, but if this is replaced in their mind by the choice they make to join a better, more rewarding group, this fear evaporates.

Belief integral to identity - Existential

This is the ultimate level of indoctrination. “I believe this because this is who I am.” This can often be found in religions and cults, although it can theoretically be applied to almost anything. Any attack on the “facts”, logic or reasoning that underpins this belief is perceived as an attack on the person and is met by a fight or flight response.

If you feel under attack, you will not engage in reasoned logic, and you will merely react. This is why cults ‘train’ their members on how to react in certain situations. Because if they have a reaction prepared, they are even less likely to stop and think.

You cannot attack this strongly held belief directly and expect success. I believe there are two approaches that can be made and that success will only come through multiple engagements over time. One effective approach is to engage the imagination, which I will outline below. The other approach, which can work together with imagination, is to seed questions for the person to consider in their own time.

Seeding questions means asking a small question, almost rhetorically, as you don’t need an answer. You want them to have that question in mind. Our minds LOVE puzzles, and we want to solve puzzles and answer questions. A small question that doesn’t have a good answer is like a small stone in your shoe. At first, you can ignore it, but in time it feels bigger and bigger until you have to do something about it.

If you say to your friend who is a smoker but also passionate about business: “I wonder why more successful business owners are non-smokers rather than smokers?” it is not a direct attack on them. Assuming they identify passionately as a smoker, they still can’t stop their mind from trying to answer the question. Answers such as discipline, saving money, and better health may occur to them. Over time their mind will expand on these answers and spot other answers throughout the day until they have built up enough dissonance to take action.

Crafting your message

Up to now, we have looked at what we need to deal with; let us change focus to how we will deal with it. As I stress to all my clients and students, there is no one way to do things, so there is no right way or wrong way. The elements of crafting a compelling message can be assembled in an infinite variety of ways. There is always a better way and a worse way to communicate your message, but to have either, you need to assemble something first, and these ideas can act as your starting blocks.

Engage the imagination

When you tell a story or start with a line like “imagine if…”, you are taking identity out of the picture. The audience does not feel that they need to defend a position. They are exercising their imagination. In this state, you can have them imagine their ideal future and work back towards the beliefs they might need to accomplish that future. Or you can ramp up the negative and extrapolate what it might lead to unless some change is made.

The language and approach will depend on the level of indoctrination and everything you learned about your audience from the steps above. The more indoctrinated they are, the more gentle your exploration of imagination needs to be. A misplaced word or phrase can be a tripwire sending the most indoctrinated into fight or flight mode.

Bring the receipts

Use facts that you can show and can be verified. Use quotes or positions of authority that will be respected by the audience. If I am an atheist with a scientific bias, you will not persuade me as much by quoting from the bible as you might by quoting some of the religious thinking of Einstein or Darwin.

Bringing up the past statements made by your audience or members of that audience can also be powerful.

Countering the Gish Gallop

In Mehdi Hasan’s excellent book Win Every Argument, he explains the concept of the Gish Gallop, named for Duane Tolbert Gish. But it would be more readily understood if I were to call it the Donald Trump Rant. This is where statements are made, as if factual, at such a rate as to be unable to keep up with them all.

While Mehdi’s book is about debating, this is also an important concept to apply to crafting your compelling message. The problem with the Gish Gallop in debating is that by being overwhelmed with the sheer number of statements to refute, you are bogged down and rendered ineffectual.

The same logic applies when you want to create a compelling message designed to change the minds of your audience; you cannot answer every possible belief or element of disinformation. Instead, it would help if you used the technique Mehdi recommends. Choose a weak argument, ideally, one that can be representative of all the arguments given, and blow it out of the water. By utterly decimating that one argument and stating that all the other arguments could be dealt with in the same way given time, you have undermined the position of the person spewing forth volumes of disinformation.

In a similar vein, when crafting a communication, find the leverage points of one or two positions or beliefs and use what we have discussed here to weaken or destroy them, and leave several questions for the audience to ponder in the future.

Conclusion

This got a little more psychological than I initially intended, and it is a much bigger subject than can be adequately explored in one article. However, I hope that you came away with an understanding that in order to compel an audience with your message, you must first have an understanding of their current position and the level to which they are attached to that position.

Having established position and attachment, you have a number of options to win someone over to a different viewpoint. Those with lightly held positions may be swayed by a single message; those with more tightly held positions may require multiple messages to have any impact.

The more strongly held a position, the more circumspect you must be in your approach so as not to instigate a fight or flight response. Engaging their imagination and seeding questions will be the most compelling techniques over the long term.

Please let me know your thoughts on this article. Do you want more like this, or is there something else you think would be more useful to explore? Do you like a more narrow-focused look at a specific issue, or do you prefer a broader look using guiding principles?

Snippets is a section where I take some interesting text I have come across in the previous week and comment on it.

I enjoyed a passage in Joe Sugarman’s Copywriting Handbook on Curiosity.

Joe writes: “If I were to pick the one major psychological reason that makes direct marketing so successful today, it would be curiosity.”

He describes how he used curiosity in his blublocker ads on TV. He got people on the street to try the glasses and then explained what looking through them was like.

This created massive curiosity in the viewer. They wanted to know what these people were seeing. -I know this is true as I remember watching those ads and wondering the same.

Joe says that if he put the filter on the camera to show what it was like, it would have dispelled the curiosity and destroyed the effectiveness of the ads.

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section where I dive into a famous (or not so famous) quote and explore how this can apply to the Compelling Communicator.

This is an interesting quote. And I think it is very relevant in a world suddenly obsessed with AI and avoiding being replaced by machines.

It tells me that to be human, we don’t want to be one-dimensional. This is at odds with conventional wisdom about how we show up as an authority. We are told to niche down and specialise. But in doing that, we are becoming less human and creating a barrier between us and our audience.

So in our talks and pitches, we want to be multi-dimensional. We want to be human. We want our audience to be able to relate to us and understand who we are.

I purposely kept this newsletter a little broad in subject. I work with Founders and Business Owners to create pitches and signature talks that get their message across from the stage or online video. But I am also involved in filmmaking in my local community, both behind and in front of the camera. I have a long-running podcast that has nothing to do with these things. And I am heavily influenced by a past where Martial Arts was my primary focus.

These things are not of interest to everyone reading this newsletter. But by referencing them from time to time, I can build a stronger bond with my audience.

You should do the same in your communications, whether that is a one-time talk or an ongoing engagement with your audience.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

I have a deluge of very welcome contract work to keep me busy

Recreationally:

Playing a little Demeo with friends on oculus has been fun

What I am reading:

Mehdi Hasan’s Win Every Argument

What I am watching:

Dipping into old shows: Happy, Barry, Veep, Silicon Valley