Some text I’ve just added to WikiPedia (apart from the first paragraph, ref. 2 and the paragraph that cites it):

Antagonists to the Church of Scientology are declared by the church to be “antisocial personalities“, Potential Trouble Sources (PTS), or Suppressive Persons (SPs). The Church of Scientology teaches that association with such persons impedes one’s progress along the Bridge to Total Freedom.

In a Hubbard Communication Office Bulletin (the official policy of the Church of Scientology), L. Ron Hubbard sets out the doctrine that by being connected to Suppressive Persons, a Scientologist could become a Potential Trouble Source (PTS):^[1]

A Scientologist can become PTS by reason of being connected to someone that is antagonistic to Scientology or its tenets. In order to resolve the PTS condition, he either HANDLES the other person’s antagonism (as covered in the materials on PTS handling) or, as a last resort when all attempts to handle have failed, he disconnects from the person. He is simply exercising his right to communicate or not to communicate with a particular person.

The bulletin goes on to set out the urgency of disconnecting oneself from an SP:

To fail or refuse to disconnect from a suppressive person not only denies the PTS case gain, it is also supportive of the suppressive—in itself a Suppressive Act. And it must be so labeled.

According to Church statements, disconnection is used as a “last resort”, only to be employed if the persons antagonistic to Scientology do not cease their antagonism — even after being provided with “true data” about Scientology, since it is taught that usually only people with false data are antagonistic to the Church. ^[2]

A belief that disconnection was not being used as a last resort led a number of Scientologists to resign from the Church of Scientology in 1984, while keeping their allegiance to the beliefs of Scientology.^[3] A local paper of the Church’s East Grinstead base quotes a joint statement from a group of these former members:^[4]

“Because we are fully aware that Mr Hubbard’s writings encourage the unity of the family we cannot tolerate a misrepresentation or misapplication of them that encourages otherwise.”

Disconnection in Practice

The official New Zealand government report into the Church of Scientology (the Dumbleton-Fowles report) quoted from a number of disconnection letters.^[5] This is from teenage Scientologist Erin O’Donnell to her non-Scientologist aunt:

“I am disconnecting from you from now on. If you try to ring me I will not answer, I will not read any mail you send, and I refuse to have anything to do with you in any way whatsoever. All communication is cut completely.”

In 1966 UK newspaper the Daily Mail quoted a disconnection letter from Scientologist Karen Henslow to her mother^[6]

“Dear Mother,
I am hereby disconnecting from you because you are suppressive to me. You evaluate for me, invalidate me, interrupt me and remove all my gains. And you are destroying me.
“I [unreadable] from this time consider myself disconnected from you and I do not want to see you or hear from you again. From now you don’t exist in my life.
“That’s it. Karen.”

Another investigation by the Daily Mail, in 1984, brought up other claims of disconnection.^[7]

“A boy of 13 has told his father he will never see him again. A woman claims her fiancé was forced to give up plans for marriage and leave her.”

The fiancé concerned claimed that “it was a personal decision” and a Church of Scientology spokesman was quoted as saying “If somebody you are associated with directly makes your life a misery, it may be necessary to drop your contacts with them. It is certainly not our policy to split up relationships.”

Also in 1984, the Mail on Sunday (a UK national paper) quoted Gulliver Smithers, a former Scientologist who had left the group’s base at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead at age 14.^[8]

“Disconnection is part of everyday life at Saint Hill. It goes round by word of mouth when someone is an outcast. He or she is just ignored and shunned. It was what we were brought up to do.”

In 1995, the UK local paper Kent Today quoted Pauline Day, who claimed to have received a disconnection letter from her Scientologist daughter Helen, who had then changed her phone number and dropped all contact.^[9][10] A spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology responded, “This was a decision made independently by Helen and has nothing to do with the church at all.”

Other disconnection letters have been posted online^[11]

(More about Scientology on my Scientology critics’ site)

References

1. L. Ron Hubbard. “PTSness and DISCONNECTION”, Hubbard Communication Office, 1983-09-10.
2. Church of Scientology What is Disconnection? (archive.org copy of website accessed 4/19/06)
3. “Buy-out bid for sect HQ: Factions announce plans to fight ‘disconnections’”, East Grinstead Courier, 1984-02-16.
4. “Sect row over policy: Members Quit in ‘Disconnection’ Protest”, East Grinstead Courier, 1984-02-09.
5. Sir Guy Richardson Powles, E. V. Dumbleton. “The Commission of Inquiry Into the Hubbard Scientology Organisation in New Zealand”, 1969-06-30.
6. “Minister is asked to investigate… The case of the processed woman”, Daily Mail, 1966-08-22.
7. Peter Seymour. “‘We disconnect you’”, Daily Mail, 1984-02-11.
8. “Hubbard Youth: The teenage bullies who reign supreme over a sinister cult”, Mail on Sunday, 1984-07-29.
9. Clare Jardine. “Talk To Me, Plea By Cult Girl’s Mum”, Kent Today, 1995-05-20.
10. “Our Little Boy Lost: Grandparents in Legal Battle for the right to see two-year-old Sam”, Daily Mail, 1995-05-29.
11. Gormez, Michael (2005-04-23). Dear Dad… Scientology disconnect policy at work. Retrieved on 2008-02-26.

An outstanding piece of writing on biases that came out last year was Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon’s “Why Hawks Win” in Foreign Policy. Rather than look at the evidence or effects for one particular bias, the authors consider the whole spectrum of biases and how they affect a particular decision: of whether or not to go to war.

Kahneman is especially well-placed to do this since with Amos Tversky and other colleagues he set off the whole “Heuristics and Biases research programme” that has spawned thousands of experiments and earned him a Nobel memorial prize in Economics.

Is there a general lesson from bias research about war? According to that authors, yes: “All the biases in our list favor hawks. [...] biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.” Some of these biases I’ve discussed previously on this blog. It’s easy to see how optimistic bias would exacerbate a war: leaders would be insufficiently prepared for adverse outcomes and when they occur, would be unwilling to cut their losses and change strategy.

We’ve seen over-optimism in the Iraq war, with estimated costs in the tens of billions of dollars translating into real costs of hundreds or thousands of billions and the predicted “cakewalk” in which the Coalition would be “greeted as liberators” failing to materialise.

…or “Why can’t we all just get along?”

In a world of economically rational agents, there would be no strikes, civil legal disputes wouldn’t come to court, marital break-up would not be so acrimonious and there probably wouldn’t be any wars. One strand of bias research deals with why there is so much conflict in human life.

A labour dispute, for example, could be resolved on paper by rational agents. The union would threaten to strike, the employer threaten to dock pay, and as each party spells out their position, they would negotiate an equilibrium. They could then sign a contract giving each other some concessions but committing not to take any of the threatened action. There’s a worked numerical example in Dixit and Nalebuff’s Thinking Strategically. Strikes cost the company and the strikers a great deal in lost production and lost pay, so it’s in their rational interest to have the strike “on paper” like this. (Perhaps it would be rational for unions to strike once in a while, just so that their threats are credible).

When there is a civil legal case, there are usually many pre-trial hearings, during which the two sides set out all the arguments they will use, and look for precedents in similar cases. Each side becomes increasingly informed about the strength of the other’s position, and about how this case is likely to turn out. Eventually both sides are working from the same information about the case, So there’s a scientific question of why such cases ever come to trial. Given that actually having a trial is very costly in legal fees, psychological stress, time spent and so on, it’s in the collective rational interest of the parties to agree a settlement.

War is enormously costly, obviously in terms of dead and maimed soldiers and civilians but in a more narrowly economic sense. As well as the costs of transporting and supporting people and equipment, there is lost productivity in that men and women in their prime are taken out of the economy to go and fight. War may be very profitable for the arms industry, but costly to the economy as a whole, because we would be richer if we could spend the resources on other things.

So, if military solutions are so costly, why are they so often taken?

A number of the biases discovered by psychologists bear on why conflicts of any sort are so acrimonious; in particular why agents can have totally opposed perspectives on an issue when, in a strictly rational sense, they have the same information.

The fundamental attribution error is an effect where a person’s reaction to circumstances is misread as part of their personality. Imagine that you are frustrated by someone’s apparent stand-offishness and become angry while talking to them. If they conclude you are an angry person by nature, and fail to see the role of their own attitude, they are making an attribution error. Conversely, if you fail to see that their attitude might be a result of the way you treat them, you’d be making the same error.

An already tense disagreement can become more aggressive because, with the fundamental attribution error, each side becomes convinced that the other is unreasonable and belligerent. Chapter 6 of Elliot and Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) has more about how attribution errors contribute to conflict in marriage.

Memory biases, especially self-serving biases, can distort so that each side can see their own behaviour as more reasonable than the other. See Chapter 3 of Elliot and Aronson.

There is a demon effect where someone with a salient negative quality in judged to be negative in other respects (the opposite process is called the halo effect). This predicts that if you aren’t familiar with someone but know something about them that you find objectionable, you might well be prejudiced to think them unintelligent, selfish or unreasonable. So when, say, capitalists and communists meet across a negotiating table, they might have pessimistic expectations of what could be achieved by negotiation.

The hostile media effect might make both sides feel that neutral parties are treating them unfairly.

Another process that may worsen conflict is polarisation of attitude due to social pressure. Say that Alice and Bob differ on some political issue that they both care about. They might go to different meetings, listen to different pundits, and generally identify with different groups. Many social effects might effect how their attitudes evolve (e.g. conformity), how they see the other group (e.g. stereotyping) and how they decide to handle the disagreement (e.g. risky shift). These processes could escalate an initially small disagreement.

Another bias that worsens conflict is what I would call the egocentric assessment of pain i.e. people considering their own pain and suffering to be more significant than other people’s. Elliot and Aronson report on an experiment by Shergill et al. (2003) where subjects were connected in tit-for-tat situation where they could each apply pressure to the other’s index finger. Although both participants were told to apply the same amount of pressure that they had just received, the pressure escalated rapidly. It seems that, to each subject, a great deal of pressure on the other person’s finger was judged “the same as” a relatively small pressure on their own.

An area where there has been specific research on the role of biases in conflict is a series of papers by Linda Babcock, George Loewenstein and colleagues on self-serving biases. This theory says that, where there is uncertainty in the evidence, each party will interpret that uncertainty in their own favour, and form an optimistic picture of what they can get out of the dispute. There are known optimism biases and superiority biases affecting a lot of human judgement. So it’s not surprising that one or both sides will think they can do better than the negotiated settlement, and reject it.

Babcock and Loewenstein in particular looked at pay negotiations for public school teachers in one state of the USA. In order to decide on a pay settlement, the union and employer (the school board) would each look for “comparable” districts to decide what amount is fair. Assuming that unions will be biased towards high pay settlements and employers towards low settlements, negotiations should be more likely to break down when there a greater range of potential comparison districts. This is exactly what the researchers found.

In a laboratory context, Babcock and Loewenstein used a role-play in which subjects took the role of plaintiff or defendant in a civil case. Their task was to negotiate a settlement, with a penalty if they failed to agree. The background information was taken from a real case, although they were not told the size of the award. This experiment clearly demonstrated the self-serving bias, in that plantiffs thought a much higher award would be paid out (and was fair) than did defendants. The greater the discrepancy between the two parties, the more likely the negotiation would fail.

A conventional economic explanation of failed negotiation would involve each side having different information, but here the two parties had the same information (i.e. the case study) but different randomly-assigned roles.

References

Linda Babcock, George Loewenstein, Samuel Issacharoff and Colin Camerer (1995) “Biased Judgments of Fairness in Bargaining” The American Economic Review, Vol. 85, No. 5., pp. 1337-1343.

Linda Babcock and George Loewenstein (1997) “Explaining Bargaining Impasse: The Role of Self-Serving Biases” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 11, No. 1. (Winter, 1997), pp. 109-126.

Sukhwinder S. Shergill, Paul M. Bays, Chris D. Frith, Danel M. Wolpert (2003) “Two Eyes for an Eye: the Neuroscience of force escalation” Science Vol. 301. no. 5630, p. 187 DOI: 10.1126/science.1085327

Thanks to Paul Latreille at Swansea University for directing me to the Babcock et al. research.

In terms of making a great breadth of research easy to understand with a variety of examples and applications, Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality (Published 1994 by Penguin, reprinted 2007 by Pinter & Martin) is still the best non-technical introduction to the topic of cognitive biases. There are books covering newer research (such as Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of Its Own) but none is as ambitious and accessible as this.

It looks at judgement and decision-making in many contexts, from military tactics to medicine and from job interviews to the paranormal. It relies heavily on scientific research - there are many elegant descriptions of psychological experiments - yet the technical details are kept out of the main text to make it easy for a non-specialist reader, and much of the text deals with real-life instances of bias. 324 footnotes point to the book’s scientific basis.

If it has a flaw, it’s on the philosophical side rather than the psychological side. In order to judge that some behaviour is irrational, you need a clear standard of rationality and an understanding of why that is the best choice. Sutherland is good at succinctly explaining the normative standards, but some of his examples are not as clear-cut as he makes them out.

Given that it’s such a definitive and dense book, I’ve created the following outline to help find topics in the book and to relate its contents to other books in the literature.

1. Introduction

2. The Wrong Impression

• Availability heuristic
• Primacy error: Asch experiment in which rearranging the order of words in a description affects the impression it makes on subjects
• Halo effect/ devil effect
• Halo effect bias in peer review

3. Obedience

• Milgram obedience experiment

4. Conformity

• Asch conformity experiment
• Effect of verbal commitment on future action: consistency effect
• Credibility of experts: halo effect
• Crowd behaviours: panic, violence, contagious emotion (including religious conversion)
• Bystander effect (conforming to others’ inaction)

5. In-groups and Out-groups

• Drift of attitudes while staying in a group is not towards the centre but towards the extreme of the group’s distinctive attitude
• Risky shift: (group judgement is more risky than judgement of individuals)
• Groupthink (Janis): “illusion of invulnerability coupled with extreme optimism”; stereotyped thinking about people outside group; suppression of doubt, dissent and unfavourable facts
• Effect of uniform worn by subject on aggression
• Sherif research on conflict between arbitrarily created groups
• Stereotype bias in memory

6. Organisational Folly

• Leslie Chapman’s book Your Disobedient Servant on inefficiency in the British Civil Service
• Examples of bias towards inefficiency in large organisations
• The “fat cat” phenomenon when directors decide their own salaries
• Contrarian investment strategy: advisers on equities routinely underperform the market

7. Misplaced Consistency

• self-justificatory bias/”bolstering a decision”: chosen item (e.g. bought house) seems much more desirable once it is chosen
• Distortions of attitude in relationships
• Escalation of commitment (”foot in the door”)
• justification of effort
• Sunk Cost fallacy
• Cognitive dissonance: Festinger and Carlsmith

8. Misuse of Rewards and Punishments

• Intrinsic motivation decreased by excessive extrinsic motivation: “people who are trying to gain a prize will do less imaginative and less flexible work than those of equal talent who are not. In addition they may come to work less hard after winning the prize.”
• Punishment of children making them less obedient
• Langer experiment on choice: a chosen lottery ticket is much more valuable to subjects than a randomly allocated lottery ticket. Related experiments with children, students, medical patients
• “If you are a manager, adopt as participatory and egalitarian a style as possible.”

9. Drive and Emotion

• Reward improves performance on simple tasks; worsens performance on difficult tasks; effects of reward persist afterwards
• Wishful thinking and self-serving biases; subjects change behaviour in direction consonant with (they are told) having a healthy heart
• Stress worsening memory recall
• fear; boredom; love

10. Ignoring the Evidence

• Military example: Pearl Harbour
• Wason rule-discovery task (confirmation bias) (people don’t try to prove their hypotheses false)
• Wason conditional task (A D 3 7)

11. Distorting the Evidence

• Military example: battle of Arnhem
• Lord, Ross and Lepper (1979) “Biased assimilation and attitude polarisation”: Subjects read ambiguous information about death penalty; evaluate the information that supports their existing beliefs as “more convincing” and “better conducted”: reading the same evidence strengthens beliefs both for and against
• Resistance of beliefs to contrary evidence: subjects given random feedback on a meaningless task persist in believing they are good or bad at the task after thorough debriefing
• Snyder and Cantor (1979) Subects given written description of a person; two days later decide if that person is suitable for a particular job: selectively recall parts of the description that support their decision
• Reasons for persistence of belief:
  1. “People consistenty avoid exposing themselves to evidence that might disprove their beliefs.”
  2. “On receiving evidence against their beliefs, they often refuse to believe it.”
  3. “The existence of a belief distorts people’s interpretation of new evidence in such a way as to make it consistent with the belief.”
  4. “People selectively remember items that are in line with their beliefs.” (see Seven Sins of Memory)
  5. Belief is shaped by “the desire to protect one’s self-esteem.”
  6. If the explanation the subject comes up with for the belief is satisfying, then the belief itself perseveres.

12. Making the Wrong Connections

• The need to use all four cells in judging correlation
• Chapman experiments on illusory correlation
• Perceived usefulness of the Rorschach test and graphology as being due to illusory correlation
• As well as illusory correlation there is correlation blindness: People “see” correlations that fit their prejudices, and fail to spot correlations (even 100% correlations) that don’t match their prejudices
• Illusory correlation of the “odd one out”; whether a word or a person
• Hamilton and Gifford (1976) experiment on illusory correlation between minority groups and minority (deviant) behaviours

13. Mistaken Connections in Medicine

• Confusion between direct and reverse probabilities (eg probability of having breast cancer given a positive mammography test, versus the probability of having a positive test given breast cancer)
• Eddy’s demonstration (in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases) that this sort of error is pervasive in medicine; even in medical research journals
• Overconfidence bias and misjudgment of the risks of operations

14. Mistaking the Cause

• Fallacy of “like causes like”, e.g. in homeopathy (and in mainstream medicine before 20th Century)
• Examples of mistaken causal reasoning from medicine and therapy, incl. myth that cholestrol-laden food makes heart attacks more likely; craze for tonsilectomies even when doctors’ judgements of which tonsils needed removal were seemingly random
• Fundamental attribution error: ignoring the effect of a situation on a person’s behaviour
• Effect of physical viewpoint on interpretation of behaviour
• Illusory similarity of others’ choices to our own
• Illusory introspection: subjects poor at judging what factors affect their mood, or their responses to situations

15. Misinterpreting the Evidence

• Representativeness (e.g. Judgements of which sequences are “random”)
• Conjunction fallacy (feminist bank teller)
• Confusion between direct and reverse probabilities (continued); base rate ignorance
• Statistical fallacies, e.g. ignoring the effect of sample size

16. Inconsistent Decisions and Bad Bets

• Framing effects on betting behaviour (people accept or reject the same bet, depending on how it is described); bias towards certainty
• Asymmetric assessment of gains and losses
• Intransitive preferences from ignoring small differences in favour of large differences
• Different answers to which bets are preferred and which bets are worth more
• Economic behaviour: treating a £5 saving on a £20 item differently from on a £200 item
• Loftus research on distortion of memory by post-event information
• Anchoring heuristic

17. Overconfidence

• Hindsight bias: Fischoff’s original experiments
• Superiority bias: 95 of British drivers think they are above average. Financial traders doing on average worse than the market but each believing their potential is better
• Overconfidence in one’s own judgments, including professional judgments
• Illusion of Control

18. Risks

• Three Mile Island and other industrial disasters
• Waagenaar experiments on ignorance of warnings
• Nuclear versus fossil fuels: biased assessment of advantages due to association, availability, halo effect

19. False Inferences

• Satisficing as a decision procedure
• Regression to the mean (e.g. “hot hand” fallacy)
• Failure to distinguish perfect and imperfect predictors (predicting other students’ exam scores)
• Subjects have greater confidence in prediction measures when those measures are extreme
• Though a pair of highly correlated tests are worse predictors of academic success than a pair of uncorrelated tests, subjects treat them as more informative (most of this chapter is based on Kahneman and Tversky (1973) “On the Psychology of Prediction”)
• Gambler’s fallacy

20. The Failure of Intuition

• Superiority of actuarial (i.e. algorithmic, in particular using multiple regression analysis) prediction over intuitive prediction in many different contexts
  • “out of more than a hundred studies comparing the accuracy of actuarial and intuitive prediction, in not one instance have people done better, though occasionally there has been no difference between the two methods. In the great majority of cases, the actuarial method has been more successful by a considerable margin”
• Why is intuitive prediction so bad?
  • People make mistaken connections
  • People combine multiple pieces of information in the wrong way (see “False Inferences)
  • Inconsistency: a person’s judgements can vary greatly from day to day
• Resistance to actuarial techniques due to illusory superiority (e.g. overconfidence) of intuition
• Use of expert systems in medical and commerce decisions (e.g. bank loans)
• The irrationality of “head-hunters”

21. Utility

• The rational standard: Expected utility and the diminishing marginal utility of money
• Limitations of utility theory: multidimensional problems; difficulty of knowing how happy one will feel in a particular outcome; loss aversion
• Irrational outcomes of purely financial cost-benefit analysis
• Medical decision-making and Quality Adjusted Life years (QALYs)

22. The Paranormal

Biases that promote belief in the paranormal:

• Reluctance to suspend judgement
• Animism (tendency to interpret events in terms of intention and agency)
• Wishful thinking
• Availability: paranormal stories make the news; null results and retractions don’t
• Conformity: people to an extent see what they are told to see
• Distorted assessment of evidence/confirmation bias, e.g. Forer effect/Barnum effect in evaluation of horoscopes
• Cognitive dissonance: having paid money for a tarot reading or psychic treatment, people are under pressure not to admit that it is bogus.
• Illusory correlation, e.g. between dreaming about an incident and it happening in real life the next day
• Innumeracy: people are just wrong about the probabilities of events happening by coincidence
• Fallible memory can be distorted so that coincidences seem more significant
• Blindness to sample size: people are persuaded by a single case when a large sample shows no evidence
• Overconfidence in belief: proponents not taking seriously the possibility they are wrong

23. Causes, Cures and Costs

Five basic causes of irrationality

• Evolutionary value of group conformity, strong emotion
• Biological randomisation and hypersensitivity in neural connections
• Heuristics
• Ignorance of elementary probability and statistics
• Self-serving biases (i.e. enhancing self-esteem)

Education in statistical concepts, in economics or in psychology seems to counter some biases.

Go to the Irrationality page on the main Bias and Belief site.

I recently read “Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion” by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini (Profile books, 2007). Written by a USA/UK team, it summarises a wide range of published scientific experiments, some of which are very recent, and draws out lessons for managers and workers in marketing/sales. It’s similar in its themes to Cialdini’s previous books on persuasion, but definitely aimed at the business community rather than researchers or students.

If I say it’s been dumbed down for managers, I risk irritating any managers who read this… well, I’ve gone and said it anyway.

Below are my one-line summaries of the book’s evidence-based tips. They aren’t meant to substitute for the book itself (which is a recommended read, except for some annoyingly twee aphorisms) but if you already know about persuasion research, this may be a helpful guide.

1. Convey that your product is popular, to benefit from social proof.
2. Make social proof specific: use a comparison group that your target audience will relate to.
3. Avoid inadvertently giving social proof in negative messages.
4. Beware the “magnetic middle”: when reporting on average behaviour, be aware that above-average people may take it as an excuse to lower their performance.
5. Don’t give customers too many similar options or they might not choose at all.
6. If you give a “free gift” with your product, emphasise the real value of that gift, otherwise it will be assumed to be of low value.
7. People don’t like purchasing the most expensive or the least expensive option, so if you want people to pay for your most expensive product, introduce another one that is even more expensive.
8. Scary messages only inspire people to act if they specify what should be done to respond to the threat: otherwise they inspire denial and depression.
9. Do people favours pre-emptively and unconditionally, and they will reciprocate down the line - maybe even later in the same conversation [but don't do good things only for selfish reasons!]
10. Personalising a request (e.g. adding a handwritten post-it note to a printed document) makes a response much more likely.
11. A “free gift” that is personalised and unexpected is much more effective. (Restaurant patrons tip more when given mints by the serving staff, rather than allowed to pick up mints on the way out)
12. Reciprocity works better if you do someone a favour pre-emptively, rather than promise a favour if they do you one first.
13. Recipients of a favour view it as less valuable over time. Givers of a favour view it as more valuable over time. Hence if you did a favour for someone a while ago and want them to help you out, you might differ in your assessment of what is owed.
14. Make a small request before a big one, i.e. foot-in-the-door technique.
15. Labelling technique: before a request, label the requestee as the sort of person who complies, e.g. telling a child that she seems the sort of child who is diligent with homework.
16. Ask people whether they are going to comply with your request: this boosts compliance because of consistency effects.
17. Elicit active, written commitments rather than passive commitment.
18. Older people desire consistency more than young people, so persuasive messages aimed at older people should be framed appropriately.
19. Benjamin Franklin’s technique: get someone to do you a small favour which is specific to them, and they like you more.
20. Frame requests in terms of a small amount of what you want (e.g. charity fundraiser saying “even a penny would help”).
21. In auctions (e.g. eBay), a lower initial price leads to a higher selling price.
22. Get someone else to promote your expertise. Even if they are a paid agent, they will be more credible than your own self-promotion.
23. The most talented person, working alone, can do worse than a team of less talented people who co-operate, so long as they avoid the problems with joint decisions. Hence, even if you are the smartest, seek perspectives from other people.
24. People trust authority. This can lead to “Captain-itis” as subordinates fail to challenge bad decisions. So leaders should actively solicit dissenting views.
25. Groupthink can block out important (but unwelcome) information, fixing the group on a disastrous path. So do not penalise dissent, listen to independent voices and encourage team members to voice doubts.
26. A “Devil’s Advocate” (someone required to take a negative position as part of their role) is not nearly as effective as a genuine dissenter, so tolerate and even encourage dissent.
27. Training that’s based on avoiding error is more effective than training that’s put in terms of success rather than errors, so seek out examples of things that have gone wrong and use them.
28. Mention a small drawback of what you are offering. This conveys honesty and makes the rest of your message credible.
29. When identifying a drawback, mention it along with positive attributes that are directly related to that drawback (e.g. a restaurant describing itself as small but cosy)
30. Organisations that attribute failure to internal causes (and say what they plan to do to deal with that problem) have more public trust than those that blame it on external causes.
31. People assign more severe blame to human error than technical error. Hence when an error is technical, it is important to convey that quickly and clearly.
32. People are more receptive to requests from people that they share trivial attributes with, such as having a similar-sounding name.
33. People are drawn to things (locations, professions) that are similar to their own name. So do not give your product an ugly, unpronounceable name.
34. Mirroring (of verbalisations or body language) promotes liking and hence their responsiveness to your requests. Given a request, repeat that request back in the person’s own words.
35. People respond more positively to a genuine smile than a fake smile. If you can cultivate positivity towards someone, they will pick up on it and respond more positively to you.
36. Scarcity is a powerful motivator, so if you are offering something scare, make that clear.
37. Frame messages in terms of potential loss rather than potential gain, to take advantage of loss aversion.
38. “Because” can be an effective persuasion word even if it is not accompanied by any meaningful justification.
39. People judge the attractiveness of an option by the ease with which they come up with reasons for that option. So give them an easy task, such as “name one advantage of our product”. Hard tasks, like “name ten advantages of our product” can backfire.
40. Make messages easy to read. Overly complex language is rated as less credible. Messages in easy-to-read fonts or handwriting are rated as more credible than difficult-to-read messages. People are more favourably disposed to a company when its name (and its stock ticker symbol) are pronounceable.
41. Ideas expressed as a rhyme are rated as more credible than the same ideas without the rhyme.
42. Contrast effects apply in the area of quantity of information. I.e. give a small amount of information about one product, then a larger amount of information about another product, and the recipient will overestimate how much well-informed they are about the latter product (and will feel more positively toward it).
43. People are motivated more by being given an incomplete task than a task which starts from scratch. E.g. a loyalty card with 8 slots, two of them already filled, gets more use than a loyalty card with six slots, all blank.
44. People respond positively to products that have an unusual, unexpected name as it encourages people to think about the product’s attributes.
45. It’s not enough for an advertising campaign to be well-recognised: you have to connect the campaign to the product. Consumers need memory aids.
46. People who can see themselves (in a mirror or on a CCTV screen) behave more in accordance with their professed values. Even putting a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall reduces some anti-social behaviour.
47. Mood affects buying and selling behaviour. Sad buyers pay more than neutral people, and sad sellers sell for less.
48. When dealing with emotionally charged issues, people are blind to quantities. They might offer the same amount of money for 50 or 100 of a good.
49. Sleep deprivation, fatigue and distraction heighten gullibility. E.g. door-to-door salesman states the price of his wares in pennies and immediately says “It’s a bargain!” People are more receptive to the “bargain” claim after the unexpected, distracting statement.
50. Caffeine makes people more favourably disposed to persuasive arguments (but no effect on weak arguments).

E-influence:

• Negotiation via email is much more likely to come to an impasse than face-to-face negotiation.
• Writers of emails systematically overestimate how likely the respondent is to read the correct tone.
• Mass emails with a specific request are unlikely to be responded to, because of the diffusion-of-responsibility effect.
• Customers appreciate being able to make price comparisons, so put your competitors’ prices on your own site.
• Background images on web sites can subliminally prime people to think about certain aspects of what they are looking for. E.g. coins in the background make them think about cost-effectiveness.

Global influence:

• Different persuasion techniques have different strengths depending on the culture you’re in. E.g. reciprocity stronger in the USA, authority stronger in China. You can’t just move your working practices to another country and expect that they’ll continue to succeed.
• Find out if you are communicating with someone from an individualistic culture or a collectivist one, and phrase your messages appropriately.

Critical thinking note: In the interest of brevity, I’ve summarised the tips in the broadest, most optimistic way possible, going beyond what’s scientifically proven. Your situation might be different from the scenario described in the research reports.

Notes from a talk I gave in the ILRT research seminar series, 21 August 2003:

We tend to see the motivation of other people as simply a task of correctly applying the “carrot” and the “stick”. Surprisingly though, cognitive psychology has shown that the “common sense” view of motivation is often counterproductive. The implications are important for managers who want to motivate employees, teachers who want to involve students in learning and innovators who want others to adopt their new ideas. This session will consider various experiments that bear on motivation.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic

Let’s start with a simple distinction:

Extrinsic Motivation

• An exercise of someone else’s power over the subject
• Depends on a contingency that failure will turn out worse for the subject than success.
• Working as someone’s subordinate
• Examples: Gold stars for kids, grades for students, bonuses for workers
• When the boss/parent is no longer providing the reward, no incentive to work well (when the cat’s away, the mice can play)

Intrinsic Motivation

• Comes from the subject’s own goals
• Does not depend on external contingency.
• Working on own or as someone’s “partner”
• Endures

What’s the psychological importance of this distinction?

The Key Finding…

• When intrinsic motivation already exists, extrinsic motivation decreases it.
• Lepper, Greene and Nisbett (1973) “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A test of the ‘overjustification’ hypothesis” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology vol. 28, pp. 129-137. doi:10.1037/h0035519
• Children were given a task which they enjoyed (drawing with crayons).
• Those who were promised a glossy certificate for good drawings showed less enthusiasm and did worse drawings than those who were not rewarded.
• Many (70+) replications, with different classes of subjects! [See for example C. M. Mueller and C. S. Dweck (199 "Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75(1):33-52.]
• Adults were offered money to donate blood. Fewer gave blood than a control group who were offered no money.

I’m grateful to Dave Beckett for pointing out the relevance of this finding to software engineering. Most software is created as part of a programmer’s job or a piece of work for which they are contracted. Other software, usually open-source, is created in the programmer’s spare time, driven by their intrinsic interest in the task. In some cases at least, the free software is better quality. The Lepper et al. experiment suggests that work done from intrinsic motivation is better quality than that done for reward.

What’s bad about reward?

A-Level results are being given out today. Some pupils are getting ten pounds from their parents for each top grade. Though this would seem to be a kind and reasonable thing for the parents to do, I argue that it is potentially very counterproductive:

• Implies that the task must be unpleasant, because you have to be paid to do it.
• Reinforces an unequal relationship rather than a peer relationship
• Conveys that the requester’s support for the requestee is not unconditional.
• Can be taken as punishment in disguise.
• Creates an artificial situation which will not apply when it is most important to be motivated
• Contributes to tension with peer group (“Teacher’s pet”, “Mummy’s boy” etc.)
• Envy from those who did not get the reward.
• Relieves the requester of the burden of finding a task which is actually interesting for the requestee to do.
• Discourages personal ownership of the task.
• Rewards self-centered thinking

Note the equivalence of reward and punishment: “I will give you ten pounds for each top grade” is equivalent to “I will give you fifty pounds as a present but take away ten pounds for each subject which is not the top grade”. When you phrase it that way, it sounds harsh.

Principle of Commitment

We’ve seen that appealing to someone’s intrinsic motivation to do a task is much more interesting than providing a bribe. However, sometimes there isn’t an intrinsic motivation to appeal to. In the next few slides we will look at some psychological principles that are known to be effective in changing others’ behaviour. In their grossest forms, these are the devious tricks used by used car salesmen. In more benign forms, these are principles that we use a lot of the time without realising.

• Freedman and Fraser (1966) “Compliance Without Pressure: The Foot-in-the-Door Technique” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• 2 or 3 times as many people agree to a large, inconvenient request if they have first agreed to (and performed) a related, minor request.
• The two requests can come from unrelated sources! Two weeks apart in the case of this experiment.
• NB: More compliance despite increase in the total inconvenience.

Homeowners in suburban California were asked to put up huge “drive carefully” billboards in their gardens. The minor request was for them to sign a petition to promote careful driving.

Reciprocity

• Regan (1971) “Effects of a favour and liking on compliance” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
• Fake experiment ostensibly about art appreciation. “Joe” does a favour for the subject. Joe sells raffle tickets to subject.
• Subjects buy twice as many tickets when he does the favour. Even those who dislike Joe still buy tickets.
• NB: Unconditional reward, given in advance, and irrelevant to the behaviour it tries to motivate.
• Reciprocity is a deep, instinctual (“hard-wired”?) principle of behaviour.
• A common method for salesmen, supermarkets, beggars to affect your behaviour.

Reciprocal Concessions

• Ask for more than you want, then retreat.
• This is one way of making the subject feel that it is their own choice.
• [Cialdini example]
• This is a counterpart to the Foot-in-the-Door technique

Self-Image

• Unconditional reward can change behaviour by effecting self-image.
• Miller, Brickman and Bolen (1975) “Attribution versus Persuasion as a Means for Modifying Behaviour” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology vol 31(3) 430-41
• Pupils were praised for leaving the room in a tidy, litter-free state (even though they were leaving lots of litter).
• These pupils subsequently dropped much less litter than control groups. Similar results with other tasks.
• This method is much more effective than persuasion, and at least as effective as straight reinforcement.

Words into Action: Hypocrisy Induction

• Aaronson, Fried and Stone (1990) “Overcoming denial and increasing the intention to use condoms through the induction of hypocrisy” American Journal of Public Health
• Students accept all the arguments for using condoms, but don’t actually use them.
• Task: make instructional video for other students, using examples from their own experience.
• Lasting positive effect on condom use from this “hypocrisy induction” technique.
• Effect does not appear if students do not have to refer to their own experience.
• Model for uptake of innovative technologies?

More Reward, Less Effect

• Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) “Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
• Subjects who have carried out a boring task are paid to tell others that it is exciting.
• When the amount paid is small, there is a lasting effect on perception of the task. Increase the reward, and this effect goes away.
• Very strongly replicated with all sorts of tasks.
• Lesson: give minimal incentive necessary.

A Simple Procedure

• Is there an existing intrinsic motivation?
  • If so, don’t offer contingent rewards
  • If not, give the minimum incentive necessary.
• Is there a mismatch between verbal acceptance and action? If so, make the subject aware that the mismatch is visible.
• Keep the subject aware that she has made the choice herself.
• Give unconditional support.

PS: Metacognition

• Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999) “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 77, No. 6. 1121-1134
• Subjects were given tests of logical reasoning, grammar and ability to spot humour. They also rated themselves compared to the other subjects in the experiment.
• Those were were worst at the tasks were also dramatically worst at assessing their own abilities: they showed an especially high Superiority Bias. Improvements in their skill result in a lowering of their self-rating.
• So: when training people for a task, train them in the metacognitive task of distinguishing good work from bad work, rather than the task itself. Once they can appreciate a good end product, they will have intrinsic motivation to

Key Readings

• Chapter 8 of Stuart Sutherland (1992) Irrationality: The Enemy Within. Penguin paperback
• Robert Cialdini (198 Influence: Science and Practice. Harper Collins
• Alfie Kohn (1993) Punished by Rewards, Houghton Mifflin
• Course notes by William Wu at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/psychology/persuasion.shtml

You know the experience. You’re in your car, just trundling along when, as you cross the junction… “WHOA! He just came out of nowhere! If I hadn’t braked, that would have been a collision. Why do they let these idiots on the road?”

Some of the research on bias examines driving. In particular, there are experiments on how drivers perceive their own skills in relation to other peoples’.

The classic study is Swenson (1981), who surveyed students in Sweden and the United States, asking subjects to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. Stop and think how you might answer this yourself. As a road user (whether in a vehicle or on foot), do you put yourself in the top ten percent for safety? the bottom ten percent? the top thirty percent? right in the middle (so that half of other road users are more safe than you, and the other half less safe)?

It’s clear that some sort of bias is at work when, looking at the first line of Swenson’s results, you see 60% of the US students putting themselves in the safest 20%. For driving skill, almost all of the US sample (93%) and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%. For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%. (Note that being “in the top 50%” is different from being “above average”). This is an example of what’s known as superiority bias, or Lake Wobegon effect.

Whereas Swenson asked about driving skill and driving safety, a follow-up study asked subjects to evaluate eight different dimensions of their driving (McCormick et al. (1986)). They had to say where they were on the dangerous-safe dimension, the considerate-inconsiderate dimension, and so on. Out of 178 subjects, only a tiny minority of responses were below average and for some of the measures, large majorities rated themselves as above average. Taking the eight dimensions together, just under 80% of the subjects put themselves above the average driver.

For me, the most powerful demonstration of this bias was an earlier study that inspired Swenson. Preston and Harris (1965) interviewed 50 drivers who were in hospital after road accidents; in 34 cases because of accidents they had caused. In written assessments of their own skill, they gave the same glowing self-evaluations as other drivers.

The practical consequences of superiority bias are that people take fewer precautions than necessary. According to Lewin (1982), only 10-15% of road accidents are purely down to mechanical or environmental factors. The remaining 85-90% are either human error (insufficient skill or attention) or a combination of factors. Another consequence is that people ignore road safety advice, because they think it is aimed at the worse-than-average drivers (you know, all those idiots on the roads) rather than them.

Another bias that might be at play is the illusion of control, where drivers have unrealistic expectations about their ability to avoid accidents. McKenna (1993) asked subjects how likely they were to be involved in different possible road accidents. Some were scenarios where the subject would have a lot of control, such as “an accident in which the vehicle you are in is driven into another vehicle”. Others were low-control, such as “an accident which is caused by another vehicle hitting you from behind”. The high-control scenarios were rated as much less likely, meaning that drivers think that their own control of the vehicle is unlikely (less likely than average) to result in an accident.

Let’s think again about that near-miss at an intersection. There probably won’t be much interaction between the two drivers other than honks and rude hand signs, but if we could listen in on the other car, the driver might well be saying, “Hey, look where you’re going! If I hadn’t swerved, that would have been a collision. Why do they let these idiots on the road?”

References

Lewin I. (1982) “Driver training: A perceptual-motor skill approach” Ergonomics 2.5, 917-924. doi:10.1080/00140138208925051

McCormick, Iain A., Frank H. Walkey and Dianne E. Green (1986) “Comparative perceptions of driver ability— A confirmation and expansion” Accident Analysis & Prevention. Volume 18, Issue 3, June 1986, Pages 205-208 doi:10.1016/0001-4575(86)90004-7

McKenna, F. P. (1993) “It won’t happen to me: Unrealisitic optimism or illusion of control?” British Journal of Psychology, 84, 39-50

Preston, Caroline E. and Stanley Harris (1965) “Psychology of drivers in traffic accidents” Journal of Applied Psychology
Volume 49, Issue 4, Pages 284-288 doi:10.1037/h0022453

Swenson, O. (1981) “Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?” Acta Psychologica, Volume 47, Issue 2, February 1981, Pages 143-148 doi:10.1016/0001-6918(81)90005-6

Intellectual property note: I, the author of the above text, licence it under the GNU Free Documentation Licence so it can be copied into Wikipedia.

The term “Holocaust denial” is, I hope, widely understood. It refers to pretend scholarship that challenges the idea that the Holocaust happened. This has no connection at all with Holocaust scholarship. Whereas real historical scholarship examines multiple, converging lines of evidence to assemble a picture of what happened at a particular time, denial takes a tenuous “what if?” scenario and treats it as proven fact, or at least equal to scientific evidence (a useful introduction to this distinction is the first chapter of Michael Shermer’s The Borderlines of Science).

Holocaust denial exists because there is a demand for it. It’s an economic fact that there are people happy to pay for, or otherwise support, validation of their opinions. The better supported a claim is with real evidence, and the more intensely biased people are against it, the more there will be this need to legitimise a contrasting opinion.That conclusion falls neatly out of the model of value bias that I’ve been working with.

Some times the “denial” term is extended to other areas; for example “climate change deniers” and “evolution deniers” (the latter being Micheal Shermer’s suggested term for the creation science movement). Some think this sort of language should be avoided. Their argument is that it implicitly compares people to Nazis (or neo-Nazis) and hence lowers the tone of debate.

I suggest that we should go the other way: recognise that the concept of an industry of denial is entirely meaningful and that such industries are plentiful in our society (because you need them whenever you want to shape belief and haven’t got science on your side). Think of opinion columnists in newspapers: they rarely if ever have to provide evidence for their opinions, and people generally seem to buy publications whose columnists agree with their point of view (there’s a legitimate question about how much this reflects a bias, which I’ll leave for now).

It’s not opinion columnists that I’m talking about when I use the term “Industry of denial”. Nor is it everyday people trying to decide what’s right or wrong. If you disagree with something which can be proven to the best scientific or historical standards, that doesn’t automatically make you a “denier”. Most us are unaware of what proper research has to say: we’re not experts ourselves, and the media give us conflicting messages.

As well as researchers and the public who rely on them there is another category: people who engage in bogus “research”, and announce the result that people want. They might be liars, self-deceivers, or sincere but misguided, but they have an eager audience because they give a legitimacy to ideas that are threatened by actual research. Creation science/intelligent design is the clearest example of this, in that their treatment of evidence and logic is often comically unlike genuine investigation of the topic, but there is a market for their message.

So it’s meaningful to call someone a climate change denier, evolution denier or vaccine denier. It might be wrong in any particular instance, but it’s not just an insult. It just means that they are “investigating” a topic in a very biased way, with only the barest pretense of finding out what’s true.

I’d especially like to see the term “vaccine deniers” given wider currency. These are people who try to discredit the proven efficacy of established vaccines. Clearly there can be legitimate debate about new, unproven vaccines, or reasonable suspicion of the pharmaceutical giants that sell them: it’s probably fair to say that the pharmaceutical industry is often an industry of denial. Vaccine denial goes far beyond this, claiming against all evidence that even the best-established vaccines are unsafe and ineffective. The vaccine denial industry gives life to scares such as that MMR vaccine causes autism. They are deniers in multiple senses, because they encourage the rest of us to deny children potentially life-saving medicine. Peter Bowditch’s site on this topic is impassioned, but it’s a morally important topic.

Update 16 November 2007: This new article on the Committee for Scientific Inquiry site about AIDS Denialism vs. Science explains the awful consequences of denying the link between HIV and AIDS, and justifies calling the anti-HIV campaign denialists rather than dissenters.

Imagine someone who claims to have superhuman powers: He has x-ray vision, enough strength to lift a car and can bend metal with his bare hands, he assures you. When you say that’s unlikely, he takes it as an insult: okay, his powers aren’t at their best right now, but it’s plain to him that he is super-human. You might find his insistence eccentric or amusing, but then you find he’s going on a long drive across the desert without taking tools, a jack or extra supplies. If the car develops a fault, he swaggers, he’ll diagnose it with super-sight, lift up the car with his super-strength, and bend the metal right back into shape.

No longer amused by his confidence, you try to dissuade him. A more reasonable person making the trip would be bold and adventurous, but he just seems blind. If only he would acknowledge who and what he really is, he could still have his fun, and avoid a potential disaster.

Now of course that story was just an analogy. You, I and the people we meet every day never claim to have super-human powers, do we? Well, consider these abilities:

• Senses that directly show us the world as it is
• Memory that, while it may lapse, doesn’t systematically distort the past, or construct memories that are vivid but entirely false
• A clean distinction between memory, imagination, suggestion and perception of reality, so that we always know which of these a mental image or feeling has come from
• Decision-making abilities that, while we might be misled or unwise, respond to the relevant features of a situation rather than irrelevant details
• Introspection into our own mental processes, so that we know why we made a particular choice or why we have particular attitudes

Repeated scientific research shows us that human beings don’t have these things, any more than a cat has wings. Someone who had these powers would be, by definition, super-human. People who wrongly believe they have these powers are entirely normal. Self-identified super-humans, then, are everywhere. We all have that failing to some extent, although in some people it’s a marked personality fault. Whenever people claim to know things when they have no evidence, they are in effect saying they are super-human.

The fact that perception, memory and judgment are unreliable does not stop us finding genuine knowledge, just as the unreliability of a car does not mean travel is impossible. For a trip across a desert, you could prepare well, taking spare parts; all the necessary tools; and lots of supplies. Similarly, in deciding what’s true, there are techniques we can use to compensate for our own subjectivity, for example:

• objective measurements
• converging lines of evidence
• calculation and analysis, to learn the most from each observation
• checkability, meaning observations that can be repeated by different people, in different circumstances

In trying to get people to think critically about what is or is not true, the main obstacle seems to be to get them to accept that their beliefs need checking, rather than that reality is just the way they see it. No one denies that scientific conclusions can sometimes turn out to be affected by individual biases, shaped by prejudice or just plain mistaken. The super-humans take this to mean that they are better off relying on their own beliefs or feelings about what’s true, but that inference ignores the fact that human perception and memory have all these problems and worse. Quoting Tavris and Aronson (2007) “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”:

Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

Some of the posts on this blog are about research into biases, whereas some, like this one, log my attempts to craft ever better text to describe my position on biases, hence I haven’t filled this post with references. On the distortion of decisions by irrelevant features of the environment, see most of the research by Tverksy and Kahneman and colleagues on the Anchoring heuristic, or any of the psychological research on stereotypes. On confusions between sources of memory, see Daniel Schacter’s Seven Sins of Memory research. On the illusion of introspection, see Timothy D. Wilson (2004) Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. The difficulty in teaching people to be actively open-minded is explored at length in Jonathan Baron’s Thinking and Deciding.

From mentioning breasts earlier in the week, I now turn to penises. In a study that deserves a great deal of publicity, psychologists used a questionnaire to identify a group of men with strongly negative attitudes to homosexuality, and another group of men who were comfortable with it. The men watched various kids of erotic films while a rubber ring around their members, hooked up to a computer, monitored them for arousal.

“Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. [...] Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.” (Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr (1996) “Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 105, No. 3, 440-445

This is from 1996, but worth blogging now because of recent news from the USA. This week saw Idaho Senator Larry Craig plead guilty to lewd conduct in a men’s toilet. Craig had a record of voting against gay rights. Florida legislator Bob Allen (also a Republican) was in similar trouble earlier this summer. He had sponsored or co-sponsored a range of bills to increase punishments for lewdness and sexual solicitation, then was caught soliciting oral sex from a man in a public toilet. In November, Ted Haggard, one of the top US Christian evangelists, admitted “sexual immorality” with a male prostitute. Haggard had frequently denounced both homosexuality and living a secret life and had been seen on British television ranting against Evolution.