Influence is all the rage: persuading key audiences that your ideas are right is seen by many as the key to success in our fight with militant Islamists of various stripes.
Surely it should be easy enough to obtain influence through our ‘strategic communications‘ with the Muslim world. After all, we’ve got a good story to tell – our values deliver prosperity and individual freedoms. What we need to do, clearly, is make sure our messages to Muslims are factual, truthful and consistent (these days its easy to get caught in a lie). Naturally, the messages should reflect our values: we want the audience to know what they’re missing out with all this takfiri repression. And telling the story should be easy – we’ve got the best minds in advertising, marketing, media and design.
What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow, it turns out that this well-meaning model of influence hasn’t been all that effective. Many of the studies on strategic communications put this down to bureaucracy – we need more money, different organizational structures, better minds – the ‘best and brightest’, even. A good survey is this recent RAND report [pdf]. Others suggest that it’s the result of our foreign policies – the best communications strategies in the world are just lipsticking the pig. Perhaps President Obama’s more sophisticated approach will sweeten the pill of western values. A third group suggest that the problem is our vague, incoherent message – in contrast to the allegedly simple, coherent line put out by the enemy: we don’t have a clear narrative, they do. I’m not persuaded, either that ‘their’ story is simple or coherent, or even that having a simple consistent story is the elixir.
I think there’s more to it. Why won’t they believe us? This Defense Science Board study has a stab at an answer [pdf]:
To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, [and] respect the importance of ideas. [...] To be persuasive, they must be credible.
Credibility. How to get that, if telling the truth doesn’t cut it? I’m writing a paper about this at the moment, so won’t spill all the beans. But as a tease – it turns out that theories of cognitive and constructionist psychology can tell us a great deal about how people receive and process incoming information. This offers some good clues as to why factual messages about attractive values have little traction with target audiences and, into the bargain, provides some insights on how to better achieve credibility and influence.
Oddly, this huge body of rigorous psychological literature doesn’t feature all that much in the recent strategic communication and influence work. Theorists of COIN, wars amongst the people, and so on have drawn in part on marketing and advertising, which – to some extent, of course – rest on psychology and sociology. This earlier RAND study is a fine example of that, and makes many good points. And yet the literature is on the whole maddeningly vague, beyond the commonplace thought that these wars are about ideas and persuasion.
So then, from cognitive psychology, we have theories of dissonance, bias, judgmental heuristics, analogical reasoning. And from constructionism, concepts of identity, mythology and memory. Communities are, to some degree, imagined by their members. The thrust of all this is that people are not passive recipients of information, that their identities are to some extent constructed, and therefore unfixed, but that these beliefs – once acquired – are stubborn to shift, even in the face of ostensibly plausible new information.
Frank Kitson once wrote that:
It is in men’s minds that wars of subversion have to be fought and decided.
That sounds right. But Kitson left it there, concluding ruefully that the area was
so hedged around with imponderables that no useful purpose would be served by further speculation in this context. Perhaps some qualified person will take the matter up later on, and research it in a scientific way.
Can we help him – and can you help me? Where are the psychologists who will do for COIN what David Kilcullen has done from an anthropological perspective? Any reading suggestions greatly appreciated, as always.
Here’s one from me: If you’re interested in the state of the art, Matt Armstrong has the best blog around on strategic communications.


