The dark magic of communication - How we manipulate others | Christopher Cummings | TEDxNTU

[Applause] communication is a lot like magic now our stories are myths and our legends and our cultural histories teach us that magic can be used for good or evil for benevolent purposes where we can try and improve the lives of others or for more malicious intentions and I think that communication is actually quite similar at it's very best communication can help us to demonstrate our love and our affection for one another it's communication that allows us to share our stories and our daily lives as we commune with our friends and our families and it's communication that allows us to inspire others to come together to face the most difficult challenges that we see in a generation however there's a dark side to communication communication can be used to foster injustice and breed intolerance it can also work to improve the idea that hate is okay and it can even be used to incite violence now it's my goal for our time together today to discuss how yes communication can be like magic but to more importantly understand the roles of communication so that way we can improve our ability to be good communicators while also making sure that those who might use communication in a more malicious way don't cast their spells upon us so that's our goals for today now when I talk about communication being like magic I really mean it when we look back at all those stories and histories magic typically takes one of three forms the first type is a magic of creation that's where the magician might pull a rabbit out of a seemingly empty hat and then there's the second form of magic the magic of transformation like alchemy turning lead into gold and the third type of magic that we see from our stories and our histories is a magic of control where we can actually cast a spell and make others do our bidding for us and I see certain parallels when we talk about communication the first one when we're talking about a magic of creating I see as communication itself the basic conception of communication is to note that we might take an idea from our minds and be able to put that same idea in somebody else's mind literally create shared understanding that's pretty magical to me the second form that magic of transformation well that seems a lot like the actual physical process of communication as I see it you see when we actually want to communicate anything we go through an incredibly elaborate process that it actually transforms the energy that we use to create this shared understanding so when I have an idea in my head that I want to share my brain sends an electrical signal down to many parts of my body and more than 100 muscles are actually involved in me producing speech sounds and these muscles don't just fire at random they have to fire in perfect harmony and in doing so they create pressure that pushes air up out of my lungs and that air travels up to my larynx and through my vocal cords where I shape the volume and pitch of my words and that air goes further forward and is shaped further by my tongue my lips my jaw even my nasal passages all play a role in producing those vowel and consonant sounds and what started as an electrical impulse in my brain suddenly travels out to all of you as sound waves it's been transformed and those sound waves travel out and they hit those big beautiful satellite dishes of years that you have on the sides of your head and those satellite dishes of ears funnel those sound waves down as vibrations and those vibrations hit your eardrum and they go and hit those three tiny bones that you might remember from your seventh grade science class the hammer or the anvil and the stirrup right and it goes to your inner cochlea which magically or seemingly magically transforms those vibrations back into an electrical impulse that travels along your auditory nerve and hits your brain and poof we have shared understanding from my brain to yours we're able to see this magic of transformation now it's the third form of magic that I really want to talk to you all about today in our histories we talked about this idea of a magic of control right hypnotism in this full form where we can put you under a spell and get you to do exactly what we want you to do and for me as a health communicator and a wrist communicator I'm fascinated in the idea that communication can be like this magic of control that there are things we can do with communication that might actually get you to barely even think about what you're doing and instead act on a greater impulse let's put it to the test I'm gonna give you a classic test that was developed in the 1920s on the next slide you're gonna see two shapes your job is to tell me which shape should be called bobba and which shape should be called Kiki you ready here we go all right on three I want everyone to seal out the name of the shape on the left one two three Kiki that's correct and that makes the one on the right buh-bah now how did I do that right this is a classic test that shows that yes I can predict exactly what's in your heads already right not fully what this test helps to demonstrate for us is that all of our senses are connected to how we envision in the world right to how we actually perceive and make decisions in real life it's called synesthetic ideation a big fancy word that notes that our senses are connected now when you think about the pronunciation of the words boba and Kiki you'll note that boba is a rounder sound that you actually make a round shape with your mouth which parallels boba the amoeboid shaped image that's on the side over here right and Kiki has a higher pitch and fall rate which generally makes you think about a shape that looks more spiky like our Kiki here fascinating now we know that there's not full 100% control for communication the magic isn't fully real right but it is still pretty powerful and as a health and risk communicator I'm really interested in the ways that we can potentially use communication to influence people to that next great degree now I don't want to scare you but I'm gonna show you an algorithm alright this is the general risk algorithm that we use to actually calculate health risks what it says is that risk is a function of magnitude times probability now if we break that down we're actually looking at two basic variables magnitude and probability magnitude is the likelihood or is the degree to which something can cause harm to you the degree to which something can cause harm to you and probability is the likelihood that that thing might actually happen to you so we can actually grid this out and look across at some different things in the world and look at them and see what kind of risk are they so we might have a low probability low magnitude risk so it doesn't happen very often and when it does happen the consequences aren't that bad so this is what happens when you get a paper cut right it's a very small risk it's not one that you typically read major headline news about right it's one that when the risk actually happens you deal with it you move on you put a band-aid on you go back to work doesn't happen very often doesn't even hurt very much the consequences aren't very large however we might have a low probability high magnitude risk doesn't happen very often again but when it does it's much more catastrophic these are our airplane crashes right these are things that are much more deadly but they still don't happen very often and then we might have our high probability low magnitude risk any allergy sufferers in the room I'm with you I have to take an allergy pill almost daily just so I don't have the itchy watery eyes right I'm even allergic to my dog it's not fair right so I take a pill and I move on with my life right the consequences aren't that dire but they happen quite often right I live with the animal right it sleeps on my bed so I have to deal with it and then we have the high magnitude high probability and what's interesting is that times this particular type of risk doesn't get as much coverage when we're looking at health media as other types of risk the high magnitude high risk is cardiovascular disease World Health Organization reports that cardiovascular disease kills more people than anything more people than anything die from cardiovascular disease yet it's other things like airplane crashes that tend to get a lot of our attention a lot of the coverage when we look at the media and that's fascinating to me and the reason why is because we need to revisit what we know about risk in risk communication we know that people don't necessarily understand risks like experts do to just judge them on magnitude and probability we add a whole new variable all of us and that variable tends to be outrage it tends to be all of the other stuff all of the emotional things that we bring to the table when we're judging a risk and some of those we call affect and it's what I want to talk about for the rest of the time that I have with you today is this concept of effect now effect is the thing that happens to us whenever we confront a stimulus some other agent enters our lives we have an instinctual and primal reaction that's effect it's the thing that drives us to understand and react and then form judgments about the thing that we confront every organism has effect so you can imagine the jellyfish under the water and I hit a rock okay I'll go this way Oh hit another rock go back this way Oh found a nice tasty fish right and I can eat that fish well what happens when the jellyfish bounces around in the ocean it makes very quick primal sense out of what it's bumping into out of the stimuli so effect is a psychological and physical state that we go through and it's one where we process primal emotions now humans aren't jellyfish right we're a higher being we have more complex emotions this is the emotional color wheel that shows a lot of the emotions that we portray and go through in different times in our lives and we have very complex emotions which are tough and is difficult to deal with now for me studying health and risk communication I'm interested in basically one of these for the most part in my personal research and the emotion that I look at when I'm dealing with investigating effect is the emotion of fear fear is an incredibly powerful emotion and it's an incredibly powerful affective state that we process that number one helps to keep us alive fear keeps us away from danger because it alerts us to danger well right we can see the danger coming and choose to react appropriately but sometimes we don't react in the right way so I want to write here and now have you all feel what that affects like by confronting your very own fear message you ready back it worked now what just happened here because it's a very interesting thing that just happened right I jump out and go ah the basic most primal fear message there is and every single person in the room had that effect of reaction it didn't just happen in your mind it happened in your body as well right and you go back and forth between the mind and body to make sense of what happened the very first thing that happened was you jolted right you had that visceral reaction of fear and then you had a cognitive process to figure out what should I do with this fear now that I have this effect of fear State and you kind of turned and you looked and you went okay am i a safe place yes this is a safe place okay I can release the fear by laughing right now if I showed up in your bedroom at 3 in the morning tonight and I left out of the closet you probably wouldn't be laughing then right it's a tricky case you have to understand what that fear means given the context and so we see that fear is an incredible driver and it's something that we can use effectively to communicate about health and risk but we can also see that sometimes it goes a little too far and sometimes we use fear when we shouldn't there's one very interesting historical case where in the UK in the 80s cow's brains were eating the holes into themselves sounds very very scary right and the pictures are pretty gross basically what was happening was cows were eating diseased food and because of it the proteins in their brains were folding upon themselves and literally chewing holes through their own brains now scientists said well we need to educate the public about this issue because there may there may be a small chance that if people then eat that cattle eat that beef that they too could have an Associated disease now scientists had a name for it they called it bovine spongiform encephalopathy bovine spongiform encephalopathy right it's a mouthful you win an award if you say it three times fast right bovine spongiform encephalopathy now when they started reporting about bovine spongiform encephalopathy they noticed that a lot of the public wasn't really concerned about this disease called bovine spongiform encephalopathy right why because it's such a mouthful there was a journalist David Brown in 1990 who changed the term and he said you know instead of describing what the disease is we should describe what it does and he changed the term to mad cow disease which is how you all know the disease to be called what that did is it provided a new touchstone that actually could elicit a different fear response among the public and they could then deal appropriately with their own emotion about it to make a decision about the risk now interestingly when press started coming out and demonstrating that yes this disease might be dangerous and yes it's associated with another long sounding difficult disease called creutzfeldt-jakob disease which affects humans in a very similar way when we changed the name to mad cow disease we saw people starting to pay attention and you saw people starting to pay attention in mass you saw people stopping buying beef you saw people really angered about the issue you saw people having protests about the issue and the like and you saw it even spilling over into other sectors where it wasn't just influencing beef but even other types of meat when we look at risks and we look specifically at how the public comes to understand risk there are two sides both sides are wrong that's the sad part there's one potential true risk that's the best understanding the actual risk that we try to come close to and working with our scientists right our toxicologist our epidemiologist the like try to come up with this number real risk true risk representative risk that's the line in the middle and unfortunately when we are trying to communicate with the public we oftentimes are combating with people being on either side of real risk and so our job as communicators is to try and bring them back to closer to that real risk side so we have on one side the attenuated risks these are the risks that should be more feared by society and aren't for instance radon radon is an odorless tasteless colorless gas that is radioactive and is known to cause lung cancer same thing goes for high calorie diets there's something that are everywhere in our societies nowadays and there's something that needs to have a greater emphasis of fear upon in the public and then we have the other side the amplified risks those are the risks that the public views as not risky or as risky but they shouldn't be viewed as risky they're over amplified in their risk perceptions and these are things like y2k if you lived through y2k where they thought that the entire world was going to end when it the clock struck midnight changing into the year 2000 I have a friend his dad bought a house up in the mountains and packed it was ready to go just in case the world fell apart right and child kidnapping is another one where unfortunately a lot of people are very concerned that strangers are going to kidnap your children when we look at the real data your child is much more likely to be kidnapped by someone you know or an immediate family member all right so these are different kinds of risks that are over amplified and it brings us back to a tough part about communication and risk communication where as dr. Peter Sandman notes one aspect of risk communication is figuring out how to scare people right right and then the next and other component of risk communication is trying to get them to calm down again and I think that understanding that people are purposefully and motivated ly trying to get your eyes trying to get your attention through using fear lets you know that they're trying to implement that third type of magic on you that magic of control when you're reading online and it says five things your teenage daughter is doing that could kill her right these are the types of articles that are purposefully trying to get your eyes and get your body to align with what they're saying through this type of fear message so if you remember and understand that yes people are indeed trying to use fear upon you you can become a better communicator yourself by not using fear messages when you don't think you need to and by being able to protect yourself when other people are trying to put you under there [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 242,118

Rating: 4.8116794 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Singapore, Social Science, Behavior, Body language, Communication, Connection, Decision making, Language

Id: cfNJmmabimU

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017