This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

Strogatz examines the underlying process of creating patterned behavior in situations where there is no obvious conscious control or even intention. These phenomena arise from “coupled oscillation”—that is, the tendency of phenomena at all levels of existence to synchronize their rhythmic features. The classic example: southeast Asian fireflies that flash in synchrony over miles of countryside.

Other natural examples are discussed:

• earthquakes
• forest fires
• mass extinctions
• synchronization of female menarche
• heart attacks

The Mathematics of Sync

The underlying requirement for coupled oscillation or sync to occur is for phenomena to operate in cycles and for the players in the phenomena to be able to influence each other mutually. In addition, a catalyst may sometimes be necessary. One of variables is pulsed communication vs. continuous interaction: continuous interaction creates more complex, subtle sync.

Some observed qualities/principles of sync:

• One-to-one coupling grows to many-to-many coupling.
• Catalysts tend to initially sync some players but desync others further.
• If one oscillator kicks another over a threshold, they will remain synchronized forever.
• Self-organized criticality and cascading behavior (described by Per Bak’s statistics of cascades).
• Frequency pulling (from Norbert Wiener): the tendency of oscillators to pull stray patterns into sync with the group is the universal mechanism of self-organization.
• Influence function (amplitude), sensitivity function (tendency to speed up or slow down), and level of connectivity shape the individual behaviors of players in the system and the time it takes them to self-organize (Winfree).
• Whenever the whole is different from the sum of the parts; whenever cooperation or competition is going on, the governing equations are nonlinear.
• A threshold of similarity is equivalent to a “phase transition.”
• Kuramoto’s rule: oscillators symmetrically adjust by making the minimum adjustment that allows them to communicate.

Disturbances to an equilibrium system grow as a function of the similarity of the individual players; if the players are nearly identical, the disturbances grow exponentially.

Link between biology and physics: “mutual syncronization is analogous to a phase transition, like the freezing of water into ice. The main difference is that when oscillators freeze into sync, they line up in time, not space.”

Frequency pulling tends to produce a pattern distribution that is unlike the familiar bell curve; instead it has a tall, narrow central peak and two weak peaks on either side—this is a possibly a description of a “standard” distribution to a synchronized or self-organized system.

“Virtually all major unsolved problems in science today have this intricate character…a complex, self-organizing system where everyone changes the state of everyone else.” Examples cited: biochemical cell reactions that lead to cancer; stock market booms and crashes; emergence of consciousness from firings of brain neurons; origin of life in the chemical reactions of the primordial soup.

Kuramoto’s rule in more detail: the amount of adjustment between pairs of oscillators is given by the sine function of the ange between them, multiplied by a number called the “coupling strength,” which determines the maximum possible adjustment. Breakthrough in this idea was the symmetrical relationship between oscillators, compared to Winfree’s concepts of frequency pull and sensitivity.

Kuramoto continued: all systems will migrate toward a state in which the order parameter and speed of the pack are constants. There are ultimately only two such states: an order parameter of 0, in which the system will never display synchrony; a “partially synchronized” state consisting of three groups: a synchronized pack of average speed, a slower desynchronized swarm of dawdlers, and a faster desynchronized swarm of sprinters. This latter case is possible only up to a certain threshold of diversity. You can predict how ordered the pack will be as a function of with width of the bell curve.

David Welsch & Steve Reppert (Mass Gen Hospital): “the brain contains a population of oscillators with distributed natural frequencies which pull one another into synchrony and make a more accurate oscillator en masse than individually. Wiener anticipated all that, but he missed an important detail: Instead of cycling 10 times per second, these cells cycle about a million times slower. These are the cells of the circadian pacemaker, the internal chronometer that keeps us in sync with the world around us.”

Strogatz’s breakthrough idea was to view oscillators as fluids.

Sync and cooperation:

“Reproductive sync has benefits for all if the females in the group are cooperative…It could be that women unconsciously strive to ovulate and conceive in step with their friends (to allow them to share child-rearing and breast-feeding duties) and to keep out of step with their enemies (to avoid competing with them for scarce resources)….Female rats in a synchronized group produce larger and healthier offspring than those reared by a solo mother.”

Cooperation in the context of oscillators means ability to sense one another’s rhythms and react to stay in step. [implications for growth of sensors?]

“When the system was self-synchronizing, Winfree found that no oscillator was indispensable. There was no boss. Any oscillator could be removed and the process would still work. Furthermore, the pack did not necessarily run at the speed of its fastest member. Depending on the choice of influence and sensitivity functions, the group could run at a pace nearer the average speed of those in the pack, or it could go faster or slower than any of its members. It was all wonderfully counterintuitive. Group synchronization was not hierarchical, but it wasn’t always purely democratic either.” (p. 52-53).

Human problems that sync can help explain, solve, interpret:

What causes fads, crowd behavior, and mob psychology?

While much of sync theory focuses on rhythmic phenomena, repeating the same cycles, human behavior is more complex. Thresholds are a focus here. Relevant research comes from:

• Thomas Schelling: discoverer of the “tipping point.”
• Mark Granovetter: rioting behavior (interesting that it is hard to distinguish a person who will readily join a riot from one who will join only after someone else starts rioting; i.e., normal sociological and psychological segmentations won’t catch the difference); also the threshold is quite low.
• Duncan Watts: innovation modeling by network analysis reveals two tipping points: 1) islands link together creating global cascades; 2) a dilution effect when cascading vanishes entirely because a node has too many neighbors. Also the concept of a “vulnerable cluster” which is equivalent to “early adopters.”

Traffic congestion

A basic chaos theory problem; key research comes from:

• Dirk Helbing and Bernardo Huberman: auto traffic synchronizes at a certain density, with large trucks setting the gating speed.
• Boris Kerner and Hubert Rehborn: traffic slows to crawl as on-ramp increases density, but stays in that sync for two hours after the heavy on-flow, “trapped” in a stable, but suboptimal sync; they have to be “defibrillated” in order to regain free flow.

Intentional collective action:

Examples of this are dance, singing, “waves” at football games, audience applause (in Europe); and on the dark side: totalitarianism: Nietszsche: “In individual, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”

How the brain gives rise to the mind:

Acts of cognition are linked to brief surges of neural synchrony.

• Christoph von der Malsburg (USC) asked what physical process binds all the chaos of sensations to allow the perception of a single object. Hypothesis: separate banks of neurons throughout the brain all oscillate in sync for a fraction of second.
• Charles Gray and Wolf Singer: tests hypothesis with cats.
• Jurgen Fell (U. of Bonn) tests human subjects (epileptics with implanted electrodes), found link between sync activity on first viewing words to be memorized and ability to recall later.
• Francisco Varela: “mooney face” experiments reveal a flurry of “gamma oscillations” that mark the moment of perception, recognition occurs when discharges in multiple regions of the brain sync, followed by “active desynchronization.”
• Christof Koch and Francis Crick: Consciousness may be the subjective experience of these states of synchrony passing through our brains.

Six Degrees begins in the beginning. Stanley Milgram's initial small world studies are analyzed. His findings in seeing if a group of people in Nebraska can get a letter to someone in Massachusetts are scrutinized. Milgram left a puzzle. Mathematically, six degrees of separation can be shown and intuitively it is appealing. But do social networks actually work that way?

Initially, Watts steps into the world of pure mathematic theory. Graph theory and random graphs are employed to build potential worlds in which connections can be made. These tools are detailed and their histories explained.

Watts and his colleagues then take the science to new levels, by introducing sociology, epidemiology, economics, and business models into this new multi-disciplinary science. Immediately, each new field of study brings with it new insights into network dynamics.

This convergence of disciplines reveals the social, transportation and technological networks that make up our world. These networks are, ultimately, made up of individuals. Individuals in turn relate back to the networks and define how they operate.

Socially, people relate to their network by clustering. Clusters are logical organizations of network elements. In a social context, we might cluster in terms of a religion, a favorite author, a school we are attending or an affinity for a type of food. Some of these have very close physical distance, while others have a social distance with members spread out over a large area.

Networks of this type are, to various extents, “scale-free” networks. If graphed these networks roughly follow a classic power law trend where the level of connectivity between two nodes in a network increases dramatically as more nodes are connected. Real-world scale-free networks tend to have highly connected hubs which rapidly, purposely, and efficiently transmit pertinent or pervasive content from one location to another. In social circles, these are networkers. In the airline network these are hub airports. In traffic they would be freeway interchanges.

Due to this architecture, the Internet and modern air transport have combined to greatly decrease the role of proximity in our social networks. This has had great impacts on commerce, tourism, cultural sensitivity and other social factors. However, it has also led to great risks in the transmission of diseases, sensitivity to distant economic fluctuations, and rapid spread of misinformation.

These dynamics create a type of network that Duncan calls simultaneously robust and vulnerable. Their strength and weakness is that, with rapid transmission from cluster to cluster, anything can move quickly from one location or group to another. He uses the example of Toyota, whose network of suppliers was organized in such a way as to quickly compensate for and recover from a potential economic catastrophe.

Stable scale-free networks do not rely on a rigid hierarchy to provide direction in times of crisis. Rather, the structure of the network itself can rapidly respond to an unforeseen situation.

Their network was arranged in such a way as to foster and reward communication. This communication helped cope with ambiguous or unplanned situations. Rather than paralyzing Toyota while people waited for a decision from a rigid hierarchy, the contractors in the network were able to analyze the calamity and provide a rapid response to it.

As mentioned above, this robustness also rapidly transmits malicious content as well. The Melissa Virus, SARS and Ebola are analyzed to show why the network did or did not transmit them and, when it did, how they eventually died out.

Watts ends this book by summarizing that the multidimensional nature of social distance is sometimes counterintuitive and subjective. People can feel close in a network sense to people they are physically distant from and, conversely, socially distant from people physically nearby.

He continues by warning that social and physical distances have shrunk. People can quickly travel from place to place and economies are highly interdependent. The sheer number of dependencies in the modern world may yield surprising results from seemingly insignificant actions.

He finishes by showing the stability of our networks with the example of how New York adapted to the 9-11 attacks. The City bounced back to semi-normal operations within a week. During the disaster, the best laid plans of emergency operations staff were scuttled by the utter unavailability of facilities and services designed to copy with disasters. The network will provide.

Recent years have seen a series of questions asking the applicability and usefulness of traditional collective action theory to certain contemporary phenomena. To name an example, Olson's (1965) proposition that small groups are more successful than larger ones in his account of collective action theory can now be widely contested with evidence from contemporary networks such as the highly successful Indymedia (a large network of journalists, writers, and everyday people organised around participatory media principles).

The paper first examines traditional collective action theory in relation to two central elements: the problem of free-riding and the importance of formal organisation as one important way to overcome it. The challenges presented by new uses of information and communication technologies address specifically to these fundamental elements.

A number of examples are presented, to drive the point that collective action theory has evolved or departed from its traditional concept especially with respect to free-riding (do I contribute or free-ride) and the role of, and dependence on organisation. Some examples are:

1. “Battle in Seattle”, in which a far-flung network of groups «used e-mail, the Web, and chat rooms to engage in a largely self-organising protest against the policies of the World Trade Organisation» (pp 370).
2. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBLM): «a core strength of the campaign, which still seems to be ill understood by many, has always been its loose structure» (pp. 370).
3. «participating in various groups and public forums in which people's useful contributions emerge from an interactive process rather than the explicit pursuit of a goal» (pp 371).
4. «posting information on a web page or weblog, contributing to discussion on an electronic bulletin board» (pp 372).
5. Open source projects (pp 375).
6. Spontaneously organised smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002) aimed at public goods (pp 376).

These examples effectively illustrate how the nature of free-riding, organisations, and organising have changed in the contemporary media environment. In the case of the problem of free-riding, the binary decision of whether one contributes or free-ride is no longer apparent. Instead, the individual frequently go back and forth through a process of interaction and negotiation for collective action. In many of these scenarios, decisions to free-ride or contribute can also no longer be easily discerned.

The rise of new technological and participatory media have also made communication methods that used to be exclusive to formal organisations, now available for individuals. Changing structures of organisation that are made possible by communication technologies have also resulted in the ability of social movements and groups to take on certain functions of formal organisations — even surpassing the possibilities of formal organisations. Again, the boundaries are blurred, «between traditional hierarchical forms and flexible network structures».

By studying these phenomena, collective action theory is now reframed using the principle of boundary-crossing between private and public. In this context, when an individual cross a boundary between private and public realms, and when this boundary is crossed by two or more people in conjunction with a public good, collective action is said to have occurred. This is a rich frame by which several scenarios in the current contemporary media environment can be accommodated:

• the ease of transforming private discourse to public discourse, without any specific dependence on central organisation (e.g. private responses to an e-mail discussion which eventually becomes public)
• The absence of a central organisation prompting people to share their email lists (transforming private domains into a public domain of collective action)
• The Web as a vehicle for crossing boundaries (information that are privately created may one day become useful publicly)

The facilitation of private-public boundaries results in exchanges that could arguably advance collective action. Technologies that help to identify, for example, private interests, experiences, and acquaintance once identified as shared between people can prompt collective action. Other than permitting the constitution of pubic spheres around commons interests, this focus would also accommodate the continuum by which individuals and groups can easily move back and forth between private and public realms.

Further thoughts:

The notion of using the private-public boundary crossing as the principle to explain contemporary types of collective action is a very interesting one, especially in relation to the commons paradigm in the media environment. Such reconceptualization of collective action is also necessary, in light of the various types of convergence that the world is witnessing today. The convergence of technologies and growing interdependence between people and their uses of technologies, converging communities and organisations, and convergence in media as they continuously evolve over time.

Having said this, there is also a number of theories and constructs which I think would be very useful to study along with the work raised by this paper. For example, borrowing the lens of structuration theory (Giddens, 1986) to look at how the nature of technologies in use reflect the structural and agency properties of the private and public realms would enhance understandings around the social processes of these technologies (how technologies influence and are influenced by people). The theoretical constructs of the commons, such as the Prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy as conceived by Hardin (1968) would also be relevant to study with respect to the free-riding problem and the role of organisations raised by traditional collective action theory. And along with this paper, it may also be worthwhile to reframe the commons concept in light of the contemporary scenarios of the commons.

References

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J. and Stohl, C. (2005) Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory, 15 (4), 365-388.

Giddens, A. (1986) The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 62, 1243-1248

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart mobs: the next social revolution, Perseus Books Group, Cambridge.

There are basic facts related to decision making and the idea of "free choice" that everybody should know. Experiments have proven that we are victims of ourselves, and therefore we can fall victims of others. This book presents the mechanisms that guide our behaviors and the techniques that can help influence it, so that the reader can be aware of the traps that awaits him in his day-to-day life.

How the brain works - resilience of decisions

Our choices are influenced by prior decisions, whether they were conscious or unconscious decisions. And these individual behaviors impact group decisions as well, and points to the fact that in a group, the analysis of the impact of a decision should always be done by people other than the ones involved in the decision.

Examples of such self manipulation can be seen in 3 types of behaviors:

• Escalating Commitment
• Sunk Cost
• Escalating Conflict

Escalating Commitment

When people agree to a small request, they feel committed, and will make sure that they do the right thing even if it costs them more than they originally expected or intended. For example if someone is asked to look after a bag, chances are that he/she will run after a robber trying to get away with this bag. Under the same circumstances but without a prior request from the owner of the bag, the same person may not have done it. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Staw published in 1976 "knee deep in the big muddy: a study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action".

Sunk cost

When people make a choice, they tend to choose based on what did cost them more instead of what would be the best for them. For example if people make a reservation (and pay) for two events that turn out to be on the same day, they will tend to choose to go to the one that did cost more rather than the one they would most interested in, even though the money was spent and the overall cost is the same regardless of the choice made. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Arkes and Blumer published in 1985 "the psychology of sunk cost"

Escalating Conflict

When a person has to take a additional decision to get out of a situation in which he is trapped, it is very hard to make such decision. If the opportunity to re-evaluate the original choice is not given, people will tend to stick to their original choice way beyond the point when this choice starts costing them more than they would ever have committed. An example of such a mechanism can be found in a study by Brockner, Shaw, and Rubin published in 1979 "factors affecting withdrawals from an escalating conflict: quitting before it's too late"

How manipulation works: from Self-manipulation to Manipulation

Preparatory steps

All the behaviors presented earlier are the result of self manipulation, but they open the door for actual manipulation by others. Somebody can easily exploits these type of behaviors, and introduce preliminary steps in an interaction so as to condition a person to fall later into one of the response mechanism described earlier. The initial preparatory decision should be the result of free choice, which can be induced:

• through a plain lie, for example offering a product that is not available or promising a deal that does not exist
• by controlling how the information is released, for example ask the subject to make a decision first, then provide him with more details that include changes to the original deal (low ball technique)
• by using a teaser, for example offering a sale on a pair of shoes with only large sizes left

It has been shown that in addition to decision being resilient, people also tend to stick to this original decision even after they have been informed of a change to the original deal. An example of this mechanism can be found in a study by Cialdini published in 1978 "low ball procedure for producing complaince: commitment then cost"

Engagement

What makes all these processes work is the effect of "engagement", which precedes the "resilience of decision", as demonstrated in a study by Kiesler published in 1971 "The psychology of commitment - Experiments linking behavior to belief"

Engagement can be reinforced, and there can be several levels of engagement:

• signing a petition is a low entry level, and providing name/address/profession is another level
• how public is the engagement or how often the engagement is requested also impacts the level of engagement.

As a result of this engagement process the reality is that "free choice" is actually "free will submission". The perception from the decision maker is that he is making a free choice, but the reality is that he can be influenced by a simple request.

The consequences of engagement

It has been shown that the preparatory steps work better when engagement is reinforced by action. More specifically, experimentation has shown the following:

• When there is engagement into an action that is in tune with what the person thinks, it reinforces the conviction of this person.
• When there is engagement into an action that conflicts with what the person thinks, it results in an adaptation of the convictions

Engagement into a non-conflictual decision, followed by an action makes the choice more resilient. This can go as far as creating boomerang reactions to opinions that go against the original choice. For example it has been shown that people asked to sign a petition for a cause that they are supporting will become stronger supporters of that cause after they have signed than they were before.

The interesting part is that the effect of engagement being reinforced by actions applies someone regardless of the original point of view of the person. This can regarded as a good thing or as a bad thing depending on how one wants to look at it:

• when engagement is for a good cause, it is usually considered to be leadership - the person engages in an action
• when engagement is for a "bad" cause, it is usually called being brain washed, or manipulated - the person has been engaged into an action

But the mechanism behind remains the same.

Techniques of manipulation

Several techniques can help prepare the context for a better compliance to a later request:

• The "Foot-in-the-door" technique
• The "Door-in-the-face" technique
• Touch
• The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique
• The "Fear-then-relief" technique
• The "But you are free of" technique
• The "A little is better than nothing" technique

The "Foot-in-the-door" technique

In this technique, the preparatory step consist in getting the person engaged into a low cost action as a way to prepare for a much more costly one. For example asking for the time of the day before asking for some money to pay for a phone call - such examples can be found in a study by Freedman and Frazer published in 1966 "compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique", and by Pliner Host Kohl and Saari published in 1974 "compliance without pressure: some further data on the foot-in-the-door technique".

This technique works even better if you follow up with an "attribution", by commenting on the person's action and by making them feel good about such action (Attribution technique - see below)

The "Door-in-the-face" technique

This technique consist in asking for something totally unrealistic as a way prepare for a much more resonable request. For example asking for a large sum beyond the means of a person before asking for $100. Such examples can be found in studies by Cialdini, Vincent, Lewis, Catalan, Wheeler and Darby published in 1975 "a reciprocal concessions procedure for inducing complaince: the door-in-the-face technique"

Touch

This technique consist in touching the person for a few second as a preparatory step for a later request. As strange as it may seem it does make real difference. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Kleinke published in 1973 "compliance to requests made by gazing and touching experimentaters in field settings"

The "Foot-in-the-mouth" technique

This technique consist in inquiring about the person and showing interest in the answer as a preparatory step for a later request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Howard published in 1990 "the influence of verbal responses to common greetings on compliance behavior: the foot-in-the-mouth effect"

The "Fear-then-relief" technique

This technique consist in creating stress before providing relief as a preparatory step for a later request. However unpopular it might be, examples of this technique can be found in police questioning procedures.

The Attribution technique

This technique consist in commenting on the person's action to give them a good image of themselves. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Millet, Brickman and Bolen published in 1975 "attribution versus persuasion as a means for modifying behavior"

The "But you are free of" technique

This technique consist in clarifying after a request that the person should feel free to not comply to this request. Examples of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Guegen and Pascual published in 2002 "evocation of freedom and compliance: the but ou are free of... technique".
This technique also works on the web (for example by changing the wording of a button to "feel free to click here" instead of just "click here"). In one experiment from Guegen, LeGouvello, Pascual and Morineau published in 2002 "request solicitation and semantic evocation of freedom: an evaluation in a computer mediated communication context", it was shown to move the success rate from 65% to 82%.

The "A little is better than nothing" technique

This technique consist in adding to the request that a little will be better than nothing, thus removing the excuse of cost from the possible answers. Example of results from such a technique can be found in a study from Cialdini and Shroeder published in 1976 "increasing compliance by legitimazing paltry contributions"

"This is not all" technique

This technique consist in offering additional items that were not requested originally to justify the high cost of the request. This is a classic, and we are exposed to in our everyday shopping.

The "Foot-in-the-memory" technique

This technique consist in asking the person to remember when they did not comply in the past with something that they approve of in general, or try to ask them to visualise situations that would not be conform with a given policy. An example of results from such a technique can be found in a study by Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson and Miller published in 1992 "using cognitive dissonance to encourage water conservation"

Once all these techniques have been identified, it is then possible to mix and match to try to optimise results. An example of such mix and match and the results that it yielded can be found in a study by Joule published in 1989 "Tobacco deprivation: the foot in the door technique versus the low ball technique". In this experiment, the goal was to have students agree to stop smoking for 18 hours. In the control group, 12% of the students selected agreed to the request, and only 4% actually complied. But after two "foot-in-the-door" steps followed by 2 engagements 95% of the students selected agreed to the request, and 90% complied.

Possible Applications

An obvious application of all these techniques is Marketing.
Management and Child Education are the other areas where they can be useful.

Management

Organizations of all kinds all require that a group of individuals work towards a common goal. And even when the culture inside the organization is very open (what the authors call industrial democracy), we are still in a configuration were people are being asked to do, or maybe they are being influenced into doing, something that makes sense for the organization as the best way to reach the goal.

Research by Kurt Lewin (1947 "group decision and social change") gave birth after the war to the practice of group decision making in industrial organizations. But what remains today from this orginal theory has been dilluted into two main versions that were further advertised, one with a "management" bias, and the other one with a "democratic" bias.

To understand how these versions differ (or not), one has to look at two important parameters within the entreprise:

• the internal social weight - impact on employees
• the organizational efficiency weight - impact on production

The "management" version of the original theory has been presented by Norman Maier who was studying group decision for better management. According to him:

• If a change has no internal social weight and no organizational efficiency weight (for example the color of the paint on the walls), then who makes the decision does not matter, and coin tossing is a good method
• If a change has no internal social weight but has organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken by experts
• If a change has internal social weight but no organizational efficiency weight, then the decision should be taken as a group decision
• If a change has internal social weight and organizational efficiency weight, then there is potential conflict, and the situation requires a "moderator" to drive the group towards the decision that makes most sense for the organization, while it is taken with buy-in from the group. This means using techniques to guide the free choice, to gain engagement, and therefore through manipulation.

The "democracy" version of the original theory favors "listening to the group", by analysing the organization constraints and the personal conflicts within the group. And from this analysis it is expected that a solution will emerge at some point in time.

But while it seem to be a friendlier approach, this also can be seen as another form of manipulation: even if the intent is sincere, the fact that the indivudual agrees to get into the process means he has been "engaged". And from that point, he can be guided as well (and the organization needs it if we do not want the process to take forever), which is again manipulation, but using a psychologist instead of a moderator.

Education

In Education, well intended parents want their child to have choice. But it should not be choice betwen many options, but rather the choice to do or not to do: when somebody makes a choice, they internalize this choice and then rationalize it. This mechanism makes them more apt at making similar choices in the future. So in the case of a child, asking him/her to do the right thing (rather than giving them a real choice or trying to impose an action) and then doing an Attribution, will condition them to make similar decision in the future. During the internalization process, they will associate the behavior to the fact that they were doing the right thing because this is who they are rather than because they were doing what they are told.

Conclusion

Manipulation and propaganda are everywhere, and people usually feel unconfortable with the concept of manipulation. But Marketing propaganda is forcing commercials into a consumer brain without regard for his/her own interest while well intended manipulation can be seen as just another act of selling. Architecting behaviors should not be consider as bad as manipulating people by lying on the virtues of a product or trying to brain wash them through force fed commercials. In fine, and despite the unpopularity of the word "manipulation", using technologies of comportment is probably a more ethical choice, as long as the preliminary steps to engage the person are not based on lies or abuse.

Regardless of what one would like to think, it is clear that we are subject in our everyday life to manipulation. So people making decisions should always keep in mind of the following:

• be aware of the mechanism behind various behaviors
• do not hesitate to re-consider a decision
• learn to consider each decision individually (and not take into account previous decision)
• do not overestimate your freedom of choice

Freedom does not prevent us from doing things that are costly to us personnally and that are the result of somebody else expectation. From a political point of view, it means that one should not confuse living in a liberal society and living in a true democracy.

When the Italian government created regional governments in 1970, a multi-decade study of levels of citizen satisfaction with these new institutions revealed that regions with norms of trust and reciprocity derived from centuries of horizontal voluntary association were both economically and politically more successful than regions that lacked dense networks of civic association and relied on patron-client relationships rather than horizontal citizen associations: "Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement, while others are cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust. These differences in civic life turn out to play a key role in explaining institutional success."

Machiavelli, writing in 16th century Florence, concluded that the success of free institutions depends on the "civic virtue" of citizens. This republican school of civic humanists was countered successfully by the liberal emphasis of Hobbes and Locke on individualism and individual rights. The U.S. constitution was designed to make democracy work with a factionalized, unvirtuous citizenry. More recently, American political philosophy has rediscovered civic humanism, harking back to John Winthrop's "city set upon a hill" sermon.

Civic communities are bound by horizontal relationships of reciprocity among citizens, not vertical relations of authority and dependency. "Fabrics of trust enable the civic community more easily to surmount what economists call 'opportunism,' in which shared interests are unrealized because each individual, acting in wary isolation, has an incentive to defect from collective action." Participation in civic organizations trains people in cooperation skills and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Citizens who belong to many different groups tend to moderate their attitudes as a result of their exposure to group interactions. These groups don't have to be political: choral societies and soccer clubs knit people together socially and culturally, but the bonds of trust and social networks serve as effective vectors for economic and political activity.

In regions that lack networks of civic engagement and widespread norms of trust and reciprocity, citizens have to resort to hierarchy and force to resolve conflict, but even hierarchical law enforcement organizations prove less effective with a mistrustful citizenry. "Light-touch" government in more civic regions works better because it is aided by willing cooperation and self-enforcement among citizens.

The Northern Italian cities – Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and later Florence – took off in the 11th and 12th centrues in part because the contract and extension of credit were new legal strategies for creating partnerships and raising capital: "In the new practices and organization of business activity, risks were minimized, whereas opportunities for cooperation and profit were enhanced."

As Europe emerged from feudalism, the bonds of personal dependence (lord-vassal) grew weaker in the northern regions, but in the south of Italy they became stronger. Northern populations learned to be citizens, southern populations remained subjects. "In the cities, a horizontal arrangement emerged, characterized by cooperation among equals." The guild, confraternity, university, and the commune – a guild of guilds – reflected the new ideals in new institutions.

Mutual aid societies flourished in pre-unification Italy (circa 1850),-- pragmatic institutions in which cooperation conveyed benefits upon contributing individuals in a changing society. Italian cooperatives grew out of the mutual aid societies.

"Networks facilitate flows of information about technological developments, about the creditworthiness of would-be entrepreneurs…. Innovation depends on 'continual informal interaction in cafes and bars and on the street.'"

Social networks allow trust to spread transitively. Trust increases through use and becomes depleted if not used. Social capital, unlike conventional capital, is a public good, not the property of any of the individuals who benefit from it, and must often be produced as a by-product of other social activities.

"Norms are inculcated by modeling and socialization (including civic education) and by sanctions." Norms that support social trust evolve because they lower transaction costs and facilitate cooperation, conferring benefits upon cooperators. Reciprocity is the most important norm, and can be balanced (or specific – the quid-pro-quo) or generalized (diffuse). Communities in which the norm of diffuse reciprocity is high can more efficiently restrain free-riding and more easily resolve collective action problems. Networks of civic engagement increase the potential cost to defectors who risk benefits from future transaction. The same networks foster norms of reciprocity that are reinforced by the networks of relationships in which reputation is both valued and discussed. The same social networks facilitate the flow of reputational information.

"The civic traditions of Northern Italy provide a historical repertoire of forms of collaboration that, having proved their worth in the past, are available to citizens for addressing new problems of collective acdtion. Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the experience of the mutual aid societies."

"Stocks of social capital (trust, norms, networks), tend to be self-reinforcing and cumulative. Virtuous circles result in social equilibria with high levels of cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well being. These traits define the civic community. Conversely, the absence of these traits in the uncivic community is also self-reinforcing. Defection, distrust, shirking, exploitation, isolation, disorder, and stagnation intensify one another in a suffocating miasma of vicious circles. This argument suggests that there may be at least two broad equilibria toward which all societies that face problems of collective action (that is, all societies) tend to evolve and which, once attained, tend to be self-reinforcing."

The statistics of differences in growth between Silicon Valley and Route 128 are startling: "in 1990 Silicon Valley was the home of 39 of the nation's 100 fastest growing electronics companies, whereas Route 128 claimed only four" and "Silicon Valley during the 1980s collectively accounted for more than $22 billion in sales, whereas their Route 128 counterparts had generated only $2 billion." At one point Route 128 firms had dominated the high technology market, but the firms could not keep up with its rapid, unpredictable pace. Saxenian argues the key was the decentralized organization form of Silicon Valley firms and that they were embedded in a social and institutional network that encouraged learning. The fate of two start-up companies, Sun Microsystems of Silicon Valley and Apollo Computer of Route 128 help to frame the story.

Although Sun and Apollo were equally positioned during the mid-1980s, Sun specialized on hardware and software for workstations, outsourcing for component parts, while Apollo "adopted proprietary standards and chose to design and fabricate its own central processor and specialized integrated circuits." Sun was able to develop complex new products quickly, relying on market competition between external vendors to ensure quality, state-of-the-art component parts.

Sun also kept its decentralized form "to preserve the flexibility and enthusiasm of a start-up company even as it grew." Similar to the corporate strategies of Japanese companies, decisions at Sun emerged more organically than in the hierarchical Apollo. Having autonomous division representatives contribute to company strategy also provides a training ground for future executives, as was the case at HP. "Former HP executives were responsible for starting more than 18 firms in Silicon Valley between 1974 and 1984, including such notable successes as Rolm, Tandem, and Pyramid Technology."