It’s happened at some point to anyone who drives a motor vehicle. You inch slowly into the intersection, cautiously looking in all directions to make sure that the right of way is clear. Convinced that you can now safely make your turn, you pull forward. Suddenly, out of nowhere, its horn blaring, appears a car, swerving to avoid you. In a panic, your heart pounding loudly in your ears, you slam on your brakes, wondering how in the world you could have missed that car.

The subject of numerous studies, including research done by the Visual Cognition Lab of the University of Illinois, change blindness is the failure to detect large changes in what is literally right in front of our eyes.

Paying attention is important, not just for drivers. Daily life demands our attention, otherwise we may inadvertently overlook the important.

So, how observant are you? Test yourself with this video, created as part of a motor vehicle safety awareness campaign for the City of London:

More change blindness links on Mediation Channel here:

• It’s not enough to talk about the gorilla in the room; you have to see him first
• Lying eyes: test yourself for change blindness
• The mind and magic: conjuring up ways to improve awareness

Hat tip to @SmilingMind.

In the February 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine is an essay entitled “The Serfdom of Crowds”, excerpted from You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, the latest book by computer scientist, web guru, and author Jaron Lanier. You Are Not a Gadget serves as a bracing rebuttal to the loud hallelujah chorus of praise for all things internet-related. Of social networking Lanier writes,

An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social-networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am. I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished.

These words pulled me up short. Minutes before reading them, I’d received a request on LinkedIn for a recommendation from one of my contacts. When I clicked on their profile I realized that I had no idea who they were or how I had come to connect with them. At one time accepting their invitation to connect on LinkedIn must have seemed like a good idea, because here they were in my list of connections, and there they were asking me for my recommendation.

Let’s pause there for a moment and consider what LinkedIn has to say about accepting or responding to invitations:

LinkedIn believes that when it comes to building your network, it is all about the quality of the connections and not about the quantity of connections. Your network should be centered on quality of knowledge, resources, skills and advocacy that LinkedIn can help unlock.

…Invitations are a great option to ask people to join your network. When sending Invitations, ensure that you know and trust the person you are extending the Invitation to. This is generally someone you have worked with, collaborated on projects with or maybe attended school with. These will be people that can recommend you to others and will become your first degree connections.

Looking over my list of contacts on LinkedIn, I can honestly say that among them are a few people I don’t know well at all. They are people who’ve perhaps read my blog, followed me on Twitter, or are fellow members of a professional networking site. The basis for these connections at times seems arbitrary, because social media and human nature make it easy to manufacture or claim kinship, whether it’s sharing an alma mater, a profession, a political view, or a hometown. But are all these individuals people I could recommend, based on direct, personal knowledge and with a clear conscience? To be honest: no. Some. But not all.

In the end I declined the request and removed this person from my list of connections. If this person was willing to ask a casual acquaintance to recommend them, then this was someone I did not care to be linked with any longer. But it left me asking, in accepting a LinkedIn invitation without undertaking due diligence, are we devaluing the currency of online social networking?

How many of us stop to weigh the words “it is all about the quality of the connections and not about the quantity of connections” before accepting invitations from strangers to connect? If a business networking site like LinkedIn is to have any worth, it must depend upon principled users. Otherwise the recommendations that LinkedIn urges users to obtain to complete their profile remain suspect.

Readers, do not mistake this post for a rejection of social media by a long-time blogger. I am not denying that social media have value for me – as water cooler, newsstand, and town square. They have led me to substantial, real-world friendships and allowed me to keep in touch with people who matter to me. Nor do I argue that regular, in-person contact is the sole means to establish or sustain a meaningful relationship. Email, Skype calls, instant messages, telephone time, and, yes, messages posted on social networking sites, can nurture collegial ties and friendships across distances great and small.

As worthwhile for some purposes social media may be, their wow-that’s-so-cool impact should not blind us to their obvious limits. Strip away the hype to reveal the teetering house of cards that social networking constructs of our trust. Social media can reduce to parody what is meaningful and valuable about relationships and personal connections. They can lower our standards or overpower our discernment. The entrepreneur or social media expert may be a disbarred lawyer or a convicted felon. It’s hard to tell when the light’s dazzling our eyes. But let’s remember the enduring truth in the aphorism “on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog“.

So long as trust is aspirational not dependably operational, what can any of us do? Two adages come to mind. In the words of the authors of negotiation classic Getting to Yes, “Be trustworthy, not trusting.” And, as a former U.S. president is purported to have once said: “Trust, but verify.”

As for me, I am in the process of drafting a LinkedIn policy, as I did for Twitter (although without the wiseassery). If you have one yourself, tell me about it. What guidelines have you set for accepting or declining invitations, or making or requesting recommendations? I’d welcome hearing from you.

Numerous news articles and blog posts have commented on the dark side of Facebook – its disregard for users’ privacy, the opportunities it affords for cyberbullying, and its vulnerability to spam, phishing exploits and malware.

I’d like to alert my readers, particularly those of you who blog, about a Facebook trap to avoid.

I regularly check search engines for mention of me or my blog, something that all of us should do routinely, not as an exercise in egotism but as good business sense, as my colleague Tammy Lenski has written.

During a search yesterday on Google I learned that Mediation Channel was listed as one of the “NetworkedBlogs on Facebook“. I clicked on the page to learn more, since I hadn’t requested the listing. A link on the page read “Pending confirmation. Help us confirm the author.” When I clicked on the link, the following choices appeared:

How do you like to verify ownership of ‘Mediation Channel’?
- Ask friends to verify you (easy, but takes a little time)

- Use our widget to verify ownership (instant, but some technical skills required)

Hmmm. Sites that enable you to claim ownership of your blog -– for example Google Analytics, which analyzes web traffic — typically require you to enter a specific snippet of code on your site, something only you as the site owner with administrative access would be able to do. It’s the sensible and secure way to confirm blog ownership.

The NetworkedBlogs app on Facebook, on the other hand, amazingly allows anybody to verify that they own a blog, whether they actually own the blog or not, by asking a handful of their Facebook friends to vouch for them. Basically anyone could claim ownership of my blog, or yours, for purposes of NetworkedBlogs on Facebook. That’s just nuts.

How nuts? Very: I decided to test what would happen if I asked a Facebook friend to verify. I clicked on “Ask friends to verify”, and then, when my friends’ profile pictures appeared, I selected my dog’s Facebook profile (yes, he has one – doesn’t yours?). My dog is a good sport in that way and a willing participant in these kinds of web experiments.

NetworkedBlogs promptly sent my dog an email asking him to verify that I own Mediation Channel. In order for my dog to confirm or deny that I own my blog, he had to allow NetworkedBlogs access to his account, something I don’t think he particularly wanted to do. (Unless it’s an app that involves bacon or chasing squirrels, he’s just not interested.)

This is wrong in so many ways. Let’s consider them:

• Unscrupulous people with the assistance of unobservant or equally unscrupulous friends could claim your blog on Facebook.
• Anyone, even if they’re a dog, can verify ownership of a blog in the wacky world that NetworkedBlogs inhabits.
• If you ask your friends for help in verifying ownership of your blog, you’re asking them to allow an app they probably don’t want have access to their accounts – which seems awfully unkind to your friends.

If you decide to go the widget route, you should know that NetworkedBlogs does not believe in hidden code or discreet badges. You will be presented with a choice between two wincingly hideous and ginormous widgets to stick in your sidebar to prove you have administrative access to your blog.

NetworkedBlogs describes itself as an app that allows you to “[p]romote your blog on Facebook and to discover new blogs… Join the fun, add your blog, and connect with others who read and write about subjects you like.” Join the fun? I don’t think so.

On the internet, NetworkedBlogs neither knows nor seems to care that you’re a dog. This is one app to avoid on principle – and avoid inflicting on your Facebook friends.

The editorial staff of Mediation Channel confirms that no animals were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Optical illusions make ideal teaching tools in negotiation and conflict resolution training. They serve as humbling reminders of the unreliability of our senses and the conclusions we draw from the data we perceive. One of my favorite illusions is “Shepard’s Turning the Tables“, which you can view at the web site of Professor Michael Bach of Universitäts-Augenklinik, Freiburg, Germany.

This illusion depicts two tables standing near each other. The tables appear to be of different sizes, one apparently longer and narrower than the other. When you click “Run”, one table top lifts and floats, coming to rest on top of the second table, allowing you to see that the surface areas of the tables are in fact identical and match perfectly. You can reset and replay the illusion again and again.

Amazingly, despite knowing the truth about the dimensions of the table tops, your eyes still see differing sizes and shapes. I invite you to see for yourself. (I must caution those of you whose time is limited: visiting Professor Bach’s site, a collection of 86 jaw-dropping illusions, for only a minute is simply not possible. You’ll find yourself irresistibly drawn from one illusion to the next.)

For those of you interested in influences on perception and cognition, I recommend one article and two videos, all thought-provoking (for those of you viewing at work, please note that a certain four-letter word appears in both videos):

Via The Boston Globe, “Easy = True: How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel“. Globe staff writer Drake Bennett describes cognitive fluency as “[o]ne of the hottest topics in psychology today”. He reports that cognitive fluency is “simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.” Studies suggest that factors such as rhyming words or font style and legibility of text influence the way we process information, enhancing or hampering our ability to perform tasks or make judgments.

The outstanding blog Sociological Images posted “Chart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization,” a presentation by political consultant Alex Lundry, which offers a salutary lesson in “graphical literacy” and warns against the ways in which depictions of visual data can mislead or distort. View it here:

From Colin Rule’s blog, “The template for every news story you’ve ever seen“. Watch in awe to see how, in Colin’s words, “a couple edits and on-the-street interviews can transform fuzzy thinking into something that seems insightful”:

In yesterday’s mail, among the bills, bank statements, and catalogs, I found a solicitation from a non-profit. The package it arrived in declared in bold red letters that my “signature is needed” (not to mention, no doubt, my cash) for a petition to halt some objectionable political action. Visible through the plastic wrapper was a pen, their gift to me.

No doubt you’ve received similar solicitations from other organizations. In the past they’ve sent me (and occasionally my dog) shiny nickels; return address labels; and (my personal favorite) a world map. Those who create these campaigns are hoping to take advantage of the principle of reciprocity, that universal force that compels us, almost beyond our will, to return favors done for us. Robert Cialdini describes its effect at length in his well known work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, and how heavily humans feel and act from a sense of obligation. He writes,

The impressive aspect of the rule for reciprocation and the sense of obligation that goes with it is its pervasiveness in human culture. It is so widespread that after intensive study, sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner can report that there is not human society that does not subscribe to the rule. And within each society it seems pervasive also; it permeates exchanges of every kind.

Alas for these nonprofits, I have read Cialdini and am able to resist the compulsion to reciprocate, pocketing the nickels and applying the return address labels to my personal correspondence without the slightest twinge of guilt.

While this effort to influence my decision regarding charitable gift-giving failed to work in my case, science has exhaustively documented  how effective its influence can be.

The force of reciprocity does much social good, allowing interpersonal and commercial transactions to flourish, leading to “a cluster of interdependencies that bind individuals together into high efficient units”, producing “social advances”, as Cialdini writes. Reciprocity, though, can be turned to a more sinister purpose. Bribes, kickbacks, and corruption are its unloved progeny.

While science perhaps acknowledges the influence and risks of reciprocity, law sometimes lags behind.  And all too often these influences operate just beneath the radar of our own awareness. For example, despite having enjoyed a duck-hunting trip at the invitation of then Vice President Cheney, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself from a case involving Cheney, confidently asserting, “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned.”  Folks who understood something about the subtle powers of persuasion weren’t so confident. (See for example, “Psychology 101: A Remedial Class For Justice Scalia” (PDF), by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Radcliffe, Harvard University.)

Now, years later, psychologists and other social scientists are shaking their heads over another Supreme Court call, this one involving another form of influence: corporate campaign financing.

In the recent Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of campaign finance laws, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (PDF), which struck down federal law limiting spending by for-profits, non-profits, and unions. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, observed:

The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt…

The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy…

…independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption. In fact, there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate.

Some psychologists beg to differ, according to “Psychologists: Propaganda works better than you think”, an article in USA Today that samples the views of several psychologists on the science behind campaign financing and voter influence. From the article:

“The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, reading the court’s 5-4 majority opinion on Thursday, finding that corporations and unions can freely spend money on campaign ads to defeat or elect federal candidates. The decision ends decades-old limits on political spending.

…

So, we might ask, how well does research suggest people “think for themselves” under the potential flood of political ads from that spigot?

“I don’t have any particular position on the ruling itself, but this justification for the decision is based on an incorrect assumption about how the mind works,” says psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia. “If the goal really was to increase the chances that citizens would think for themselves, then the decision should have been to ban partisan advertising completely.”

Nosek and his colleagues, Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji and the University of Washington’s Tony Greenwald, operate “Project Implicit” which features an “Implicit Association Test” to measure unconscious beliefs, including political ones. The data from 7 million participants show so-called “undecided” voters have often already made up their minds unconsciously on who they will vote for, for example. And the team has also mapped congressional race outcomes nationwide against unconscious racial biases, finding that prejudices invisible to voters themselves swayed their decisions, rather than rational thinking.

“The (think for themselves) justification is ironic considering that the purpose of advertising — political or otherwise — is to persuade the viewer about a particular point-of-view,” Nosek says. “That is, the goal of the political ad is deliberately ‘not’ to have citizens thinking for themselves.”

Psychologists remain wondering when the legal system will catch up with the science. So might the rest of us.

In the second episode of ADR podcast series Cafe Mediate, conflict resolution and ADR marketing expert Tammy Lenski, London-based international business mediator Amanda Bucklow, New York City detective and conflict resolution professional Jeff Thompson, and I sit down together to consider the question, “What makes a great mediator?”.

This lively transatlantic conversation focused on the qualities that distinguish the effective practitioner. Listening to these seasoned colleagues left me inspired and thinking how fortunate I am to be able to count these talented conflict resolvers as my friends – thanks to Tammy, Amanda, and Jeff for such a thought-provoking discussion.

Each month ADR podcast series Cafe Mediate (motto: “where conversation, not caffeine, is the stimulant”), will feature conversation among ADR practitioners about topics relevant to the business, practice, and future of our field.

Future editions will explore issues such as certification and professionalization; debunking ADR myths; and training and education of mediators. I hope you’ll tune in. In the meantime, click here to learn more about “what makes a great mediator“.

The American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution has announced that it has honored premier ADR and negotiation web site Mediate.com as the institutional recipient of the prestigious Lawyer as Problem Solver Award.

From the ABA press release:

Mediate.com offers the field one of the most used information resources, replete with blogs, cutting edge articles, news of mediation and negotiation practice, as well as a place for interactive dialogue. The website is a practical tool for practitioners and helps them become more effective problem solvers.

Mediate.com applies the technology of the internet directly to lawyers and dispute resolution practitioners. The founders of Mediate.com had the foresight to see the importance and applications of internet and bring them to bear on a developing field of practice. This groundbreaking website has given tools and resources to the public and to ADR professionals to do their own problem solving in virtually every field of law.

Jeffrey Krivis, a well known leader in the dispute resolution field, expressed it best when he observed that Mediate.com “has become to mediators what Google has become to the Internet.”

To my friends at Mediate.com: congratulations on this well-deserved honor.

Each month, in pursuit of better arguments and improved public discourse, I highlight a different logical fallacy. This month I invite you to consider the irrelevant appeal to authority.

People of a certain generation perhaps recall advertisements for Sanka decaffeinated coffee in which actor Robert Young, known for playing a doctor on a popular seventies television drama, Marcus Welby, M.D., warns against the health risks caffeine poses and recommends Sanka to TV viewers.

In Chapter 6 of his popular work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini describes the influence this particular ad wielded in shaping the coffee purchasing decisions of its audience:

From the first time I saw it, the most intriguing feature for me in the Robert Young Sanka commercial was its ability to use the influence of the authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The appearance of authority was enough. This tells me something important about unthinking reactions to authority figures. When in a click, whirr mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance.

The well-worn, now comic phrase “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” has its provenance in ads such as this one. But our automatic reaction to authority is no laughing matter.

Clever speakers understand how easy it is to manipulate the public’s deference to perceived experts, using the appeal to authority to disarm our reason in their efforts to persuade us to their point of view. The appeal to authority may assume several forms, including its best known, the irrelevant appeal to authority (invoking an authority figure on a subject on which the authority figure is no expert, such as the Sanka ad). To gird ourselves against such manipulations of our reason, we should perhaps heed the advice of sixties-era protest signs: Question Authority.

By the way, if you’ve enjoyed this series on fallacious arguments and want to learn more about the application of logic in everyday life, there is no better resource than Robert J. Gula’s Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. It’s available in print and also for free downloading in PDF.

As I do each month, I’ve highlighted posts from prior years. Here is the selection for January:

January 2009

• No soap, radio: confronting the fear of asking questions
• Remembering wartime: photos of present-day city evoke tragic past

January 2008

• Send lawyers, guns and mediators: what songs would be on your mediation playlist?

January 2007

• Is your negotiating style leaving value on the table?
  
• Three-part series: “Bridging the divide between lawyers and mediators“

January 2005

• Mediation isn’t “meditation” with a typo

I hope the new year is off to a good start – may you fulfill your aspirations for the year ahead!

This past Sunday my blog turned 5.

Two years ago I explained what blogging means to me. Those words still ring true:

It is the collegiality, the friendships that have sprung up across geographic distances. It is the pleasure of mutual discovery, of interests shared. It is the sparks struck and the ideas that ignite when viewpoints collide.

And so it remains.

Thank you so very much, readers, for your support – thanks to those of you who’ve been there since early days and to those of you who’ve just tuned in. I’m sure looking forward to continuing this conversation.