Writing as committing?
When I was in high school I had to write a senior thesis and mine was all about persuasion and the different ways that our minds can be twisted and pulled psychologically.
I basically ripped off Robert Cialdini’s excellent book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
One of the things he mentions is how POWs would be forced to write certain things by their captors. Seemingly innocuous things like “I hate America” or “America is the evil of the world” (grammar wasn’t really what they were after).
Some prisoners were surprised that this was being forced on them—it didn’t hurt and they could easily comply without really believing what they were writing.
Then their captors would show these pieces of paper (complete with the POW’s signatures) to the other prisoners as proof that they had been “converted.”
What do you think happened?
Turns out that by writing these things down, part of these prisoners’ brains defended what they had written. The mind, even under these strange circumstances of extreme duress, apparently yearns for consistency and has a lot of trouble blowing it off by saying “they made me do it.”
In short, it worked. The people holding these POWs were actually converting part of the prisoners psyche by making them write all these things down.
Beware the power of writing. I just thought of this story because of some of the writing-related things I’ve written on the blog. Some of the tips I’ve written about getting published (knowing the publication you’re sending to, always writing a cover letter, etc.) I’ve known for a while, but once I wrote about them on this blog I now feel like I absolutely must follow the advice I am giving out myself.
Kind of like the POWs only the stakes are a lot lower, thank god. So that’s another unexpected benefit of this blog, which is great.
November 4th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Good idea. Influencing yourself is prerequisite to influencing others. Need to commit yourself to accomplishing something or practicing what you preach? Blog it! Thanks, this can be a cool tool.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
[...] you write about something, it becomes a part of you that you can’t just shrug off as tiring advice. It’s happened [...]
February 21st, 2008 at 7:02 am
[...] A lot of times us bloggers give out advice and forget to follow it (most of us are human), so it’s always a good feeling when we catch ourselves before it’s too late and follow what we write. It’s funny because I just wrote about this a few days before and now I’m following it, so that goes to show you the power of writing. [...]