Get Serious About the Science of Influence
Sponsored by Booz Allen
Influence operations as a strategic component of information warfare are poorly understood and employed, largely because science has not determined what works.
By Douglas J. Bryant
June 2024 Proceedings Vol. 150/6/1,456
The U.S. national security apparatus has bet big on its ability to influence Beijing’s behavior to deter or delay conflict with China. It is a risky bet—potentially blind—because there is strong evidence that foreign-directed influence does not move unsympathetic audiences. The science of influence and persuasion exists in the sales and advertising domains, but no one has developed such a science for national security.
Today, it is not known whether foreign influence campaigns work, whether they are counterproductive, or whether they have any effects whatsoever. Those questions could be answered with a serious research program. However, to this point, the United States is just playing at influence, doing this or that on a pop-psychology whim, hoping something will happen, and almost never detecting whether anything did. It is an irresponsible approach to a problem of immense stakes.
The American philosopher Richard Rorty was known for provocative statements about truth, one of which is, “Take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.”1 His argument was that truth gets all the protection it needs from freedom alone. Rorty held controversial views, but this one is especially unpopular today. Much of the academic and government work on information warfare not only warns against the dangers of mis- and disinformation, foreign malign influence, cognitive domain operations, or cognitive warfare, but also advocates for media literacy education to shore up Americans’ so-called cognitive security.
Research skeptical of these claims is largely unadvertised. There is no disagreement that Russia, China, and others wage disinformation campaigns to hide unfavorable narratives from, and promote false ones among, both domestic and foreign audiences. There is, however, real disagreement about whether foreign-targeted activities work.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/june/get-serious-about-science-influence
