Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy [123]
A large-scale framing change attempt was made through the controversial anti-smoking commercials where volunteers pile up body bags in front of a tobacco industry building’s front door. The body bags represent how many people die every minute, hour, or day from smoking. The hope is to alter the frame of those who support smoking to think about the death toll for those who smoke.
“Relevance of the frame to the realities of the participants”: The frame must be relevant to the person (target). It must be creditable and testable as it relates to the target’s experience.
You can’t expect to use a marketing frame that will encourage people to take a luxury cruise in a land where people cannot afford food for the day. No matter how good you are at using framing in marketing, it just would fail. For the frame to align, it must not just be relevant but must also be provable in order to hold value, even if that proof is just in the mind of the target.
For example, in 2007 a very popular and trusted news source, Insight Magazine (which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times) reported that then-presidential candidate Obama had attended an all-Muslim school that was known for teaching a very radical and fundamental form of Islam. When this news report was released many believed it right away—why? It fit into the frame of their reality, it seemed credible, and it came from a “trusted” source.
CNN, another reputable source for news, sent out investigators, discovered that story was false, and reported its findings.
This is a good example of altering people’s frames on a matter using a very trusted source for “truth”—news media. People who wanted to believe that Obama was a radical Muslim ran with that story, and the news went wild. When research revealed the story to be false, many people’s thinking was altered again.
“Cycles of protest; the point at which the frame emerges on the timeline of the current era and existing preoccupations with social change”: What is happening in the world can affect a social frame. Think back a few years ago; if the idea of full body X-ray scans were proposed to companies in the U.S. or other Western cultures, the idea would have been thrown to the wind.
Activists for privacy would have fought against the idea and won, simply by using the idea of someone being able to see your private areas and potentially saving that picture to mock or sexually harass you. This argument would have outweighed the sales efforts of the creators of the machines. Yet, after the attacks in America on September 11 and the subsequent rise of terrorist activity, those machines are being installed at airports around the globe despite the cries by activists, even arguing with the power of child pornography laws on their side.
Why? The social frame of how to remain safe has been altered, allowing a new breed of decision to enter.
Snow and Benford propose that when proper frames are constructed as described in these four points, large-scale changes in society such as those necessary for social movement can be achieved through frame alignment. Their studies focus on society as a whole, but these same principles are effective when dealing on a smaller scale or even one-to-one.
The preceding discussion is just the process to frame alignment; actually four different types of alignment can occur after these four conditions are met. Although many of these aspects are geared towards framing groups as a whole, the following sections discuss these four framing alignments on a personal level that will show how you can use them on a smaller scale both as a social engineer and/or just as a person wanting to align frames with others. Imagine trying to align your goal of entry to a building with the frame of the security guard designed to stop you. Bringing his frame into alignment with your pretext can ensure success.
One thing to remember about frames is that they are never constructed from scratch. Frames are always drawn on already-existing cultural codes that involve the core of a person’s beliefs and experiences.