Donut Understand

Yesterday I was in a Dunkin' Donuts (I guess now officially just "Dunkin'") getting my morning coffee, when the two unbearable yet familiar yammering voices of the "Dunkin' Radio" hosts came over the audio system. It would seem that rather than pay royalties for a service like Muzak or simply turn on the radio, the company has devised a far more ingenious solution - that of creating their own broadcast. Largely, it consists of sugary beat-heavy pop songs interspersed with ads for nothing but Dunkin' products. There is also, however - worse than all the rest - a periodic "trivia" segment.

As someone who founded one plank of his teenage selfhood on the idea of being a "trivia buff," my heart sinks whenever this segment comes on. The so-called trivia questions are in fact designed to exclude anything that could remotely be described as specialized knowledge. They relate to matters of such universal familiarity that no one could ever possibly feel their intellect was being called into question. Yesterday's was particularly odious. In between the advertisements for new sugar-laden latte concoctions, our male and female co-hosts asked: "how many months have 28 days in them?"

To give us time to conjure the answer to this whopper, they started to play another song.

O despair! O fury! This is not trivia! Knowing of the existence of February is not an achievement! I sipped my latte in a rage, as it occurred to me that it was of course not the purpose of this question to be difficult or to put anyone in doubt of their genius. It was, rather, to give us all a shot of unearned dopamine - to garnish the full-on glucose injection we were all sipping through our straws - to ensure we all left the Dunkin' feeling great about ourselves, that we were so smart, that we knew so much, and that we ought to be sure to come back and spend more money at a place that made such a good impression.

Dunkin', after all, has learned at least one marketing lesson well. People do not like to be asked to supply information they do not already know. Even "Trivia buffs" are not immune to this tendency. In fact, they may feel it more acutely than anyone else, and it may be this same heightened sensitivity that motivates them to become buffs in the first place. It is precisely to avoid the painful stab of not-knowing that they are driven to compulsively accumulate knowledge.

Everyone feels the same in greater or less degrees, however, and if ever one is in a group of people and wishes to win their trust and favor, one should make damn sure to only ask questions to which they already know the answer.

A few times as a public speaker or writer, I have made the mistake of forgetting this, or unwittingly doing otherwise. I have tried to get a call-and-response going in which the desired responses were not sufficiently clear. I have asked a question to the audience to which not a single person in the room felt inclined to raise their hand and supply an answer. I have used terminology for an external audience that suited my needs but may not have been interpretable.

A genius fundraiser I know reproached me for these failings. I think in this particular instance it was the use of the word "neoliberalism" without definition or context that provoked the scolding, but that was only the most recent of several transgressions. "People get angry if you say things they don't understand," she told me.

In saying this she reflected the accumulated wisdom of generations of organizers, leaders, politicians, managers, marketers, advertisers, salespeople, fundraisers - basically anyone who for the sake of their job - or a cause they believe in - needs to know how to sometimes leave the people around them feeling good. (Would-be "prophets" and "artists" are encouraged to do the opposite, of course. Success in these fields is measured by whether or not people leave feeling vaguely bad.)

There is a scene in Steinbeck's novel In Dubious Battle in which the experienced labor organizer Mac is accused of being a phony and a play-actor, because he is observed to adopt the lingo and speech-patterns of whichever group of people he happens to be around. He retorts that by doing so, he is only doing what any good organizer must. "You can insult a man pretty badly by using a word he doesn't understand," says Mac. "Maybe he won't say anything, but he'll hate you for it."

I described in an earlier post the many parallels between the organizer's wisdom of Mac and that which was later developed by Saul Alinksy in his Rules for Radicals, and here is another that I forgot to mention earlier: the emphasis both place on the value of communication.

Communication can be used to advance a cause or it can be used to sell donuts; in either case, however, the lessons for how to do it are more or less the same. If people are to be spoken to, it must be in words they understand. Otherwise - as Alinsky says - one might as well not be speaking to them at all. One is simply playing word-games with oneself, which one can do just as well in the privacy of one's home.

It may also be true that situations arise in which an organizer or fundraiser must intellectually challenge their audience; if there is no provocation, no learning takes place, and no one's mind is changed or prompted to take action or to donate, after all. In which case, there again - one might as well just be talking to oneself.

Any such provocation, however, must only take place within that Vygotskyan zone of proximal development people talk about. It must prod them just a little bit, enough to feel they have accomplished something, but not so much that they are overwhelmed and defeated by the effort.

Dunkin' Donuts seems to have learned one half of this lesson well. They have decided they are not going to try to defeat their listeners intellectually by calling upon them to summon arcane knowledge.

As much as Mac is right that it is possible to insult someone by using a word they do not understand, however, is it not also possible to insult someone's intelligence by talking down to them? Should the "Dunkin radio" station not ask a question that - while it may be possible to guess the answer - at least calls for the expenditure of a quantum more mental energy?

The two co-hosts came back on the air after the song had finished playing. They were ready to supply the answer. "So," they said, "Our question was: how many months have 28 days in them?"

Yes, yes, I remember, I'm not an idiot.

"The answer is... 12! They all have 28 days in them!"

Oh... I get it.

It was a trick question.

I guess I didn't know the answer after all.

I left in a sour mood.