Spoon-bending Gellar had The Amazing Randi to debunk him...The Secret has debunkers Dave Lakhani and Blair Warren, and Captology has me, Ben Mack.

Captology = Stanford's center for Computers As Persuasive Technology, except they don't define computers or persuasion and they won't study the two most effective forms of online persuasion: Entrepreneurial and Psy Ops.

You can't run a respectable center about online persuasion and not reference the Zeigarnik Effect! That would be like saying you are the expert on Peanut Butter and you never mention jelly. That's an easy hole to fill-in. However, ignoring the largest data-base of online split-tests... Wait, ignoring is the wrong word because their director claims not to have heard of Michel Fortin. Not investigating the lead, not knowing it exists, that's lazy research. I'd invite a guest lecturer who has access to Fortin's data base.

I'm mad. They rejected an essay of mine because it wasn't academic enough. Being too academic is killing knowledge and many people along with its smugness. THE LARGEST DATA BASE OF ONLINE SPLIT TESTS IS NOT IN YOUR CONSIDERATION SET, your samples are miniscule.

Computers As Persuasive Technology is a broad subject, begging a definition of persuasive technology. Compounded in the notion or persuasive technology is our ability to identify persuasion. What if persuasion that looks like persuasion is really third-rate persuasion? With what certainty can we identify persuasive technology? If state-of-the-art persuasion is invisible to us, then what is it we’re studying?

A similar problem confronts criminology:
“However, for as long as criminology has been a field of study, it has always been haunted by the theory of ‘the competent criminal.’ For obvious reasons criminologists (and psychologists and socialogists, etc.) only study failed criminals—that is, those persons whose criminal acts led to their conviction and to punishment. If there is a group of people out there who commit crimes and are not caught and live happily ever after, then criminology is not a study of criminals but of incompetents, bumblers, fuckups and should instead be called fuckupology.”
--Larry Beinhart, Wag The Dog; pg 314

From a memetic perspective, the greatest threat to the survival of Captology is over-specialization. Evolution has shown us that isolated species that evolve a fit to a specific mirco-environment often don’t survive relative minor changes to their environment. Captology shows evidence of evolving away from both academia’s rhetorical analysis and academia’s advertising research, and even further away from influence as studied by practitioners of online persuasion. As the language of Captology becomes increasingly incompatible with other studies of influence, the insular effect may prove grave.