Attitude change and compliance

Question 1

What is the definition of an “attitude”?

Answer 1

An evaluative response to anything, can be positive or negative

Question 2

What was the role of Carl Hovland in studies of attitude change?

Answer 2

Experimental research into attitude change picked up during WW2 and Hovland was asked to investigate how propaganda could be used to rally support and persuade citizens that the US should join the war

Question 3

What is meant by “attitude change”?

Answer 3

Any significant modification of an individual’s attitude by the communicator, the communication, the medium used and the characteristics of the audience, or by cognitive dissonance i.e. inducing someone to perform an act that counters an existing attitude

Question 4

Which 3 methods were originally, and incorrectly, sold as being persuasive techniques that could be useful for e.g. advertising agencies?

Answer 4

1) Hypnosis - evidence on 1-to-1 settings but can’t work through mass media
2) Subliminal perception - preconscious processing of stimuli below INTENSITY OR DURATION of the absolute threshold (James Vicary cinema evidence was fabricated, Thorpe&Marlot found that even just below the absolute threshold with a large sample size you might get statistical significance in the number of people able to GUESS which one had flashed but there would be no behaviour change)
3) Brainwashing - victims may comply outwardly with captors, and may potentially even identify with them, but seldom actually internalise messages they are exposed to i.e. their attitudes don’t genuinely change. Most revert upon being freed.

Question 5

What is the Yale Communication Program?

Answer 5

The earliest systematic experimental research program into attitude change & persuasion, led by Hovland et al in 1953.

Suggested that the key factors in persuasion are source characteristics, message contents, and receiver characteristics (medium variables have now also been added)

Summarised as WHO SAYS WHAT TO WHOM

Question 6

What are the 4 distinct steps in the persuasion process?

Answer 6

Attention, Comprehension, Acceptance, Retention i.e. the audience has to at least pay attention to the communicator’s message, understand the content and think about what was said.

All of these steps are influenced by the key variables, and in any context all 3 are operative and interact e.g. whether an argument should be one or two-sided can depend on the intelligence of the audience

Question 7

Not all findings from the Yale Research Programme have endured. Provide an example

Answer 7

Baumeister and Covington (1985) - people with high self-esteem are just as easily persuaded as those with low, they’re just less likely to admit it and may even deny it when it does occur e.g. conveniently fail to recall their original opinion. We see the THIRD PERSON EFFECT in which people consider themselves less susceptible to persuasion in advertising than others

Question 8

What is meant by the communicator variable?

Answer 8

Essentially we are looking at source credibility i.e. extent to which messages from the source will be influential in changing attitudes/persuasion. Credibility is a function of trustworthiness and expertise, and affects the ACCEPTANCE of persuasive messages

Question 9

Which 3 key factors influence perceived trustworthiness?

Answer 9

1) Closeness to the source e.g. relatives more trustworthy than strangers
2) Popularity/attractiveness - celebrity endorsements, in politics attractiveness can make someone seem more trustworthy than perceived expertise!
3) Similarity to self e.g. members of a peer group - particularly in issues of taste/judgement, although not usually in issues of fact

Question 10

What can undermine trustworthiness?

Answer 10

Perceived ulterior motives i.e. making the attempt at persuasion obvious can trigger reactance (Brehm, 1966) (can be problematic in persuasive politics)
Walster and Festinger (1962) - studies of overheard conversations showed increased trustworthiness

Question 11

What is meant by reactance?

Answer 11

People will try to protect their freedom to act and so when they perceive someone trying to curtail this freedom they will act to regain it e.g. by undermining source credibility and engaging in counter arguments

Question 12

What is meant by expertise and what can influence perception of it?

Answer 12

How much a person actually knows about a topic - same argument generally carries more weight when delivered by someone who seems to know all the facts (Hovland & Weiss, 1952)

Rapid speech increases it (Miller et al 1976)
Perceived power

Question 13

How do trustworthiness and expertise interact in perceived source credibility?

Answer 13

Independent of each other in that someone can be trustworthy but not expert for example, but it is a multiplicative function in that if either perceived trustworthiness or perceived expertise is zero then source credibility will also be zero

Question 14

Summarise the sleeper effect (Hovland and Weiss, 1951)

Answer 14

Impact of a persuasive message INCREASES over time, counterintuitively, when discounting cues can no longer be recalled

Low credibility source may be a discounting cue, but over time this gets forgotten and the result is that the argument alone is remembered without the negative association and thus its persuasiveness is increased

Recipients of discounting cues were more persuaded over time when the message arguments and the cue had a strong initial impact. In addition, the increase in persuasion was stronger when recipients of discounting cues had higher ability or motivation to think about the message and received the discounting cue after the message (Kumkale and Albaraccin review)

Question 15

How did Bochner & Insko (1966) study the effect of source credibility and position discrepancy on attitude change?

Answer 15

Asked students how much sleep they thought was needed to maintain good health
Exposed to high credibility and low credibility sources presenting opinions of varying discrepancy
Found that an extreme discrepancy was not a good influencing tactic (triggers reactance), although even where the discrepancy was quite marked the expert induced a greater amount of attitude change than the low cred source
Example of source and message variables interacting

Question 16

List 5 key message variables that can influence the impact of a persuasive message

Answer 16

1) Repetition - Arkes et al (1991) repetition increases perceived truth (increases familiarity, can make something seem “famous”)
2) One-sided vs two-sided arguments - interacts quite strongly with audience characteristics but O’Keefe (1990) suggested that 2-sided are generally better for persuasion
3) Fear appeals
4) Framing a message - can subtly change the meaning of a message and subsequently also the chance of an audience accepting it e.g. presenting affirmative action as “equal opportunity” rather than “reverse discrimination” is more persuasive
5) Inoculation theory - one of several theories relating to how audiences can resist persuasive messages

Question 17

What is meant by the Mere Exposure Effect (Zajonc, 1968)?

Answer 17

Repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to enhance liking (related to enhanced believability). There are exceptions where repeated exposure can be boring/irritating but the general principle still stands

Question 18

When do 2-sided arguments (i.e. presenting a rival product as inferior) work particularly well?

Answer 18

Where a target customer is not particularly motivated to buy the target product, or may be intelligent but against the argument.

Question 19

List some scenarios in which a 1-sided argument may prove more persuasive than 2-sided

Answer 19

1) Low intelligence recipients (especially when already in favour of the argument)
2) Recipients initially agreeing
3) Recipients unfamiliar with the issue (no need to shoot down opposing arguments because they won’t know them anyway)
4) High loyalty to a rival brand

Question 20

Describe the work done by Janis and Feshbach (1953) into fear appeals

Answer 20

Less fear-inducing messages followed more than high-threat (inverted-U pattern) - very low fear wasn’t motivating enough, while too high fear was paralysing and reduced the effectiveness of processing the information being received.

Question 21

What is the most effective way to use fear appeals?

Answer 21

Present high-threat but also high-efficacy i.e. give the audience something they can do to neutralise the threat (protection motivation theory).
When an escape is possible, the relationship between fear and attitude change is no longer an inverted U.

Question 22

What determines whether a fear appeal achieves its goals?

Answer 22

Trade-off between threat analysis (perceived danger) and coping appraisal (perceived ability to cope with the danger) - if believe can cope, perceive challenge rather than threat

Question 23

What did Rothman and Salovey (1997) find in terms of how message framing can influence persuasiveness?

Answer 23

Review of how to promote health-related behaviours - if behaviour relates to illness detection (which is negative), the message is more persuasive when framed in terms of PREVENTING loss. If, however, behaviour relates to a positive outcome such as weight loss from regular exercise, the message should be framed in terms of a GAIN

Question 24

Describe the basic principles of inoculation theory (McGuire, 1964)

Answer 24

Organisms raised in a sterile environment won’t have protective antibodies to defend themselves with
Attitudes and beliefs will be more or less resistant to persuasion attempts through having been exposed to repeated and mild attacks - by proving the audience with diluted counter-arguments, they build up effective refutations to a later, stronger argument

Cultural truisms are beliefs that are rarely questioned, leaving them vulnerable

Question 25

How did McGuire and Papageorgis (1961) study inoculation theory?

Answer 25

Students equipped with a supportive defence (based on attitude bolstering and provision of additional arguments to support belief) when their truisms were challenged were more resistant to attitude change than a control group, however the inoculation group were substantially more strengthened in their defence

Question 26

What are 4 key recipient variables?

Answer 26

Self-esteem - relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility an inverted U (McGuire 1968, confirmed by Rhodes and Wood, 1962)

Sex differences - women consistently more easily persuaded than men

Individual differences - in the need for closure, need for cognition, need to evaluate, preference for consistency, and attitude importance; when these needs are all high people are less likely to be persuaded (also an important role of a mediator variable such as social contextual factors in influencing the personality-persuasibility relationship)

Age differences - 5 hypotheses about this

Question 27

What was Crutchfield’s (1955) suggestion regarding sex differences and persuasibility?

Answer 27

Women more conforming and susceptible to social influences because of cultural socialisation (more cooperative and non-assertive than men, therefore less resistant to attempts at influencing them)

Question 28

What did Sistrunk & McDavid (1971) suggest regarding sex differences?

Answer 28

Women only more easily influenced when the subject is one with which men are more familiar. If the topic is female-oriented, men are more easily influenced (link back to source variable of expertise?).

They suggested that previous gender biases had only been found because messages used in previous studies of sex differences had all been male-oriented

Question 29

What has a more recent study by Carli (1990) suggested about sex differences?

Answer 29

Gender-related persuasiveness is actually a complex interaction of WHO is talking, who is listening, and whether the message is delivered in a sex-stereotyped way (i.e. it is the result of interactions between all the variables).

Men are more easily persuaded than women by a female speaker when they are more tentative than assertive.
Male speakers are equally influential to both genders whether they are tentative or assertive

Question 30

What are the 5 hypotheses suggested about relationship between age and persuasibility?

Answer 30

1) Increasing persistence i.e. decreased susceptibility as get older (accumulate relevant experiences)
2) Impressionable years (S-curve) - core attitudes crystallise during a period of plasticity in early adulthood
3) Life stages (U-curve, most widely accepted hypothesis) - highest susceptibility in earlier and later life
4) Lifelong openness - susceptible to attitude change to some extent throughout life
5) Persistence - attitudes developed before adulthood so susceptibility is low for the majority of life

Question 31

What are 2 additional variables which influence susceptibility to attitude change?

Answer 31

Prior beliefs - evidence for disconfirmation bias in argument evaluations i.e. tendency to refute and regard as weak any arguments that counter our own. Magnitude of bias is higher if prior beliefs associated with strong emotional conviction (value-laden)

Cognitive biases - such as the third person effect in media persuasion, effect seen most strongly in people who don’t identify strongly with a group being targeted

Question 32

What did Chaiken & Eagly (1983, 1987) find regarding medium variables in their study of mass media?

Answer 32

When message content and audience are held constant, TV/films/social media are more persuasive than radio/audio, and both are more persuasive than printed text (except in the context of difficult material in which case printed text seems more persuasive)

Question 33

What is agreed to be the most effective medium for persuasion?

Answer 33

Face to face communication (Hart et al, 2009 meta-analysis)

Question 34

Why is face-to-face communication thought to be so persuasive?

Answer 34

Selective exposure limits the other forms of communication

Question 35

If face-to-face communication is the most persuasive medium, and yet isn’t appropriate for mass media persuasion, why is it that mass media persuasion is still so effective?

Answer 35

Lazarsfeld proposed a 2-step model to explain this - discovered the existence of OPINION LEADERS who are more sociable (i.e. more exposure to face-to-face interaction with people) and also more susceptible to mass media persuasion than regular people. Once influenced, these people propagate the persuasive message to other people directly

Question 36

What did a review by Watts and Dodds suggest as limits to the 2-step flow model?

Answer 36

In most conditions influentials are only modestly more important than average individuals, and most social change seems to instead be driven by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals influencing other easily influenced individuals

The s-shape of the diffusion curve can be generated in a homogenous population i.e. influentials are irrelevant

The influentials hypothesis is not entirely flawed, it is just that details of who influences whom and how require more careful articulation (2-step flow is too simple)

Question 37

What is a revised schematic of the network model of influence?

Answer 37

Suggests influence can flow in either direction between influentials and followers, not just one way, and also influence can propagate for many steps, not just 2. Influentials and followers are both exposed to mictures of interpersonal and media influence, therefore differences in influences are more appropriately described on a continuum

(return to review for details)

Question 38

What is currently the most influential theory of how attitude change occurs?

Answer 38

The elaboration likelihood model developed by Petty & Cacioppo (1981, 1986)

Question 39

Briefly summarise the principles of the ELM

Answer 39

Dual process theory - when people receive a persuasive message they think about the argument it makes, but the extent to which they think about it will differ depending on various factors i.e. the ROUTE they take in terms of processing the info will vary. Attitude change will vary depending on the likelihood of route used

Central route - highly motivated recipients, high elaboration/high processing ability (opinion leaders will generally use this route)
Peripheral route - motivation and processing ability low, more influenced by peripheral cues such as source attractiveness, produces generally superficial and short-lived effects

(See notes on Brinol and Petty review)

Question 40

How is cognitive dissonance defined?

Answer 40

State of unpleasant psychological tension generated by having 2 or more cognitions that are inconsistent. Festinger suggests that people will strive to maintain a state of internal consistency so will try to reduce this dissonance

Question 41

What are the 3 methods for reducing cognitive dissonance?

Answer 41

1) Change a cognition (can be difficult in examples like smoking because the cognition you could change is behaviourally anchored)
2) Look for additional evidence to bolster your side - justifying cognitions
3) Derogating the source of one of the cognitions and reducing perceived importance e.g. trying to play down evidence that smoking is bad for your health

Question 42

How does the selective exposure hypothesis make it harder for cognitive dissonance to lead to attitude change?

Answer 42

For dissonance to lead to attitude change it is obviously necessary that 2 cognitions are in contradiction. However, because dissonance is so unpleasant, people tend to avoid exposing themselves to potentially dissonant information (unless their existing attitude is very strong and resistant to attack, or very weak and it seems better to discover the truth now and make attitudinal and behavioural changes)

Question 43

In what ways has cognitive dissonance been studied?

Answer 43

1) Effort justification - Aronson & Mills, 1959 (embarrassing induction)
2) Induced/forced compliance - Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959 (payment for task), Zimbardo et al, 1997 (fried grasshoppers)
3) Free will - reducing dissonance after committing to a decision
4) Role of the self - Stone, 2003 (evaluation against self-standards)
5) Vicarious dissonance

Question 44

Elaborate on Stone (2003) theory and the conflict it resolved

Answer 44

Aronson = self consistency theory i.e. we all like to think of ourselves as moral and competent, and counter-attitudinal behaviour is inconsistent with this and is distressing. Greater dissonance with greater self-esteem

Steele = self-affirmation theory i.e. negative behaviours threaten our sense of self. In people with high self-esteem particularly this dissonance can lead to self-affirmation i.e.rectifying bad behaviour by emphasising unrelated positive things about themselves. Greater dissonance with lower self-esteem

Stone suggested we evaluate our actions to judge whether they are good/bad by comparing to personal/normative standards. The standards used are those that are readily and chronically accessible in memory. If we believe we have behaved badly dissonance may occur but self-esteem is not involved unless a personal standard has been brought to mind

Question 45

Define compliance

Answer 45

A response to a specific request made by someone else - persuaded to BEHAVE in a certain way. It is a superficial, public and transitory change in behaviour and expressed attitudes

Question 46

What are the 3 “multiple-request techniques” employed to ensure compliance?

Answer 46

1) Foot in the door technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966)
2) Door in the face technique (Cialdini et al, 1975)
3) Low Ball tactic (Cialdini, Cacioppo, Bassett & Miller, 1978)

Question 47

Why does the “foot in the door technique” work so well?

Answer 47

A likely psychological process can be explained by Bem’s self-perception theory - by complying with a small request, people become committed to their behaviour and develop a picture of themselves as “giving”. When they are presented with the larger request they are compelled to appear consistent

Gorassini & Olson (1995) countered this by suggesting that the self doesn’t need to be involved - rather the tactic simply leads people to interpret situations differently, thus activating attitudes which enhance compliance.

Question 48

When might the “foot in the door” technique not work quite so well?

Answer 48

If the initial request is too small or the second is too large the link between them breaks down

A possible refinement to the tactic is to use a series of graded requests rather than just one big jump

Question 49

How does the door in the face technique differ from the foot in the door?

Answer 49

Foot in the door works when the second request is made by a different person. Door in the face works best when the second request is made by the same person who made the first request - second request will be perceived as a concession and feel pressure to reciprocate

Question 50

What is meant by the low-ball tactic?

Answer 50

Technique for inducing compliance in which a person who agrees to a request still feels committed after finding out there are hidden costs.

Experiment where asked first to commit to an experiment and secondarily told that the start time was 7am. Compliance was more than the control group who were told the start time when being asked to participate in the experiment

Question 51

What has much compliance been suggested to result from?

Answer 51

Mindlessness i.e. we often act before we think, and Langer and colleagues found that as long as a request is small people are likely to agree even if the reason for the request is spurious because we don’t give it that much thought (lower compliance when no reason given at all though)

Question 52

What are the 6 strategic self-presentation tactics often used by salespeople to enhance compliance?

Answer 52

1) Intimidation - make people think you’re dangerous, eliciting fear
2) Exemplification - elicit guilt by getting others to perceive you as a morally respectable person
3) Supplication - elicit pity by presenting as helpless and needy
4) Self-promotion - elicit respect and confidence by presenting competence
5) Ingratiation - get others to simply like you in order to secure compliance with a subsequent request (transparent ingratiation can massively backfire)
6) Reciprocity principle - based on the principle that we should treat others how they treat you e.g. repay a favour with a favour

Question 53

Briefly describe Shelley Chaiken’s HSM (heuristic-systematic model)

Answer 53

Deal with the same phenomena as ELM but use the concepts of systematic and heuristic processing

Heuristic processing = using mental shortcuts and truisms to process information e.g. scientists are always right. This is why, for example, washing detergents will be advertised in a lab setting

Whether we rely on heuristic or systematic processing will depend on cognitive factors i.e. sufficiency threshold - we will use heuristics as long as they satisfy our need to be confident in the attitude we adopt (remember the cognitive miser principle). Reliance will also depend on mood - generally sadder people ruminate more than happy people

Question 54

What did Chaiken and Maheswaran (1994) suggest regarding the likelihood of reliance on either heuristic or systematic processing?

Answer 54

Complex interactions between source and message variables, and task importance.

When a task was considered unimportant, source credibility influenced attitudes i.e. heuristic processing was used, regardless of whether the message was strong/weak/ambiguous

When the task was considered important, systematic processing was used and the message content influenced attitudes (provided the message wasn’t ambiguous). Source credibility only played a role where the message was ambiguous, in which case both systematic and heuristic processing were used

Question 55

How did Fazio, Zanna and Cooper (1977) refine Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory?

Answer 55

Suggested that it isn’t as simple as previously thought and instead both dissonance theory and self-perception theory together can help to understand attitude change, centralising around the concept that we have “latitudes of attitude acceptance” around our attitudes

If our actions fall within this range of acceptance, self-perception theory best accounts for the response - self-attributional processing and no real conflict. However, it is when actions fall outside of the acceptable range that dissonance occurs and we have to change our attitude to reduce the feeling

(See notes to clarify understanding if necessary)

Question 56

Describe Cooper & Fazio’s (1984) revision of cognitive dissonance theory

Answer 56

Counter-attitudinal behaviour is first assessed in terms of behavioural consequences - if negative and serious, we must then check to see if our actions were voluntary. If yes then we must accept responsibility and experience arousal from the resulting state of dissonance. We must then bring the relevant attitude into line to reduce the dissonance

(see flow diagram in notes)

Question 57

What did Das, de Wit and Stroebe (2003) suggest regarding fear appeals?

Answer 57

Impactful messages should pinpoint vulnerability to a greater degree than just simply risk severity.

Also, if fear becomes so strong that it raises awareness of death and mortality (even if presented with high efficacy), terror management theory indicates a paralysing effect and motivation becomes focused on reducing the TERROR of death’s inevitability i.e. likelihood of the desired attitude change becomes very very low

Question 58

What was Lewin’s belief about “action research”?

Answer 58

Attitude change is best achieved if people are actively involved in the change process rather than just being passive targets of persuasion

Janis & King (1954) - GIVING a speech against an existing attitude led to greater attitude change than simply listening to one.

Foreshadowed cognitive dissonance theory