Ch.5, Persuasion Flashcards
Central vs. Peripheral Route
Central Route: focusing on the logic of the arguments, OFTEN QUICKLY CHANGES EXPLICIT ATTITUDES
Peripheral Route to persuasion: focusing on cues that trigger acceptnace without much thinking, more slowly builds implicit attitudes through repetition
CREATES DUAL PROCESSING
Sleeper Effect:
if a credible person’s message is persuasive, its impact may fade as its source is forgotten or dissociated from the message
Why would the impact of a non credible speaker increase over time?
The impact of a non-credible person may correspondingly increase over time if people remember the message better than the reason for discounting it^^
Six Persuasion Principles, Cialdini
Authority (people defer to credible experts
Liking: people respond more affirmatively to those they like
Social Proof: people allow the example of others to validate how they think feel and act
Reciprocity: people feel obliged to repay in kind what theyve received
Consistency: people tend to honour their public commitments
Scarcity: people prize what is genuinely exclusive info or opportunities
What do well-educated rational people respond best to?
Reason vs. emotion: well-educated/analytical people respond best to rational appeals and travel the central route, disinterested audiences use the peripheral route and are more affected by how much they like the communicator
Decision making and mood relationship
People in a good mood make faster, more impulsive decisions and rely more on peripheral cues
People in a bad mood ruminate more before acting and less easily swayed by weak arguments
One Sided vs. Two Sided Appeals
A two sided presentation is more persuasive and enduring if people are, or will be, aware of opposing arguments
Primacy vs Recency
Primacy Effect: info presented early is most persuasive; first impressions are important
Recency Effect: forgetting creates the recency effect (most recent message is most persuasive), when enough time separates the two messages, and when the audience co,mmits itself soon after the second message
Mass media and attitudes
People agree that mass media influences attitudes: but they only believe it influences other people’s attitudes and not their own
Two Step Flow of Communication
much of the media’s effects operate in a two-step flow of communications from media to opinion leaders, which then influence the rest of the public
Often important opinion leaders derive their info from the media, then go on to influence others in this regard
Life Cycle Explanation of attitudes
attitudes change as people grow older
Generational Explanation
attitudes dont change; older people largely hold onto the attitudes they adopted when they were young
How does forewarning impact persuasion?
Forewarning can negatively impact persuasion: with juries, forewarning juries about the prosecution evidence to come is actually not helpful and neutralizes its impact
Foot in the Door Phenomena and cults
cults work by starting off very slowly with mild persuasion and tasks that become more severe later
Who, what, how, audience approach to persuasion
Who: if the communicator is attractive, trustworthy, credible and an expert
What: message content, reason vs. emotion, discrepancy, one-sided vs. two sided argument, primacy vs recency effects
How: active vs passive, transmitted via personal vs. media
Audience: analytical or image conscious audience, age of the audience
Cults and Group effects:
the cult typically separates members from their previous support systems and isolates them with other cult members
Social implosion of cults
Social Imposion, Stark and Bainbridge: external ties weaken until the group collapses inward socially, each person engaging only with other group members; LOSE ACCESS TO COUNTERARGUMENTS
“Folie a deux”
Folie A DEUX: insanity of two, two cult members reinforcing each other’s aberrant thinking
How can be persuasion be constructive?
Persuasion can be used constructively, like in therapy: provides a supprotive and confiding social relationship, offer an expertise and hope, special rationale that explains ones difficulties and offers a new perspective, set of rituals and learning experiences that promise a new sense of peace and happiness
Cognitive dissonance and new information exposure
Festinger: cognitive dissonance theory; and provided one of the earliest discussions of impact of attitudes on info processing; argued that individuals are motivated to maintain cognitive consistency and therefore people are motivated to incorporate info that is cosnistsent with their atittudes and to avoid info that is inconsistent
Selective Exposure and info-processing biases
Selective Exposure: extent to which people’s atttitudes affect the info they expose themselves to
Selective perception and selective memory in info-processing biases
Selective Perception: people are more likely to agree with their own point of view and see material supporting it as more convincing and scientifically rigorous
Selective Memory: people use this when they process social info, they remember info that is congruent with their attitudes better than information that is incongruent with their attitudes
Reactance and persuasion
Reactance: knowing that someone is trying to coerce us may prompt us to react in the opposite direction
Persuasion, 4 Elements
Source: where is it coming from
Message: content trying to be conveyed
Medium: how the message is being transmitted
Audience: people receiving the message
Source, similiarity and credibility
Similarity: if the person is similar to you, you are more likely to be persuaded
Credibility: perceived expertise (skills/competencies you believe this person has) and trustworthiness (person is honest and has good intentions)
Manipulating trustworthiness
Manipulating Trustworthiness: testimonials and endorsement by people/reviews, presenting the message as education/presented at only giving the facts, word of mouth happens organically but can also be when influencers are paid to do this, the maven (expert or someone in social circle who has the knowledge about something that everyone goes to, person who is good with directions that everyone relies on)
Message and counterarguments
Refute counter-argument; inoculate them to some ideas that they might encounter later on as to why this thing is bad and equip them for how to refute it
Emotions and message (sincerity, fear, vividness, positive feelings)
Emotions: sincerity (come across as authentic or craft message so it looks like it goes against your own interest), fear, vividness (attention grabbing, but also don’t want to be too vividly scary that people only remember the fear component and not the message, “story of a person who needs your help”), positive feelings (elicit positive feelings, associate it with happiness)
Medium of a message
IN GENERAL, FACE TO FACE DELIVERY IS ALWAYS MORE IMPACTFUL
VIDEO IS MORE IMPACTFUL THAN AUDIO
AUDIO IS MORE IMPACT THAN WRITTEN
How message is delivered
Written, audio, video, face to face
INTERACTIONS BTEWEEN MEDIUM AND MESSAGE ARE STRONG
If message is difficult to understand, written is best for opinion change, because you have the time to think about and analyze/process the message
How to strengthen existing attitudes?
A mild attack can also serve as an inoculation, stimulating one to develop counter-arguments that will then be available if and when a strong attack comes.
This implies, paradoxically, that one way to strengthen existing attitudes is to challenge them, though the challenge must not be so strong as to overwhelm them.
Mcguire Attitude inoculation and Experiments
“Immunizing” someone by first creating a small challenge to their belief (like a vaccine creates a small threat to immunity) so that their beliefs will be stronger later in the face of a bigger attack (like a vaccine)
Reciprocity, Cialdini
A universal norm: we feel obligated to reciprocate this norm and feel uncomfortable if we don’t (UNIVERSAL ACROSS EVERY SINGLE SOCIETY)
When someone gives you something or does something for you, you feel some kind of debt
Reciprocity Anxiety: the discomfort you feel when you haven’t reciprocated something in this kind of exchange
Uncomfortable to be labelled a ‘freeloader’: this term exists because of the norm of reciprocity
Companies who give people free samples: it will increase their sales, a portion of the people will want to respond and reciprocate
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE OF RECIPROCITY: Looking at all studies published my medical jounrals about a specific drug: only a few companies produced these drugs; publications that put only positive findings about the drug vs publications that included some negative aspects of the drugs: those who wrote the positive findings received ‘support’ by the companies 100% of the time, vs those who reported some negative findings only 37% had received support
Social proof, Cialindi
In a situation where you are unsure how to act, you will look around you to see what others are doing
Form of conformity^^^
Perceive what others are doing as correct: social proof that you should be doing a specific behaviour
More likely to be used if others are perceived as similar to self
Hotel towels experiment^^^ when people believed other people were reusing their towels 75% of the time in that specific room, they also followed along because of the social proof effect
Red Bull initially differentiated itself from other energy drinks by filling all garbage cans in downtown London with empty bottles of redbull, people believed others were doing it so they started drinking it: use of social proof
Social proof can be very adaptive: we can adapt to others around us, not always a bad thing, if people are making good decisions around us then it can be a good thing
Deciding where to eat: if a restaurant is empty then you wont go in
Consistency, Cialdini
WE are all motivated to feel consistent: cross situational consistency, cross situational beliefs and attitude consistency (associated with stability, honesty)
View self as consistent and have others view us as consistent
Gym memberships also take advantage of this^^
TECHNIQUES: Assertion about self, public commitments, large investment
To appear consistent, someone will say how much they like something more after theyve bought something very expensive
REMEMBER AI ASSERTION ***** ON TITLE PAGE: but this is an example of how people want to be consistent
Scarcity, cialdini
People value rare or unique objects, ideas, and information more than their common versions
People are motivated by fear of loss than want of gain— FOMO, great motivator
4 TYPES OF SCARCITY MARKETING
Exclusive Scarcity: if you feel that ther eis something that is being offered solely to you, and no one else will have it, you want to secure that rare or “scarce” thing
Rarity Scarcity: LIMITED QUANTITY the opportunity will be lost if you don’t quickly jump on the opportunity because its so rare
Urgency Scarcity: need to quickly book the hotel before its all booked up
Excesss Demand Scarcity: extreme demand on something, scarce, motivates us to want it more (everyone is doing it so you want to get it now)
Methods of resisting persuasion
Resisting authority: assess expertise and trustworthiness
Resisting liking: disentangle source from the message, are you just convinced because their attractive
Resisting reciprocity: notice and redefine the gift, notice whether youre intentionally being put in a situation where someone expects something back from you
Resisting social proof: identify false proof, ask what motive the social proof might be having, weigh proof
Consistency: notice whether someone has your best interest at heart or not, evaluate
Pseudo Effect
We will see again and again that when people commit themselves to public behaviours and perceive these acts to be their own doing, they come to believe more strongly in what they have done. But this research is not without criticism. Because stronger initial attitudes increase the likelihood of the effect occurring, some of the foot-in-the-door results found might be “pseudo”-effects
