Lecture 8: Resistance to persuasion Flashcards
Gullibility
Accept too much, too easily persuaded.
Ethical concerns
Manipulation, misinformation, microtargeting, intrusiveness.
Potential issues
Failure to communicate novel, important information.
Problems by marketing and advertising
intrusive, disruptive TV, radio, online ads, deceptive advertising, targeting specific groups.
Problems by politics
Propaganda, mass media, polarization and disinformation.
Problems by health and safety
Disinformation, failure to communicate important information.
Conservatism
Reject too much information, fail to update
How easily are people persuaded?
People are gullible even when its bad for them but are evolved to resist being taken advantage of.
people evolved to resist being taken advantage of.
Especially hard to persuade for costly behavior, counter-intuitive arguments. People accept content that fits with prior views more than the reliability source.
Psychological mechanisms
plausibility checking –> trust calibration –> reasoning
Plausibility checking
Use prior beliefs to interpret new information or messages, only believing if plausible.
Different models of plausibility checking
- Inconsistency between new experienced info and prior beliefs
–> update. - Inconsistency between message from another person and prior beliefs –> evaluate source trustworthiness and reason –> updating
- More extreme / new information –> more thorough checking.
- When too conservativism –> fail too update for non-intuitive information –> harder too spread (wappies die geen vaccine willen)
Trust calibration
Evaluate trustworthiness via cues of competence and benevolence of source and commitment tracking.
Competence
Do you trust the messenger? Are they competent?
Benevolence
Do they care about you? Or just wanna sell something?
Commitment tracking
Calibrate trust according to source confidence and reliability.
Reasoning
Evaluate argument strenght (if high involvement).
Examples of problematic persuasion
Propaganda: May use or adjust messages to popular opinion. May employ rewards or punishments for true changes in belief.
Political campaigns or mass media: Confirmation bias, echo chambers, some cases of people adapating position to party affiliation and trust in media leads to more accurate political and economic knowledge.
Advertising: relatively small effects. More scrutiny of important or relevant information.
Medical misinformation: effective treatments may be counterintuitive. Ineffective or harmful treatments may be intuitive.
Examples for gullibility
People do buy things they don’t need/want/etc.
Some people do enter misinformation rabbit holes or join cults
Costliness to self matters, but costliness to others may not trigger strong reaction
Why resist persuasion?
Accuracy motives, defense motives, freedom motives and social motives
Accuracy motives
Desire to have correct information and avoid deception. Maintain own beliefs as correct and truthful –> confirmation bias.
What can trigger skepticism? (accuracy motives)
1) Previous negative experiences with persuasion.
2) Knowledge of persuasion strategies.
3) Use of tactics as:
Attention-getting tactics, delayed sponsor identification, negative/incomplete comparisons or promotion of option/ attitudes that clearly benefits the source.
Defensive motives
Self-consistency, reduce conflict and reluctance to change. Desire to maintain important and self-relevant beliefs. Perceive more risks than benefits and satisfied with current situation.
Freedom motives
Reactance to threat to freedom. People behave or shift attitude to contradict persuasive message (boomerang).
Why does persuasion threatens freedom?
To display or change attitude or behavior and avoid committing to a position.
When can perception of threat to freedom occur?
If persuasive intent is perceived, even when same arguments as you have, for own well-being. If forcefull, intense, assertive, direct request and if guilt-inducing.
Strategies to resist
Avoidance-, biased processing-, contesting- and empowerment strategies.
Avoidance strategies
Avoidance, selective exposure and selective memory
Avoidance
Avoid persuasion by physical (leave room), mechanical (ad-blockers), cognitive (reduce attention). It is more likely to avoid informational than emotional messages.
Selective exposure
Avoid information that contradict prior attitudes and seek aligned information. This may be stronger for more extreme attitudes. It may increase perception of consensus of own attitude and knowledge about topic.
Selective memory
Remember information that is self-consistent, fluent, accesible but not others like counter additional info. Niet veel bewijs.
Biased processing
More weight on attitude consistent information, reduce relevance by isolating counter-attitudinal info. High knowledge –> stronger attitude –> more resistant to persuasion. + optimism bias
Optimism bias
Assume negative outcomes will not happen to self. bv) geen vaccine nemen want ik krijg die ziekte toch niet.
Contesting
Challenge or derogate the message. Undermine source and content credibility and message based on bad intent.
Derogating the message source
Question credibility, expertise and trustworthiness of source. That is less effort than counter-arguing, based on cue rather than argument. Commercial sources perceived as less credible than non-commercial and opposing political candidates perceives as less credible.
Inoculation
warning and weak counter-attitudinal message combined with proattitudinal messages, “practice” counter-arguing for stronger attempts.
Derogating the persuasive intent/strategies
Knowledge of persuasion strategies, such as emotional appeals, use of
cute or attractive images can trigger resistance, by forewarning and inoculation.
Empowerment
Attitude bolstering, self assertion and social validation
Attitude bolstering
Retrieve attitude and generate pro-attitude reasons before exposure. Makes attitude more accessible and does not directly counter contradictory messages.
Self assertion
Reaffirm self-esteem, self-confidence about attitudes. Reduced influence of social pressure to conform.
Social validation
Confirm attitude by thinking about others who share that attitude.
Disinformation vs misinformation
Disinformation is intended to be false, misinformation is false but by accident.
When to use different strategies? (3)
Learn topic (attitude retrieval)
Exposure to counter-attitudinal message
After exposure/ persuasion
Learn topic
Empowerment & avoidance:
Bolster initial attitudes
Selective memory
Selective exposure
Exposure to counter-attitudinal message
Contesting & biased processing:
Derogation of source and content
Derogation of persuasive attempt
After exposure/persuasion
Contesting & biased processing:
Forewarning/ inoculation
Counterarguing
Drivers for misinformation
Cognitive and socio-affective drivers
Cognitive drivers
Familiarity: fluency, plausibility, coherence with prior beliefs
Intuition: more time to think, justify choices can override intuition and reduce susceptibility.
Socio-affective drivers
Source cues: credibility, attractiveness.
Emotion: mood, moral, harm
Worldview: Ideology, political leaning and group membership.
Barriers to correction
Cognitive: memories cant be erased, corrections must be integrated with original misinformation in memory.
Socio-affective: emotional misinformation may create stronger memories and correction that threatens worldview may backfire. Cues matter.
Misinformation interventions
Policy interventions and psychological interventions
Policy interventions
Fact checking, shift algorithm (but false positives and false negatives) and government regulation of ads and media (but freedom of speech).
Psychological interventions
Logic corrections, debunking en pre-bunking
Logic corrections
Address general logical fallacies in misinformation
Debunking
Correct specific misinformation after exposure, explain why false, and offer alternative explanation.
Pre-bunking
Warning of potential misinformation, pre-emptive correction.
Study labeling, prebunk and debunk.
Participants rate false headlines as false more often in the debunk and label group. Participants rate true headlines as true more often in the debunk group, but prebunk and labeling better than control. Debunking better for specific facts.
Inoculation theory
A vaccine but for misinformation.
2 components of inoculation theory
- Warning of risk of being misled
- Give weak version of misinformation and strategy how to resist.
Bad news game
A game developed by DROG and cambridge. Players act as disinformation creators and learn different methods or strategies of
disinformation.
Strategies in the inoculation theory
- Impersonation: pretend to be credible source
- Emotion: create emotionally-charged content
- Polarization: act on group-membership, divide groups more
- Conspiracy: promote the idea that unexplained events are orchestrated
- Discredit: attack mainstream media/fact-checking
- Trolling: provoke emotional response to increase engagement
Research about bad news game
Participants rate misinformation as
less reliable after playing but also rate real news as less reliable after playing. Participants rate misinformation as even less reliable than real news.
Other study says leads to conservatism.
Applications of inoculation theory
COVID, climate change and conspiracy theories. Effect fades after moths but booster shot after 3 months + training show stable effects.
