Persuasion Flashcards
What is persuasion? Where/When does this occur?
The process in which a message induces a change in beliefs, attitudes, or behaviour.
This can occur:
- Politics, marketing, parenting, negotiation.
- Believing a message: education/information.
- Told not to believe a message: propaganda.
How is persuasion effective? What are the factors? Cite the study.
Hovland et al., 1949.
4 important factors of persuasion based from WWII propaganda:
- The communicator (who is telling the message).
- The content of the message (what is being said).
- Channel of communication (how it’s being said).
- The audience (who it’s being said to).
What makes persuasion more convincing?
Communicator:
- Credibility (how confident they are, trustworthy).
- Expertise (are they educated?).
- Attractiveness (if they are hot we are more attentive, agreeable).
Information:
- Two sides of the argument was proposed, generates answers to opposing questions, seems more fair.
- Logical or emotional: logic appeals to more well-educated, analytic crowd, whereas emotional appeals to more uneducated and less analytical crowds.
- Good moods can also increase effectiveness of message (Dabbs & Janis, 1965) those who ate peanuts and drank pepsi were more influenced.
- Fear: helps prevent or reduce behaviour (smoking, unsafe sex, tooth decay, drinking, criminal behaviour).
Explain the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and who this was proposed by.
Petty and Cacioppo (1986)
Explains how persuasive messages can be gone through two different routes: central or peripheral.
Central: high level engagement of processing and critical thinking, carefully analytic, and is most likely to change behaviour.
- Most effective when message is presented in a credible and factual way.
Peripheral: low level engagement of processing and critical thinking, less analytical.
- Most effective when message is presented in an attractive, hedonistic way.
Persuaders must take into account of what could affect persuasion: their motivations (interests, requirements, need for cognition), their involvement (central or peripheral) to the information, and how it is presented (attractive or factual), as this could be tailored to better persuade the aimed audience.
Contrasting the ELM, what is the unimodel of persuasion?
Central and Peripheral routes are not ‘routes’ and are just processes that is a single path to persuasion.
- Even the ELM model admits that they can sometimes co-occur.
Low involvement tasks only use heuristics and mental shortcuts, appealing to low persuasive requiring messages (usually messages appealing to hedonistic needs and attractive).
Whereas, higher involvement persuasion requires more critical thinking and evaluations, used with high persuasive requirement messages, etc.
How does extreme persuasion occur? AKA those in cults? Explain the 4 factor persuasion in depth, and some examples.
4 factors of persuasion can play into extreme persuasion:
- The audience: younger people are more prone to attitude change.
- Communicator: can be important figures, or charismatic, are credible.
- Content: cult leaders use emotional messages to build trust and support.
- Task completion: ask to complete a small task and then gradually increase. (ask for £5 at first, then gradually to £100).
- Prior commitment to tasks makes it harder to change their mind.
In cults:
- People are isolated from society; cult is their only place of acceptance, loses access to counter arguments.
- Safety.
- Can be threatened to obey.
Can persuasion be resisted? How?
- Strengthening personal commitment: prior personal commitment builds resistance to change. (e.g., agreeing a rainbow will appear without seeing it yet).
- Confidence: less likely to change.
- Mildly challenge beliefs: mild arguments can strengthen commitment to belief.
