Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term for influence. Persuasion can influence a person's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviours.
An attitude "is a summary evaluation of an object of thought. An attitude object can be anything a person discriminates or holds in mind." Attitudes include beliefs (cognition), emotional responses (affect) and behavioral tendencies. In the classical definition an attitude is persistent, while in more contemporary conceptualizations, attitudes may vary depending upon situations, context, or moods.
Irving Lester Janis was an American research psychologist at Yale University and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley most famous for his theory of "groupthink", which described the systematic errors made by groups when making collective decisions. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Janis as the 79th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Carl Iver Hovland was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra's propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on your degree of belonging to the group.
Social judgment theory (SJT) is a self-persuasion theory proposed, perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. According to this theory, an individual weighs every new idea, comparing it with the individual's present point of view to determine where it should be placed on the attitude scale in an individual's mind. SJT is the subconscious sorting out of ideas that occurs at the instant of perception. The theory of Social Judgement attempts to explain why and how people have different reactions and responded toward the same information or issue. Social Judgment Theory can be used to improve the way people communicate with one another. The theory is also widely considered in persuasions. The Social Judgement Theory depends on the individual's position on a certain issue occurring. Depending on three elements Social Judgement Theory has, they are followed by their anchor, alternatives and ego-involvement.
Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.
The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1980. The model aims to explain different ways of processing stimuli, why they are used, and their outcomes on attitude change. The ELM proposes two major routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.
Fear appeal is a term used in psychology, sociology and marketing. It generally describes a strategy for motivating people to take a particular action, endorse a particular policy, or buy a particular product, by arousing fear. A well-known example in television advertising was a commercial employing the musical jingle: "Never pick up a stranger, pick up Prestone anti-freeze." This was accompanied by images of shadowy strangers (hitchhikers) who would presumably do one harm if picked up. The commercial's main appeal was not to the positive features of Prestone anti-freeze, but to the fear of what a "strange" brand might do.
Anthony R. Pratkanis is a researcher, author, consultant, media commentator and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, and has published research papers in scientific journals on the topics of social influence, fraud, terrorist and dictator propaganda, marketing and consumer behavior, and subliminal persuasion.
Most investigators accept the definition of language intensity proposed by John Waite Bowers: a quality of language that "indicates the degree to which toward a concept deviates from neutrality." Intensity as a lexical variable in communication studies has generated extensive empirical research.
Inoculation theory is a social psychological/communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be made resistant to persuasion or influence, in analogy to how a body gains resistance to disease. The theory uses medical inoculation as its explanatory analogy but instead of applying it to disease, it is used to discuss attitudes. It has applicability to public campaigns targeting misinformation and fake news.
Source credibility is "a term commonly used to imply a communicator's positive characteristics that affect the receiver's acceptance of a message." Academic studies of this topic began in the 20th century and were given a special emphasis during World War II, when the US government sought to use propaganda to influence public opinion in support of the war effort. Psychologist Carl Hovland and his colleagues worked at the War Department upon this during the 1940s and then continued experimental studies at Yale University. They built upon the work of researchers in the first half of the 20th century who had developed a Source-Message-Channel-Receiver model of communication and, with Muzafer Sherif, developed this as part of their theories of persuasion and social judgement.
Regulatory focus theory (RFT) is a theory of goal pursuit formulated by Columbia University psychology professor and researcher E. Tory Higgins regarding people's motivations and perceptions in judgment and decision making processes. RFT examines the relationship between the motivation of a person and the way in which they go about achieving their goal. RFT posits two separate and independent self-regulatory orientations: prevention and promotion.
Narrative transportation theory proposes that when people lose themselves in a story, their attitudes and intentions change to reflect that story. The mental state of narrative transportation can explain the persuasive effect of stories on people, who may experience narrative transportation when certain contextual and personal preconditions are met, as Green and Brock postulate for the transportation-imagery model. As Van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels elaborate further, narrative transportation occurs whenever the story receiver experiences a feeling of entering a world evoked by the narrative because of empathy for the story characters and imagination of the story plot.
The heuristic-systematic model of information processing (HSM) is a widely recognized model by Shelly Chaiken that attempts to explain how people receive and process persuasive messages. The model states that individuals can process messages in one of two ways: heuristically or systematically. Whereas systematic processing entails careful and deliberative processing of a message, heuristic processing entails the use of simplifying decision rules or ‘heuristics’ to quickly assess the message content. The guiding belief with this model is that individuals are more apt to minimize their use of cognitive resources, thus affecting the intake and processing of messages. HSM predicts that processing type will influence the extent to which a person is persuaded or exhibits lasting attitude change. HSM is quite similar to the elaboration likelihood model, or ELM. Both models were predominantly developed in the early to mid-1980s and share many of the same concepts and ideas.
In social psychology, the Yale attitude change approach is the study of the conditions under which people are most likely to change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages. This approach to persuasive communications was first studied by Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University during World War II. The basic model of this approach can be described as "who said what to whom": the source of the communication, the nature of the communication and the nature of the audience. According to this approach, many factors affect each component of a persuasive communication. The credibility and attractiveness of the communicator (source), the quality and sincerity of the message, and the attention, intelligence and age of the audience can influence an audience's attitude change with a persuasive communication. Independent variables include the source, message, medium and audience, with the dependent variable the effect of the persuasion.
In social psychology, the boomerang effect, also known as "reactance", refers to the unintended consequences of an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead. It is sometimes also referred to as "the theory of psychological reactance", stating that attempts to restrict a person's freedom often produce an "anticonformity boomerang effect". In other words, the boomerang effect is a situation where people tend to pick the opposite of what something or someone is saying or doing because of how it is presented to them. Typically, the more aggressive something is presented, people would more than likely want to do the opposite. For example, if someone were to walk up to a yard with a sign saying "KEEP OFF LAWN" the person would be more likely to want to walk on the lawn because of the way they read the sign. If the sign read "please stay off my grass" people would be more likely to follow the directions.
The rhyme-as-reason effect, or Eaton–Rosen phenomenon, is a cognitive bias whereupon a saying or aphorism is judged as more accurate or truthful when it is rewritten to rhyme.
Self-persuasion is used to explain one aspect of social influence. This theory postulates that the receiver takes an active role in persuading himself or herself to change his or her attitude. Unlike the direct technique of Persuasion, Self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change. More specifically what characterizes a self-persuasion situation is that no direct attempt is made to convince anyone of anything. Thus, with self-persuasion, people are convinced that the motivation for change has come from within, so the persuasion factors of another person's influence is irrelevant. Therefore, Self-persuasion is almost always a more powerful form of persuasion than the more traditional persuasion techniques. Self-Persuasion, also has an important influence in Social judgment theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cognitive Dissonance and Narrative paradigm.
In advertising, a fear pattern is a sequence of fear arousal and fear reduction that is felt by the viewing audience when exposed to an advertisement, which attempts to threaten the audience by presenting a negative physical, psychological or social consequence that is likely to occur if they engage in a particular behaviour. Fear appeals are commonly used in social marketing campaigns. These are sometimes called “threat appeals”, however the label “fear appeals” is justified if the appeal can be shown to arouse fear.
