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Persuasion - Coggle Diagram
Persuasion
Attitudes
- Why study attitudes?
- Attitudes are important because they:
- Influence our thoughts > help to organise and evaluate stimuli (eg- categorising stimuli as positive or negative)
- May influence behaviour > predict behaviour in a wide range of contexts (eg- voting, interpersonal relations)
- What are attitudes?
- Evaluations of any aspect of our world > yourself, other people, like anything.
- Attitudes have a structure > components > affect, behaviour, cognition
- Attitude formation
- Classical conditioning: learning based on association
- Subliminal conditioning > without awareness
- Instrumental conditioning: learning to hold attitudes that are rewarded
- social/observational learning: learning by observing the actions of others and exposure to mass media.
- Social comparison: compare ourselves to others to determine if our view of reality is correct.
- Attitudes are shaped by social information from others we like or respect.
- This is why so much money is spent on advertising
- Influencers
- We compare ourselves to others to determine if our view of reality is correct > a lot of our attitudes are not based on anything factual, and so we look to the social environment to figure out how we should feel about things.
- Genetic factors
- Comparisons of identical and fraternal twins
- Attitude-Behaviour Correlations
- Do attitudes influence our behaviour?
- Attitudes don’t always predict behaviour.
- LaPiere (1934) found that virtually all businesses served Chinese couples courteously, yet most owners held negative attitudes towards them (USA, 1934).
- People might have multiple attitudes towards a complex situation, and with all those attitudes together it’s hard to predict behaviour.
- People who suntan even though they know the dangers of sun exposure > the attitude of looking good takes precedence over attitudes towards personal health.
- When attitudes are more likely to predict behaviour:
- When attitudes are strong
- When we have a strong intention to perform the behaviour
- When the attitude and the behaviour both occur in similar situations
- When the attitudes are measured at a specific, rather than a general, level
Attitude Change
- Cognitive approach to attitude change
- Persuasion: the efforts to change attitudes through various kinds of messages.
- Early persuasion research focused on:
- The communicator (source)
- What they said (message)
- How they said it (channels)
- Who was listening (audience)
- Elaboration likelihood model
- Suggests that there are two major routes to which information is processed and that leads to attitude change > peripheral and central)
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Predictors
of Attitudes
- Mere exposure: repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to enhance attitudes to the stimulus (Zajonc, 1968)
Embodiment
- Nonverbal sources can influence thoughts/feelings we have in response to persuasive messages.
- Participants who listened to radio editorials while nodding their heads up and down expressed more agreement compared to participants who were shaking their heads side-to-side.
- Peripheral cues to agreement/disagreement).
- Strong vs weak arguments
- Strong: nodding increases agreement.
- Weak: nodding increases disagreement (feeling greater confidence in their unfavourable thoughts).
Resisting Persuasion
- Attentional biases: Selective attention > we selectively attend to information that confirms our original attitudes, and tune out information that contradicts them.
- Previous commitments: many messages fail because they cannot overcome previous commitments.
- Pubic commitments make people resist attitude change
- Don’t want to lose face.
- Engage in more extensive thoughts which tend to produce more extreme attitudes
- Repeated expressions lead to more extreme positions.
- Thought polarization hypothesis: more extended thought about a particular issue tends to produce a more extreme attitude.
- Prior knowledge makes people engage via central route.
- More knowledge > more resistant to persuasion.
Attitude Inoculation
- small attacks on one’s attitudes/beliefs can cause one to counteract a subsequent larger attack and thus resist persuasion.
- Smoking- present weak pro-smoking arguments and encourage them to make counterarguments.