Four Persuasion Challenges

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From the course by Northwestern University

Leadership Through Social Influence

447 ratings

Northwestern University

Leadership Through Social Influence

447 ratings

Course 3 of 6 in the Specialization Organizational Leadership

This course will provide learners with a systematic general framework for analyzing persuasive influence situations. Learners will be able to identify different challenges faced by persuaders and to fashion appropriate strategies for addressing those challenges. The broad goal is to provide learners with not only an extensive persuasion tool kit, but also with an understanding of how different tools are useful in different situations. Specifically, the course will address four broad topics: strategies for influencing people’s personal attitudes; strategies for affecting social factors influencing behavior; strategies for affecting people’s perceived ability to undertake the desired behavior; and strategies for inducing people to act on their existing intentions.

From the lesson

Influencing Attitudes

This module discusses the first of four challenges that persuaders often face: getting people to think that what you’re proposing is a good idea. Sometimes, the reason people aren’t already doing what you want is that they’re not yet convinced that they should—that is, they don’t have sufficiently positive attitudes. This module discusses some fundamental strategies for changing people’s attitudes.

Introduction to Course 3 with Dean Blount1:21

Compliance, Persuasion, and Message Adaptation5:35

Four Persuasion Challenges5:57

Meet the Instructors

Daniel J. O’Keefe
Owen L. Coon Professor
Department of Communication Studies, School of Communication

[MUSIC]

The previous segment introduced the idea that if there is one key idea

to understand about Effective Persuasion it is the idea of Message Adaptation.

The idea that different situations present different challenges to persuader's,

different problems for persuader's to solve.

And a strategy that works in one kind of situation won't necessarily work for

some different problem.

Which is all very nice in the abstract, but

the question is, how do persuasion situations actually differ?

That is, what are the different challenges that persuaders face?

Well in fact, persuaders can face all sorts of different situations,

all sorts of different challenges.

And it's not possible here to catalogue all of them or

to talk about how to handle all of them.

However, there are certain sorts of persuasive challenges that recur,

you see them over and over again.

And you see these challenges, these problems for persuaders quite widely,

that is this persuasive problems are quite general.

They're not limited to anyone particular, influence setting or

anyone specific target audience or anyone specific sort of desired behavior.

And so, for example, influencing your co-workers, or your boss,

or your subordinates, or your customers, or your family members.

A spouse, children, parents, or your neighbors, or

the city council, or the board of a charity where you volunteer, or, or, or.

There are some basic fundamental recurring kinds of challenges, kinds of

problems that persuaders face across all these different sorts of circumstances.

Correspondingly, the toolkit I want to give you

concerning how to address these challenges is also meant to be quite general.

I want to give you tools that you can use as a basis for

influence in all sorts of different concrete situations.

What I wanna do now is give you an overview

of these recurring persuasion challenges.

And then beginning with the next segment, we start working through them, one by one.

So, an overview of the challenges.

There are four such challenges.

Four common problems that a persuader might need to address.

And as a way of organizing these four ideas,

you can think of them as four different possible answers to a key questions.

A questions that persuaders always ask themselves

before embarking on persuasive efforts.

And that questions is, why aren't people already doing this behavior?

Expressed differently, why aren't people already doing what I want?

Well, one possible answer is they don't think it's a good idea.

That is, they don't have positive attitudes about what it is you

want them to do.

And so that's the first potential challenge for a persuader.

Getting people to have appropriately positive attitudes.

Getting them to think that what the persuader is urging is a good idea.

But there's a second possible reason that people aren't already doing what you want.

Namely, that social considerations are a barrier.

What I mean to point to by talking about social considerations

is what people think other people think or do.

For example, it's possible for

a person to have positive attitudes about doing something, but

then not do it, because they think that other people think they shouldn't.

I'm in favor of it but all these people around me are telling me it's a bad idea.

Those social factors are a second possible challenge for persuaders.

There's a third possible reason people aren't doing what you want,

a third potential problem to address.

People's perceived ability to perform the behavior.

Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes and

the social considerations about what other people think or do are all positive.

But people don't think they can perform the behavior.

Maybe they don't know how to perform the behavior.

And so, they don't even try.

And so, sometimes persuaders face the task of addressing that issue.

Addressing people's ability to perform the behavior.

Fourth, finally.

Sometimes people have the appropriate positive attitudes, and

the social considerations are all positive, and

people know they're able to engage in the behavior.

And so, in some sense, they vaguely intend to do what you want.

But somehow they don't translate those good intentions into action.

That is sometimes the task a persuader faces

is the task of helping people convert their intentions into behavior.

Each of these is a different kind of persuasive challenge,

a different kind of problem or puzzle for persuaders to solve.

And because these are different challenges,

they require different approaches.

That's why, at the very outset, persuaders should ask themselves,

why aren't people already doing the thing I want?

If the answer is, they don't think it's a good idea,

then you need to think about how to change their attitudes.

But if the answer is they think it's a good idea, but they don't think they

can perform the behavior, well then, you need a different approach.

So that's the overview of these four common persuasion challenges we're going

to be discussing.

In the segments that follow we take up each of these in turn, and

talk about how to address each one effectively.

[MUSIC]

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