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Lecture 2.6: How to Be Persuasive

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Social Psychology

Wesleyan University

4.9 (244 ratings) | 28K Students Enrolled

Ever wonder why people do what they do? This course—which includes more than $1,000 of video and reading materials—offers some answers based on the latest research from social psychology. Students taking the course for a Certificate will also receive free membership in Social Psychology Network (SocialPsychology.org). COURSE DESCRIPTION FROM PROFESSOR PLOUS: Each of us is dealt a different hand in life, but we all face similar questions when it comes to human behavior: What leads us to like one person and dislike another? How do conflicts and prejudices develop, and how can they be reduced? Can psychological research help protect the environment, and if so, how? This course offers a brief introduction to classic and contemporary social psychology, covering topics such as decision making, persuasion, group behavior, personal attraction, and factors that promote health and well-being. Our focus will be on surprising, entertaining, and intriguing research findings that are easy to apply in daily life. The course will also draw from the websites of Social Psychology Network, the world's largest online community devoted to social psychology. I hope you'll join me for this course, have fun, and learn some useful information that enriches your life.

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4.9 (244 ratings)

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F

Nov 08, 2018

Learning so much and I'm only in week 1. It's untangled and clarified some of my own experiences and interactions in such an easy format with relevant and informative resources.

SS

May 10, 2019

Professor Plous has made this course interesting with a number of additional videos, Ted talks and snapshot quiz. It is one of the best courses that I have taken on Coursera.

From the lesson

WEEK 2: The Psychology of Self-Presentation and Persuasion

This week's goals are to: (1) learn how people explain their behavior and the behavior of others; (2) explore the link between attitudes and behavior; (3) understand what cognitive dissonance is and why it matters; and (4) gain some practical tips from the science of persuasion and social influence.

Lecture 2.6: How to Be Persuasive15:07

Lecture 2.7: Secrets from the Science of Persuasion (Guest Lecture)13:02

Lecture 2.8: The Ins and Outs of Social Influence18:30

Taught By

Scott Plous
Professor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching

Transcript

Earlier, we discussed the surprisingly

weak connection that attitudes and behavior sometimes have.

We also discussed cognitive dissonance research and saw that when attitudes and

behavior are connected, it's often the case that attitudes follow behavior

rather than cause behavior. In this video, I'd like to focus on

attitude change and the psychology of persuasion, an area in which there's been

just a tremendous amount of research. In fact, by some estimates, more than

1,000 studies on attitude change are published in psychology journals each year.

So with such a vast research literature,

we obviously need a way to organize the topic,

and one of the best frameworks to do exactly that was developed by

Bill McGuire, a Yale attitude researcher, in a landmark research review.

McGuire created a matrix with independent variables, or variables under the control

of the experimenter, arranged along the top, and mediating or dependent variables,

what he called "output steps," arranged along the side.

What you see here is a simplified version of the matrix adapted from the original.

McGuire's five categories of independent variable were the following:

Source variables—that is, variables having to do with the persuader,

the source of the communication. Message variables—that is, variables

concerning the way a message is constructed (so, for example, whether it

uses humor, or fear appeals, or informative statistics, and so on).

Channel variables—that is, variables related to

whether a persuasive appeal is given in person, on television,

in magazine advertisements, the Internet, or other channels of communication.

Receiver variables, or variables having to do with the audience—the receivers or

recipients of the message. And finally, target variables, or

variables that have to do with the thing you're targeting for change,

such as getting people to wear seat belts or buy a product,

vote for a candidate, and so on. The output variables included things such

as paying attention, liking, understanding, agreeing, remembering

the message, deciding, acting on it, and so forth.

When you think about it, the sheer number of variables that you could study, and the

number of ways these variables could interact with each other, is staggering,

so it's no wonder that there's so many studies on attitude change

(for example, the effects of source attractiveness on purchasing decisions

made by people in their twenties). Research on persuasion is also of great

practical importance, and the results aren't always what you'd predict.

Let's pause for five pop-up questions that should illustrate the point.

Very few people get all five of these items correct,

and even those who do aren't always 100% sure beforehand that their answers were

correct, which suggests that persuasion research has something to teach almost

all of us. I know that I continue to be surprised

when I read new studies on this topic. So, how are we going to cover

this large terrain? Well, selectively.

In this video, I'm going to focus on just three questions,

and the next video—an animated guest lecture by Bob Cialdini and Steve

Martin—will focus more broadly on "Secrets from the Science of Persuasion,"

a wonderful title and a terrific lecture. Anyway, here are the three questions that

I'd like to focus on. First, if you want to be persuasive, is it

a good idea to explicitly discuss counter-arguments to your position?

Second, should you use a central route to persuasion or a more peripheral route?

(And I'll explain these terms in a moment.) And third, should you try to scare the

receiver—that is, are fear appeals effective?

So let's turn to the first question: whether to acknowledge counter-arguments—

that is, arguments against your own position.

Political campaigns often operate on the assumption that it's best to stay on the

offensive, ignoring rather than refuting opposition charges.

Research tends to show, however, that it's better

to acknowledge and refute counter-arguments even before presenting your own

arguments, under a couple of conditions: First, when counter-arguments have been

made salient by familiarity or controversy—that is, you know that the

receivers are going to come in contact with the opposition anyway—

or second, when the receiver is highly intelligent or initially opposed to your position.

In other words, if you know from the start that the receiver is smart or

doesn't agree with your position, it's best to begin by acknowledging counter-arguments

to your position, to present what's known as a two-sided appeal:

"I know that you've heard X, Y, Z, but here's what's wrong with X, Y, Z."

The use of counter-arguments can also be effective in building resistance to

attitude change when people already hold the position you're advocating—that is,

when they're already on your side. Here's how.

If you mildly criticize the position people hold, enough so that they defend their

position and generate reasons for it, but not so much that they change their mind,

it's like immunizing them with a low-dose vaccine.

In fact, this technique for building resistance is known in social psychology

as "attitude inoculation," and, as covered in one of your readings for this week,

it's been used in everything from political campaigns to helping children resist peer

pressure when it comes to smoking cigarettes.

The difference between a two-sided appeal and attitude inoculation is that in a

two-sided appeal, you raise the counter-arguments and then explain why

they're not convincing, whereas in attitude inoculation, you

raise a mild objection, and it's the receiver who generates the reasons why

the objection isn't persuasive. The next question that I want to consider

is whether it's better to use a central route to persuasion or a peripheral route

to persuasion, and this, too, is a topic that's covered in more detail in this

week's assigned reading. A message that uses a central route to

persuasion is a message based on facts, statistics, and arguments.

This is the kind of message that someone who's highly involved with the issue

would find persuasive. In contrast, a message that relies on the

peripheral route to persuasion is a message that uses beautiful music,

idyllic settings, attractive models, or other cues that are really

incidental, or peripheral, to the issue at hand.

Peripheral cues are most effective when the audience isn't too involved or critical.

Most advertisements use a combination of

central arguments and peripheral cues. It's hard to find examples that are 100%

one or the other, but here's a car advertisement that

certainly focuses on the central route: "A Story in Numbers" that gives the

vehicle's torque, safety score, and other details that a highly involved consumer

might want to know. In contrast, look at this car ad, which

also appeared in a magazine but is probably the most peripheral ad I've ever

seen for a car. In fact, there aren't even any words,

let alone numbers, and there's no car in sight.

It's not even clear what the product or company is until we zoom in on

Marilyn Monroe's mole, at which point you can see it's Mercedes-Benz.

What's being sold isn't a specific car—

it's an association with beauty and glamour, and indeed, the magazine that ran this

ad was Glamour magazine.

It can also be interesting sometimes to see the central and peripheral routes to

persuasion in political advertisements. Here's a TV commercial from the 2012

presidential campaign of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

After you watch, I'll ask you a question about whether the approach

was mainly central or mainly peripheral.

>> The last question that I want to discuss

is whether fear appeals tend to be persuasive.

As it turns out, the answer is yes. Fear appeals can be pretty effective as

long as you give people specific steps they can take to avoid whatever the

threat is. If you just scare people silly without

saying how to avoid the threat, fear appeals can actually backfire.

They can drive people into a state of denial.

Returning to the case of political advertisements, the specific thing that

viewers can do is usually quite clear—they can vote for

a particular candidate or else. That's one reason why so many political ads

are based on fear appeals—that if you don't vote for a particular candidate,

there'll be nuclear war. Unemployment will double.

Taxes will increase. The sky will fall.

Wow, that was pretty dramatic!

Let me share with you two classic examples of U.S. presidential campaign

advertisements that were based on fear appeals—one from a Republican,

the other from a Democrat. The first one, courtesy of the Ronald Reagan

Foundation and Library, tries to instill fear by presenting Russia,

or maybe the Russian military, as a potentially dangerous bear.

The advertisement also uses peripheral cues like ominous music and a heartbeat

to build tension in the background. Take a look.

>> There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see.

Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame.

Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right,

isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear if there is a bear?

>> The next advertisement, courtesy of the

Democratic National Committee and the Lyndon Banes Johnson Presidential Library,

is one of the most famous TV campaign ads ever shown,

which is all the more remarkable because it was only shown once,

on September 7, 1964, and it effectively branded the Republican

candidate, Barry Goldwater, as a threat to peace.

>> One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine, nine.

>> Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children

can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.

>> Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd.

The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

>> One thing these ads show is that

televised fear appeals have been part of the political landscape for 50 years or more.

And of course, fear appeals and negative campaigning

have been around much longer than television.

For example, the U.S presidential race in the year 1800 between the incumbent

John Adams and the challenger, Thomas Jefferson (who ended up winning)

was extremely negative. One can only imagine what a TV commercial

attacking Thomas Jefferson would have looked like.

Thanks to the Center for New American Media, I'll end this video with a brief

glimpse of how modern day persuasion techniques might have been applied if

television had been around in the year 1800.

>> A nation destroyed.

Dwellings in flames. Gray hairs bathed in blood.

Female chastity violated. Children writhing on the pike and halberd.

It happened in France, but it could

happen right here in America if Thomas Jefferson is elected President.

Murder, robbery, rape, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.

The soil will be soaked in blood, and the nation black with crimes.

Great God of compassion and justice, shield our country from destruction.

Vote Federalist.

>> Paid for by the Adams 1800 Committee, Alexander Hamilton, Treasurer.

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