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.
Lecture 2.6: How to Be Persuasive
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From the course by Wesleyan University
Social Psychology
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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.
Meet the Instructors
Scott PlousProfessor of Psychology; Executive Director, Social Psychology Network; recipient of the American Psychological Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching
Department of Psychology
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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