Persuasion

In social psychology, persuasion is the ability to influence a person's feelings, beliefs, and behaviors through spoken or written words. Through persuasion, people try to change others' minds by providing reasons, arguments, or appeals. Persuasion requires communication between people and can occur on an individual level or through a mass audience. Persuasion can be applied to nearly all aspects of life, from personal matters, relationships, and careers to business, politics, and religion. Advertising and marketing rely on persuasive techniques to sell products. Lawyers use persuasion to influence juries or judges during trial proceedings. Politicians use persuasive tactics to appeal to potential voters. Six key theories attempt to explain the effects of persuasion on people's attitudes and actions, and the most common methods of persuasion can be narrowed down to six principles.

Background

The art of persuasion dates back to ancient Greece. It was considered part of rhetoric, or the art of effective speaking. The Greek philosopher Aristotle determined that to be effective, persuasion must be based on three platforms: logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and ethos (source credibility).

Persuasion is an intentional act. An individual must want to deliberately influence or change another person's mind. In general, persuasion is used to convince someone to choose a course of action that is in his or her own best interest, which also serves to benefit the persuader. It involves free will and is usually based on mutual trust and respect. Persuasion is different from manipulation, which is when a person controls another through coercion for his or her own benefit. Persuasion can cross over into manipulation depending on the motives of the persuader.

Two dominant models explain how persuasion functions. They are called dual process models because they propose that humans process persuasion through two pathways.

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) suggests that information is processed through the central route and the peripheral route. The central route involves thinking about a message and scrutinizing the arguments in it. The peripheral route involves relying on a simple association rather than the substance of the message. An underage teen may decide to drink a beer at a party because his best friend is drinking one. This is the peripheral route of persuasion. If the teen used the central route, he would consider that police may bust the party and arrest the teens for underage drinking.

The heuristic-systematic model (HSM) is similar to ELM. The model proposes that persuasion operates along two modes, systematic processing and heuristic processing. Systematic processing is more analytical, making it comparable to the central route in ELM. Heuristic processing relies on simplistic cues, like the peripheral route in ELM. Using heuristic processing, an individual would buy a flat screen TV based on the brand name. Under systematic processing, the person would consider researching the TV's features and cost.

An alternative model, the unimodel, suggests that persuasion operates on one pathway. This model proposes that longer messages take more consideration to process, while shorter ones take less consideration.

Overview

Several theories explain how persuasion may alter people's thoughts, attitudes, and actions. The following are the most common.

The stimulus-response theory of learning involves conditioning, a key concept in persuasion. Conditioning is building an association between a stimulus and a response. People learn to associate proposals with certain outcomes, and those consequences stir up feelings that become connected with those appeals. The proposal is the stimulus, and the feeling is the response. This conditions people to identify a proposal simply by the feelings they associate with it. Advertisers rely on conditioning to sell products, such as that brand names connote higher quality than generic forms.

Social judgment theory suggests that when people are presented with persuasive messages or appeals, they evaluate them and compare them with their current beliefs, which are called anchor points. Around those anchor points, each person has a range of positions he or she is willing to accept, a range that is neutral, and a range that is unacceptable. Every time a person receives persuasive information, it falls into the latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, or rejection. An individual is more likely to change his or her mind if the appeal falls into the latitude of acceptance. Social judgment theory contains vital implications for politicians, who usually make ambiguous appeals to voters to land in their latitudes of acceptance.

In inoculation theory, a persuader warns an audience not to accept an opposing argument from a different source. By preparing the audience ahead of time, the persuader is "inoculating" the audience, like a vaccine, from the other argument's persuasive value by building skepticism. The strategy is effective in political campaigns and trial proceedings.

Cognitive dissonance theory concerns the mental stress that occurs when two cognitive elements, such as beliefs or attitudes, are inconsistent with each other, known as cognitive dissonance. This can happen when an individual holds a view that is contradicted by new, persuasive information. To lower stress, an individual will try to reduce cognitive dissonance by altering one of the elements. This can permanently change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

In attribution theory, people make inferences about the individuals around them and use them to explain others' behaviors. People may attribute an action to a personal cause, such as an individual's personality traits, or an external one, an outside force or situation. When people persuade others to like them or other individuals, they will use personal attributions to explain good behaviors and external attributions to expound negative ones.

The theory of motivated reasoning suggests that people are more receptive to persuasive messages when they reflect what they already think. People constantly seek to confirm their beliefs and attitudes, and they maintain those elements by looking for evidence that affirms them.

Various methods can be used to persuade people. Social influence expert Robert Cialdini devised six principles that underlie persuasive strategies:

• Reciprocation is the feeling of owing the persuader for a gesture or a gift.
• Commitment and consistency is following previously established beliefs.
• Social proof is when people make decisions in line with the majority opinion.
• Liking occurs when people say yes to those they like.
• Authority is heeding individuals considered credible experts.
• Scarcity is wanting something in limited supply.

Persuasion is a daily component of life. People encounter persuasive tactics that influence the choices they make on a regular basis, from buying a car to switching cellphone companies to deciding which presidential candidate to vote for.

Understanding the theories and principles behind persuasion can help people evaluate those tactics and determine their best interests when deciding whether to be persuaded.

Bibliography

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