Attitudes and Persuasion

Introduction to Attitudes and Persuasion

• Persuasion can occur in various everyday scenarios
  • Waking up
  • Taking a course
  • Taking a bath
  • Joining an organization
  • Buying beauty products
  • Choosing a partner
  • Staying in a relationship
  • Moving on from someone.
• Propaganda aims to alter views to promote a cause or undermine an opposing one
  • often seen as a biased form of education
  • presents nonfactual information as fact.

Aristotle's Three Modes of Persuasion

• Attitudes are general, lasting positive or negative feelings about a person, object, or issue.
  • Example: Wanting to end a relationship with someone
• Belief pertains to personal information about others, objects, or issues
  • factual or may be a personal opinion.
  • Example: Thinking ending a relationship will relieve burdens
• Behavior involves overt actions
  • Example: Actually ending a relationship

Functions of Attitudes

• Ego-defensive attitudes protect from unflattering truths
• Value-expressive attitudes enable expression of values
• Knowledge attitudes aid understanding of events
• Utilitarian attitudes help gain rewards and avoid punishments.

Attitude Measurement

• Direct procedures ask individuals to self-report their attitudes
  • using Thurstone, Likert, or semantic scales
• Indirect procedures measure attitudes without the person's awareness.
  • disguised self-reports
  • behavioral indicators
  • physiological indicators such as facial EMG

Habits

• Habits are automatic behaviors done without much thought

Message Learning Approach: Attitude Change

• Determinants of attitude change
  • the source
  • the message
  • the recipient
• Fundamental processes in attitude change
  • attention
  • comprehension
  • yielding
  • retention

Source Factors

• The source of communication can be a person, group, or institution
• Incentives are affected by source factors and link to attitude change
• There are three source factors influence incentives
  • associating the "correct" attitude with past rewards
  • negative experience with untrustworthy or manipulative sources
  • social approval

Communicator Elements

• Communicator credibility is key

Intent and Persuasion

• Varying recipient awareness of the source's persuasive intent impacts trustworthiness
• Issue involvement can alter the effects of persuasive intent
• Attractive communicators are more persuasive
• Similar communicators are more effective

Communicator Power

• Rewards and punishments need to
  • be believed to be administered by the source
  • must be decided to be used for compliance,
  • must be known to be checked for compliance

Message Factors

• Message comprehensibility requires attention and understanding
• Rewards are more effective when immediate
• Consider one-sided vs. two-sided messages, conclusion drawing, source identification, message order, repetition, and style

Recipient Factors

• Intelligence impacts the reception of arguments through attention, comprehension, retention, and yielding
• Higher intelligence improves comprehension and recall
• Self-esteem is self-worth
  • low self-esteem increases yielding
• Sex differences exist
  • women may be more agreeable due to socialization
  • men may resist due to socialization
  • persuasive messages may vary in relevance to each gender

Channel Factors

• Face-to-face communication is a channel factor
• Mass media appeals are a channel factor

Conditioning and Social Learning Approaches

• Classical conditioning is associative learning
  • pairing stimuli in time or space
  • a neutral stimulus becomes conditioned through association with an unconditioned stimulus
  • unconditioned stimulus (UCS) leads to unconditioned response (UCR)
  • conditioned stimulus (CS) elicits conditioned response (CR)

Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning was developed by B.F. Skinner
• Consequences control the likelihood of a response
• Reinforcement and punishment determine the response to stimulus

Reinforcement Types

• Positive reinforcement is behavior followed by a desired stimulus
  • Example: a child is praised for picking up a toy and will pick it up again
• Negative reinforcement is behavior removing an undesired stimulus
  • Example: A child is less likely to leave the garbage if her parent stops nagging.

Punishment Types

• Positive punishment is behavior followed by an aversive stimulus
  • A child is slapped after pulling a dog's tail, reducing the behavior
• Negative punishment (omission training) prevents or removes a desired stimulus following a behavior
  • Losing a license after drunk driving decreases the behavior

Social Learning Theory

• (Bandura, 1977) states that people learn through observing others, forming ideas about new behaviors, and using this information to guide actions.

Social Learning requirements

• Attention is required, people must be focused to learn
• Retention is required, information must be stored
• Motor reproduction is required, behaviors must be reproduced
• Motivation is required, they must be motivated to repeat the behavior

Mere Exposure Effect

• Mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon
  • people prefer familiar things
  • repeated exposure increases familiarity.