ch. 13.16 & 13.17- Peripheral Route + Cognitive Dissonance

Authority vs Liking

1. Use of experts can increase persuasion - hard to resist authority presence, ex: commercial with doctors to sell toothpaste

2. More likely to believe people we like - attraction and charismatic can make you more convincing, Halo Effect: when we have positive impression on someone we are more willing to attribute positive qualities to them

Social Validation

conformity of other group members facilitates persuasion - other people being convinced makes us feel more likely to feel convinced, gives impression lots of people are agreeing

Reciprocity

we often feel a sense of obligation to others if they have done us a favour or made a concession

Door-in-face technique: start out with outrageous offer u know the person will turn down, follow up with a seemingly reasonable offer (anchoring effect)

Enhancing Peripheral Route

We strive to maintain internal consistency in our beliefs and between our beliefs & behaviour

Foot-in-door technique: following up a smaller request you know someone will accept with an even bigger one such that the subject complies on the grounds of the bond creates

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

When we hold inconsistent beliefs, this creates aversive inner tension (dissonance) that we are motivated to reduce

• Leon Festinger: purposefully boring experiment, participants paid either $20 or $1 to like about how fun an experiment was - people payed more thought it was boring, people paid less found it more interesting

Justification of Effort

We are constantly, often unconsciously, trying to find internal justifications for our actions and beliefs

Hazing, ostracism, and feelings of in group membership - stronger affinity towards group, cognitive dissonance “if people are willing to do this it must be an awesome group”

Multicultural pt. 2

Fervent belief in a fair and multicultural Canada

Seeing acts of racism, police brutality against minorities

“not a problem with our system it’s just a few bad people” gets in the way of making progressive changes in Canada