Attitudes and Persuasion

Attitude: Feelings, often influenced by our beliefs, that predispose us to respond in a particular way to objects, people, and events.
Attitudes-follow-behavior principle: Cooperative actions feed mutual liking, which in turn promotes positive behavior.

Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon (FITD): The tendency for people who have first agreed to a small request to comply later with a larger request.

Role: A set of expectations about a social position, defining how those in the position ought to behave.
Role-playing: Step-by-step role-playing has been used to train torturers.
Philip Zimbardo's Prison Experiment: Showed how we deindividuate and become the role. However, people differ in their responses; the person and situation interact.

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Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Leon Festinger): We act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognitions) are inconsistent.
Reducing Dissonance: When we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes.
Example: Marines in boot camp.

Influencing Feelings: We cannot directly control all our feelings, but we can influence them by altering our behavior.
Changing Behavior: If we are depressed, we can change our attributions and explain events in more positive terms, with more self-acceptance and fewer self-put-downs.
Acting "As If": If we are unloving, we can become more loving by behaving as if we were—by doing thoughtful things, expressing affection, giving affirmation. Act as if you like someone, and you soon may; pretense can become reality.

Influence: People may try to influence our actions by using persuasion to change our attitudes.
Example: Encouraging mask-wearing and vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Persuasion: Changing people’s attitudes, potentially influencing their actions.
Peripheral Route Persuasion: Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker’s attractiveness.
Central Route Persuasion: Occurs when interested people’s thinking is influenced by considering evidence and arguments.

Write down an attitude or a tendency you would like to change.
Use the attitudes-follow-behavior principle to help your partner change the attitude.

Do Not:
- Loudly argue your position before listening; yelling backfires.
- Humiliate people or imply that they are ignorant; insults breed defensiveness.
- Bore people with complex and forgettable information.
Do:
- Identify shared values or goals.
- Appeal to others' admirable motives. For example: "Political conservatives would like us to recover the good old days, when people owned hunting rifles and pistols, but not assault rifles" can be reframed as "Political conservatives would prefer to make a change, so that in the future people may own hunting rifles and pistols, but no one will have assault rifles."
- Make your message vivid; people remember dramatic visual examples well.
- Repeat your message; people often come to believe repeated falsehoods, but they also tend to believe oft-repeated truths.
- Consider alternatives.
- Engage your audience in restating your message or acting on it; engage them in actively owning it, not just passively listening.

Political conservatives: Tend to respond to nostalgia. Those promoting gun safety legislation to this group should frame their message as an affirmation of yesteryear.
Political liberals: Respond better to future-focused messages.

When trying to persuade someone, which strategies should you avoid?
Using scientifically derived evidence, explain how you can appeal to other’s admirable motives.
Explain the reasoning behind the assertion that repeating a message is persuasive.