Chapter 17.1 Persuasion An Overview

Learning Objectives

• Define and explain persuasion.

• Explain the following three theories of persuasion:

  • Social judgment theory

  • Cognitive dissonance theory

  • Elaboration likelihood model

Importance of Studying Persuasion (Richard Perloff)

• Exponential growth in the number of persuasive communications.

• Increased speed at which persuasive messages travel.

• Persuasion has become institutionalized.

• Persuasive communication has become more subtle and devious.

• Persuasive communication is more complex than ever.

How Technology Has Changed Persuasion

• Persuasion has changed over the last 50 years due to advancements in technology.

• Public speakers must compete with various technologies to gain and maintain audience attention.

• Scholars have identified persuasive strategies to help speakers be more effective.

Definition of Persuasion

• An attempt to get a person to behave in a manner or embrace a point of view related to values, attitudes, and beliefs that he or she would not have done otherwise.

Types of Persuasive Public Speaking

• Changing attitudes, values, and beliefs

• Changing behavior

Attitudes

• An individual's general predisposition toward something as good or bad, right or wrong, or negative or positive.

  • Example: Persuading others to adopt a negative attitude towards local curfew laws for people under 21.

Values

• An individual's perception of the usefulness, importance, or worth of something.

  • Examples: College education, technology, freedom.

• Values motivate behavior.

  • Example: Valuing technology leads to seeking out new technology.

Beliefs

• Propositions or positions that an individual holds as true or false without positive knowledge or proof.

Core Beliefs

• Beliefs that people have actively engaged in and created over the course of their lives.

  • Examples: Belief in a higher power, belief in extraterrestrial life forms.

Dispositional Beliefs

• Beliefs that people have not actively engaged in, but rather judgments that they make based on their knowledge of related subjects when they encounter a proposition.

  • Example: Judging whether stock cars can reach 1,000 mph on a 1-mile track.

  • Also referred to as "virtual beliefs."

• Persuading audiences to change dispositional beliefs is easier than changing core beliefs.

Changing Behavior

• Persuasive speech that attempts to persuade an audience to change their behavior.

  • Examples: Encouraging audiences to vote for a candidate, sign a petition, or drink tap water instead of bottled water.

Why Persuasion Matters (Frymeier & Nadler)

• Understanding persuasion makes you more successful at persuading others.

• Understanding persuasion makes you a better consumer of information, allowing you to analyze messages and avoid half-truths and illogical arguments.

• Understanding persuasion helps you grasp what happens around you in the world, enabling you to analyze why certain speakers are effective and others are not.

• It is an ethical imperative to be persuasively literate to combat unethical messages that manipulate, coerce, or distort information.

Theories of Persuasion

• Social judgment theory

• Cognitive dissonance theory

• Elaboration likelihood model

Social Judgment Theory (Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland)

• Determines the types of communicative messages and conditions under which messages will lead to a change in someone's behavior.

• People's perceptions of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors exist on a continuum, including:

  • Latitude of rejection

  • Latitude of noncommitment

  • Latitude of acceptance

• Persuasive messages are most likely to succeed when they fall into an individual's latitude of acceptance.

• Persuasion is a matter of knowing how great the discrepancy is between the speaker's viewpoint and that of the audience.

  • If the speaker's point of view is similar to that of audience members, then persuasion is more likely.

  • If the discrepancy is too great, the likelihood of persuasion decreases dramatically.

• There is a threshold where attitude change isn't possible, and people slip from the latitude of acceptance into the latitude of noncommitment or rejection.

• It's essential to know which options you can realistically persuade your audience to and which options will never happen.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Leon Festinger, 1957)

• Cognitive dissonance is an aversive motivational state that occurs when an individual entertains two or more contradictory attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors simultaneously.

  • Example: Knowing you should be working on your speech but wanting to go to a movie.

• The goal of persuasion is to induce enough dissonance in listeners that they will change their attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors.

• Necessary conditions for cognitive dissonance to work effectively:

  • Aversive consequences

  • Freedom of choice

  • Insufficient external justification

• Aversive Consequences: There needs to be a strong enough punishment for not changing one's attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors.

  • Example: convincing audince that without enough fiber in their diets, they are at higher risk for heart disease or colon cancer, they might fear the aversive consequences enough to change their behavior.

• Freedom of Choice: People must have a freedom of choice; if they feel coerced, dissonance will not be aroused. (e.g., driving slowly only when a police officer is nearby).

• External vs. Internal Justification:

  • External justification: Identifying reasons outside of one's own control to support one's behavior, beliefs, and attitudes.

  • Internal justification: Voluntarily changing a behavior, belief, or attitude to reduce cognitive dissonance.

  • Internal justifications are more likely to result in change than external justifications.

  • Example: Persuading college students to use condoms, providing internal justification (aligning with their self-image as responsible adults) is more effective than external justification (avoiding negative consequences).

Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)

• Continuum from high elaboration (thought) to low elaboration (thought).
  Elaboration refers to the amount of thought or cognitive energy someone uses for analyzing the content of a message.

• Central Route (High Elaboration):

  • Analyzing the content of a message.

  • Using cognitive energy to examine the arguments.

• Peripheral Route (Low Elaboration):

  • Attending to messages but not analyzing the message or using cognitive energy to ascertain the arguments.

• Factors Determining Route Selection:

  • Ability: Audience members must be able to process the persuasive message.

  • Motivation: Audience member's choice to elaborate on the message.

• Factors Leading to High Elaboration (Frymeier & Nadler):

  • Personal relevance and personal involvement: audience member directly affected by the speech topic

  • Accountability: Perception that someone will be watching to see if the receiver remembers the information later on.

  • Personal responsibility: Feeling responsible without external accounting for the evaluation of a message.

  • Incongruent information: Information that does not adhere to one's own ideas.

  • Need for cognition: Personality trait characterized by an internal drive or need to engage in critical thinking and information processing.

Key Takeaways

• Persuasion is using messages to influence behavior or beliefs.

• Studying persuasion is important for personal effectiveness, media literacy, and understanding the world.

• Social judgment theory emphasizes understanding audience's latitudes of acceptance, noncommitment, and rejection.

• Cognitive dissonance theory focuses on resolving conflicting ideas.

• Elaboration likelihood model suggests encouraging audiences to centrally process arguments.