persuasion

persuasion, the process by which a person’s attitudes or behaviour are, without duress, influenced by communications from other people. One’s attitudes and behaviour are also affected by other factors (for example, verbal threats, physical coercion, one’s physiological states). Not all communication is intended to be persuasive; other purposes include informing or entertaining. Persuasion often involves manipulating people, and for this reason many find the exercise distasteful. Others might argue that, without some degree of social control and mutual accommodation such as that obtained through persuasion, the human community becomes disordered. In this way, persuasion gains moral acceptability when the alternatives are considered. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s evaluation of democracy as a form of government, persuasion is the worst method of social control—except for all the others.

In the universities of Europe during the Middle Ages, persuasion (rhetoric) was one of the basic liberal arts to be mastered by any educated man; from the days of imperial Rome through the Reformation, it was raised to a fine art by preachers who used the spoken word to inspire any number of actions, such as virtuous behaviour or religious pilgrimages. In the modern era, persuasion is most visible in the form of advertising.

The process of persuasion can be analyzed in a preliminary way by distinguishing communication (as the cause or stimulus) from the associated changes in attitudes (as the effect or response).

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Analysis has led to the delineation of a series of successive steps that a person undergoes in being persuaded. The communication first is presented; the person pays attention to it and comprehends its contents (including the basic conclusion being urged and perhaps also the evidence offered in its support). For persuasion to be effected, the individual must yield to, or agree with, the point being urged and, unless only the most immediate impact is of interest, must retain this new position long enough to act on it. The ultimate goal of the persuasive process is for individuals (or a group) to carry out the behaviour implied by the new attitudinal position; for example, a person enlists in the army or becomes a Buddhist monk or begins to eat a certain brand of cereal for breakfast.

Some, but by no means all, theorists emphasize similarities between education and persuasion. They hold that persuasion closely resembles the teaching of new information through informative communication. Thus, since repetition in communication modifies learning, they infer that it has persuasive impact as well and that principles of verbal learning and conditioning are widely and profitably applied by persuaders (as, for example, in the judicious repetition of television advertisements). The learning approach tends to emphasize attention, comprehension, and retention of the message.

One’s reaction to persuasive communication depends in part on the message and to a considerable extent on the way in which one perceives or interprets it. Words in a newspaper advertisement may exhibit different persuasive qualities if they are printed in red instead of in black. Perceptual theorists regard persuasion as altering the person’s perception of any object of his attitudes. Perceptual approaches also rest on evidence that the receiver’s preconceptions are at least as important as the message content in determining what will be understood. The approach stresses attention and comprehension.

While learning and perceptual theorists may stress objective intellectual steps involved in the process of being persuaded, functional theorists emphasize more subjective motivational aspects. According to this view, humans are essentially ego-defensive—that is, human activities and beliefs function to satisfy conscious and unconscious personal needs that may have little to do with the objects toward which those attitudes and actions are directed. The functional approach would theorize, for example, that ethnic prejudice and other forms of social hostility derive more from individual personality structure than from information about the nature of the social groups.

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Other theories view the person confronted with persuasive communication as being in the vexing role of finding some reasonable compromise among many conflicting forces—e.g., individual desires, existing attitudes, new information, and the social pressures originating from sources outside the individual. Those who stress this conflict-resolution model (frequently called congruity, balance, consistency, or dissonance theorists) focus on how people weigh these forces in adjusting their attitudes. Some theorists who take this point of departure stress the intellectual aspects of persuasion, while others emphasize emotional considerations.

An extension of the conflict-resolution model is the elaboration-likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion, put forth in 1980 by American psychologists John Cacioppo and Richard Petty. The ELM emphasizes the cognitive processing with which people react to persuasive communications. According to this model, if people react to a persuasive communication by reflecting on the content of the message and its supporting arguments, the subsequent attitude change is likely to be more firmly established and more resistant to counterpersuasion. On the other hand, if people react to a persuasive communication with relatively little such reflection, the subsequent attitude change is likely to be ephemeral.

Each of the approaches considered above tends to neglect one or more steps in the process of being persuaded and thus serves to supplement rather than supplant the others. A more eclectic and inclusive approach, growing out of information-processing theory, is oriented toward a consideration of all the options implied by the communication aspects of source, message, channel (or medium), receiver, and destination (behaviour to be influenced); each option is appraised for its persuasive efficacy in terms of presentation, attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, and overt behaviour.