Learning Theory

Learning theory is based on the principle that people learn attitudes through direct experiences and messages that are relevant to life's challenges and that they use arguments and reasons presented in messages to develop the opinions that guide their behavior. Learning theory provided the rationale for one of the largest and most important research projects ever conducted to explore the nature of persuasion in social influence. During the 1950s, massive funding was allocated to Yale University researchers to better understand the intricacies of persuasion. Because of its popularity, learning theory was adopted as the centerpiece of the project. This project spawned two decades of researchers and thousands of major studies and laid the foundation for many modern theories of persuasion.

A major contribution of learning theory is that it can account for human behavior, decision making, and influence without relying on drive theory. During the middle years of the 20th century, drive theory posited that human behavior results from genetic drives rather than being learned and subject to voluntary choice. Learning theory maintained that what people learn, especially their attitudes, leads them to be able to make choices between rewarding and negative outcomes and consequences. This theoretical approach provided insights for subjective utilities theory and also contradicted many claims from propaganda theory about how people could be easily persuaded, even by unethical means.

Central to this learning is sorting between outcomes that are rewarding and those that are punishing. How people react to messages is important, according to this theory. Messages can hold content that points to positive or negative outcomes. For instance, one does not need to look at much television advertising to realize that those messages often show customers how much better their life will be if they use the sponsor's product or service. “Use my product and anticipate X” is a common persuasive incentive. Evaluation, however, can work against the persuader's message. People can think about whether the product, for instance, really will bring those benefits.

Messages must capture people's attention and be understandable as prerequisites for influencing judgment. Attention, comprehension, and anticipation are learning factors, whereas evaluation is an acceptance factor. Evaluation was an important element in the Yale research project because it kept people [Page 481]from being mindless puppets dancing to the persuader's tune. Refining this line of analysis, researchers in the project recognized that two factors were essential to persuasion: reception, or noting and thinking about a message, and yielding, or allowing it to influence one's attitudes.

Learning theory was being applied to persuasion research at a time when other researchers were exploring a variety of communication models. Inspired by these models, persuasion researchers theorized that several elements could account for persuasive influence. Researchers explored how persuasion could occur because of source, message, channel, and receiver variables.

Interest in source as a factor in the Yale study sparked two decades of analysis that renewed classical rhetorical theory's interest in ethos or the credibility of the source of a message. Researchers knew that some people were more influential, more persuasive, than others. Factors related to the source's credibility might account for this difference in influence.

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