Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Psychological Processing

To the extent that public relations efforts attempt to influence the behavior of target audiences, practitioners must understand the psychological processes that underlie people's responses to messages on a given topic.

Psychologists generally differentiate between three aspects of the human mind that can influence learning and behavioral decision making: the cognitive, the affective, and the conative. Simply stated, cognitions deal with what people know—the information and thoughts stored in memory. Affect relates to people's physiological responses, including level of arousal, feelings, and emotions. Conation deals with both the unconscious (automatic) and conscious (reasoned and deliberative) inclination to take action. Behavioral decisions made in response to public relations efforts typically involve some combination of these three processes.

The Role of Cognition

The acquisition of new knowledge can be examined from three principal perspectives. Classical conditioning suggests that people learn by making associations between objects, illustrated by Pavlov's early psychological studies in which he taught a dog to associate the ringing of a bell with being fed. Operant or instrumental conditioning focuses on altering people's knowledge or behavior by giving them rewards. Social learning theory stresses that people learn by observing others, accepting the behaviors of others as norms, and then modeling personal behavior after others.

Cognitive learning usually begins by exposure to a message. Perception of a message uses the human senses to collection new information and is followed by comprehension, which involves making sense of a message. Understanding involves reconciling new information with a person's extant knowledge stored in memory. Importantly, remembering information involves more than the simple passing through of a message into the brain. Instead, people analyze the information, focus on key parts, amplify on those parts, and make “mental notes” about information in a process known as elaboration.

Schemas

Cognition refers to the mental mechanisms that lead individuals to perceive, think about, and elaborate on public relations messages and appeals. Although practitioners tend to assume that members of target audiences will respond in similar ways to communications, this is not necessarily the case. Rather, individuals are constantly building unique frameworks of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations based on their personal history, current circumstances, future plans, and interactions with others. These cognitive structures—representing the attributes and relationships among people, objects, and events—are known as schemas.

Schemas are believed to improve the efficiency of cognitive processing by allowing people to process information quickly. They also provide predictability about people and events by creating expectations about topics in people's minds. Schemas influence the types of messages that people notice (attention schemas), how they process information contained in the messages (encoding schemas), as well as how they retrieve information from memory (retrieval schemas). Other types of schemas include event or script schemas, which govern the sequence of events that people expect in particular settings, and role schemas, which govern the way people expect others to act in particular roles.

Stereotypes are one type of schema. Stereotypes, or person schemas, are based on the physical appearance and behavioral characteristics of other groups of people. According to social learning theory, people form stereotypes based on what they learn from parents, peer groups, and mass media. From these and other sources, people learn to separate others into different social categories based on age, gender, race, and other characteristics. Stereotypes can lead people to habitually look for a particular desirable or undesirable trait in another group. Although stereotypes can contribute to the efficient processing of public relations messages, they can thus produce biased judgments and behavior.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution