Persuasion

Definition

Persuasion is a method of changing a person's cognitions, feelings, behaviors, or general evaluations (attitudes) toward some object, issue, or person. Although any change technique is sometimes referred to as persuasion regardless of the target of influence, the term more commonly refers to a method of change in which a person is deliberately presented with a message containing information intended to alter some general evaluative judgment (e.g., capital punishment is bad). Self-persuasion can occur when people generate their own messages in favor of or against something. Persuasive communication is readily used by advertisers, salespeople, politicians, ministers, attorneys, and people in everyday situations to produce change in others. In democratic societies, persuasion has replaced coercion as the primary means of influence.

History and Background

The power and prevalence of persuasion have led to a great deal of scientific research investigating the factors that make a persuasive appeal effective. In the 1950s, Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University conducted the first systematic analysis of persuasion in what was known as the Yale Communication Project. The Yale group determined that four elements are present in all persuasion settings: (1) a source who delivers the persuasive message, (2) the message itself, (3) a target person or audience who receives the message (recipient), and (4) some context in which the message is received. Adopting an information-processing approach to persuasion, the researchers proposed that for a persuasive appeal to work, the message recipient must pay attention to, comprehend, learn, accept, and retain the message and its conclusion in memory. People's degree of engagement in these steps was thought to be determined by various characteristics of the source, message, recipient, and persuasive context. For example, a highly complex message might be too difficult to comprehend and therefore, unable to be learned, accepted, or retained.

Later research showed, however, that persuasion often does not depend on the specific arguments in a message that people learn and remember but, rather, on what unique cognitive (mental) reactions they have in response to those arguments. That is, what matters most when people are actively processing the message is not learning what is in the message but what people think about the message. According to this cognitive response approach, persuasion is more likely when the recipient has favorable thoughts toward the message and less likely when the recipient's thoughts about the message are unfavorable. For example, two individuals may both learn the same details of a proposal to increase the interstate speed limit and yet have wildly different thoughts (e.g., “I'll be able to get to work faster” versus “It will make driving more dangerous”).

Current Theories

The learning and cognitive response approaches to persuasion focused on attitude change through active, effortful thinking. However, research has also shown that sometimes people are persuaded to change their attitudes when they are not thinking much about the information in the message. Instead, they base their attitudes on simple associative or heuristic processes that require less cognitive effort. Incorporating these different ideas, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and Shelly Chaiken's heuristic-systematic model (HSM) are two similar theories introduced in the 1980s that propose that both effortful and non-effortful processes can produce attitude change in different situations.

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