Introduction to Persuasion
UNDERSTANDING PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION EFFECTS
Up to this point, the discussion has focused on differences between persuasion and related terms. However, persuasion is not of one piece; there are different kinds of persuasive communications, and they have different types of effects. Some messages dramatically influence attitudes; others exert smaller or more subtle impacts. Taking note of this, Miller (1980) proposed that communications exert three different persuasive effects: shaping, reinforcing, and changing responses.
Shaping. Today everyone has heard of the Nike “swoosh.” You’ve seen it on hundreds of ads and on the clothing of celebrity athletes. It’s a symbol that resonates and has helped make Nike a leader in the athletic shoe business. The now-classic ad campaigns featuring Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson helped mold attitudes toward Nike by linking Nike with movement, speed, and superhuman athletic achievement.
A nastier example is cigarette marketing. Tobacco companies spend millions to shape people’s attitudes toward cigarettes, hoping they can entice young people to take a pleasurable, but deadly, puff. Marketers shape attitudes by associating cigarettes with
beautiful women and virile men. They appeal to teenage girls searching for a way to rebel against boyfriends or parents by suggesting that smoking can make them appear defiant and strong willed. (“I always take the driver’s seat. That way I’m never taken for a ride,” said one Virginia Slims ad.)
On a more positive level, socialization can be regarded as an example of attitude shaping or formation. Influential social agents model a variety of pro-social values and attitudes, such as self-discipline, altruism, and religion.
Reinforcing. Contrary to popular opinion, many persuasive communications are not designed to convert people, but rather to reinforce a position they already hold. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, people have strong attitudes toward a variety of topics, and these attitudes are hard to change. Thus, persuaders try to join ‘em, not beat ‘em. In political campaigns, candidates try to bolster party supporters’ commitment to their cause. Democratic standard-bearers have made late-campaign appeals to African American voters, the overwhelming majority of whom are registered Democrats. Republican candidates have won elections by appealing to religious conservatives. Increasingly, political consultants argue that elections are not solely about winning over undecided voters, but, rather, concentrate on appeals to the base.
In a similar fashion, health education experts try to reinforce individuals’ decisions to quit smoking or to abstain from drinking in excess. Persuaders recognize that people can easily relapse under stress, and they design messages to help individuals maintain their commitment to giving up unhealthy substances. Thus, persuasion involves bolstering, reinforcing, and strengthening attitudes. While these are not the mass transformations somewhat simplistically associated with persuasion, they count because they involve the individual’s alteration of an attitude or decision to commit to a behavior based on attitude reinforcement. If you are a marketing consultant, attitude strength- ening can translate to increased purchase of a product, a palpable instance of persuasion. Changing. This is perhaps the most important persuasive impact and the one that comes most frequently to mind when we think of persuasion. Communications can markedly change attitudes. Just think how far this country has come in the past 50 years on the subject of race. In the 1950s and 1960s, Blacks were lynched for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, many southerners openly opposed school desegregation, and northern Whites steered clear of socializing with Black friends or colleagues. This changed as civil rights campaigns, heart-rending media stories, and increased dialogue between Blacks and Whites led Whites to rethink their prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). In 1958, interracial marriage was favored by 4 percent of Americans. More than half a century later, the proportion
in support of marriage between men and women of a different race increased more than 20-fold, to 87 percent (Leonhardt & Parlapiano, 2015).
Negative attitudes toward gay marriage have changed dramatically. In American cities where gay couples would have been flogged or killed decades ago, prejudice has given way to tolerance. Consider Jacksonville, Florida. A gay church was bombed there in the 1980s. Nowadays, eight churches accept gay parishioners and one seeks out couples who have children. The city has one of the largest populations of gay parents in the United States. A pastor who leads a program geared to children of gay parents likens the city’s transformation to the metamorphosis of attitudes on civil rights. “Slowly but surely, all this will pass,” she said. “I truly believe that” (Tavernise, 2011, p. A15). And indeed it has.
Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans support gay marriage, a sea change in attitudes that achieved legal significance when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. On other topics too, spanning the environment to fatty fast food to exercise, Americans and people worldwide have changed their attitudes. Persuasive communications have had strong, desirable effects on these issues. They have influenced attitudes and behavior.
Important as these effects are, they rarely occur overnight. Persuasion is a process; change can be slow and painstaking. A bigot does not become more open-minded after one persuasive encounter. It takes many years of exposure to people of color, rethinking of prejudices, and self-insight. Persuasion is a process. It happens over time, step by step, with each step counting as an instance of self-persuasion.
CONCLUSIONS
Persuasion is a ubiquitous part of contemporary life. If you search the term on the Web, you may find hundreds of topics, including “brainwashing controversies,” “marketing,” “how to get people to like you,” or “15 secrets of really persuasive people.” The Internet is a persuader’s paradise, with Web sites promoting millions of products and services. Social media are filled with opinionated message exchanges among strangers spanning the globe. However, persuasion has more personal components. We can all think of times when we yielded to a parent’s heartfelt influence attempt, tried to persuade friends to go along with us, or scratched our heads to figure out ways we could have done a better job of getting a colleague to accept our plan.
Persuasion is an ancient art. It dates back to the Bible and ancient Greece. Yet there are important aspects of contemporary persuasion that are unique to this era, notably the
volume, speed, institutionalization, subtlety, complexity, digitization, and remixing of modern messages. Social media have transformed some of the contours of persuasion, elevating terse text messages, fraught with cultural meanings, compressing distances between persuader and persuadee, highlighting the versatility of persuasion, where individuals are simultaneously message sender and message receiver on different social networking sites, and expanding choices almost endlessly, while paradoxically amplifying exposure to like-minded others that reinforce preexisting worldviews. Yet social media messages intended to change attitudes must be understood through the time-honored processes of persuasion.
Persuasion is defined as a symbolic process in which communicators try to convince other people to change their own attitudes or behavior regarding an issue through the transmission of a message, in an atmosphere of free choice. A key aspect of persuasion is self-persuasion. Communicators do not change people’s minds; people decide to alter their own attitudes or to resist persuasion. There is something liberating about self- persuasion. It says that we are free to change our lives in any way that we wish. We have the power to become what we want to become—to stop smoking, lose weight, modify dysfunctional behavior patterns, change career paths, or discover how to become a dynamic public speaker. Obviously, we can’t do everything: There are limits set by both our cognitive skills and society. But in saying that people ultimately persuade themselves, I suggest that we are partly responsible if we let ourselves get conned by dishonest persuaders. I argue that people are capable of throwing off the shackles of dangerous messages and finding positive ways to live their lives.
Of course, this is not always easy. The tools of self-persuasion can be harnessed by both beneficent and malevolent communicators. Persuaders can be honest and truthful, appealing to the best angels in the message recipient. Or they can be dishonest and manipulative, trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Trying to see the best in a persuader or hoping that a persuader’s ministrations will bring them wealth, love, or happiness, people can coax themselves into accepting messages advanced by unsavory communicators. When this occurs, persuaders are ethically responsible for the choices they make.
Social influence is a powerful phenomenon. It can be viewed as a continuum, with coercion lying on one end and persuasion on the other. There are not always black-and- white differences between persuasion and coercion. They can overlap, as in situations involving authority, religious cults, and prisoner torture. Still, with clear definitions we can disentangle coercion and persuasion. Coercion occurs when the influence agent delivers a believable threat of some consequence, deprives the individual of some measure of freedom or autonomy, and attempts to induce the individual to act contrary to his or her preferences. Persuasion occurs in an atmosphere of free choice, where the
individual is autonomous, capable of saying no, and able to change his or her mind about the issue. In such situations, individuals are responsible for their choices and accountable for their decisions.
Even in coercive situations, people “choose” to accept or reject the communicator’s directive. But their choices and freedom are seriously compromised psychologically and philosophically, and they cannot be held entirely accountable for their behavior. Persuasion overlaps with propaganda and manipulation. These terms carry negative connotations and differ in several ways from persuasion. In the main, propaganda occurs when leaders have near or total control over transmission of information, employ deception, and rely on media to target masses of individuals. Manipulation occurs when a persuader disguises his or her intent, hoping to mislead the message recipient with a charming or otherwise disingenuous message.
Persuasion, broadly defined, has a host of effects on individuals, subtly and blatantly influencing beliefs, emotions, and actions. Persuasion helps form, reinforce, and change attitudes. It can humanize, but also belittle. Just as humans are full of complicated emotions—strong and weak, good and bad—so is persuasion an amazing amalgam of communication effects varying in their power and goodness, a central facet of contemporary life.
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