In-depth and complete summary of all contents for the course of Persuasive Communication at the University of Amsterdam; including summaries of the book, lectures and additional readings.
Chapter 1: Influence – Definition, History, and a Model
A brief history of influence research
Persuasion from a scholarly perspective
● Aristotle: power to persuade determined by source, recipient, and content
o Inspired Laswell’s model
Attitudes
● Laswell’s model
o “Who says what in which channel to whom, with what effect?”
● Attitude
o A positive or negative evaluative response to a person, situation, product, idea, or
organization
● Hovland’s research on message, source, and recipients
o Found factors like reliability and expertise of source help determine how a message
effects recipient
o Found the direct impact of a message often differs from its indirect effect
o Four-step process model of persuasion
▪ Attention 🡪 understanding 🡪 acceptance 🡪 retention
▪ Content/source/attitude also have an impact
● Yale model of persuasion
o Only asserts that motivated people will take in information, not how or what effects the
outcome
● McGuire’s inoculation theory
o Presentation, attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, behavior
o Steps are more dynamically related and can influence each other
● Greenwald’s cognitive response theory
o The way information is processed affects attitudes
,Advertising and influence
● AIDA model
o Four steps run in parallel and can be skipped
Influence and ethics
Two extreme standpoints on influencing people
1. Plato’s rejection of sophists’ rhetoric
2. People are free to do whatever with the information they get and any influence is permissible
Subconscious influence
● People can be influenced without realizing it
● Subliminal advertising seen as unethical
Duality of influence techniques
● Good or evil, responsible or irresponsible
● Ethical code could ensure ‘persuaders’ operate ethically
,McGuire: Theoretical Foundations of Campaigns
Directive theories of the persuasion process: communication/persuasion matrix
The input (communication) variables
● Independent variables and persuasive message options that can be manipulated
● Source factors
o Characteristics of the perceived communicator who gives the message
o Source issue: how persuasive impact is affected by whether the audience is aware of the
source’s intent
● Message factors
o Delivery style, types of appeals, inclusions/omissions, organization of the material,
length, repetition, etc.
● Channel factors
o Media through which persuasive messages are transmitted
o Audio/visual, written/spoken, context, mediated/immediate, verbal/nonverbal, etc.
● Receiver factors
o Campaigns should be designed with regard for audience characteristics
▪ Capacity, demographic, and psychographic variables
● Destination factors
o The type of target behavior the communication is aimed at
o Immediate/long-term change, change on an issue/a system, change in an existing
belief/resistance against attacks
Output factors
● For communication to be effective:
o Exposure, attendance, liking, learning what and how, agreeing, storing and retrieving,
deciding on the basis of it, behaving on the basis of that decision, getting reinforced, and
engaging in post-compliant activity
Using the matrix model to avoid communication errors
● Attenuated-beliefs fallacy
o The probability that the communication will evoke all of the output steps is conditional
upon each of the preceding steps
o Guard against exaggerated expectation for the size of the persuasive impact
● Distant-measure fallacy
o The campaign is evaluated in terms of a response step too early in the chain (payoff is
not until step 10)
● Neglected-mediator fallacy
o Selecting inputs based on evoking just one or two output steps out of twelve
● Compensatory principle
o Recipients with a higher level of education are less likely to yield to persuasion
● Golden mean principle
, o Input variables should be applied at an intermediate level
● Situational-weighting principle
o Analyze the situation of the amount of variance in persuasion reduced or enhanced by
each step, in order to determine the optimal level to set the input variable
Variants and alternatives to the communication/persuasion matrix
● Alternative-routes variants of the input/output model
o Audiences take shortcuts to shorten the list of steps
o Selective exposure
o Perceptual distortion
▪ What the audience believes determines what the perceive the message to be
● Persuasion from within
o Persuasion involved activating information already held, increasing the salience of
information already accepted
● Attitude chance as the consequence of behavioral change
o To change people’s attitudes, you shouldn’t present new information, but compel the
public’s behavioral change, then attitudes will be adjusted to fit
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