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- Attitudes are dispositions to evaluate objects in a
negative or positive light. Attitudes include three
different elements: affective evaluations (emotions),
cognitions (thoughts and knowledge), and actions
(behaviors).
- Attitudes can be measured with self-report Likert
scales, with response latencies that capture attitude
accessibility (the degree to which the attitude is ready
to become active in an individual's mind), and with
attitude linkage measures that gauge attitude centrality
(the extent to which an attitude is correlated to
attitudes about other issues).
- Attitudes serve several functions. They serve a utilitarian
function, signaling rewards and punishments.
They serve an ego-defensive function, protecting people
from undesirable beliefs about themselves—for
example, the recognition that their lives will
inevitably end. They serve a value-expressive function,
reflecting values that people want others, especially
their reference groups, to acknowledge. And attitudes
serve a knowledge function, organizing how people
construe the social world and guiding how people
attend to, store, and retrieve information.
- Both the heuristic-systematic model of persuasion and
the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion
hypothesize that there are two routes to persuasion.
Factors that determine which route is used include
motivation, or how important the message is to the
person, and ability to process the message.
- When using the central (systematic) route to persuasion,
people attend carefully to the message, and
they consider relevant evidence and underlying logic
in detail. People are especially likely to go through
this route when the message is relevant to them,
when they have knowledge in the domain, and
when the message evokes a sense of personal responsibility.
When going through the central route, people
are more persuaded by high-quality messages.
- In the peripheral (heuristic) route to persuasion, people
attend to superficial aspects of the message. They
use this route when they have little motivation or
time or ability to attend to its deeper meaning. In
this route, people are persuaded by source characteristics
(such as attractiveness and credibility of the
communicator) and message characteristics (such as
how many arguments there are and whether the
conclusions are explicit).
- The elements of the persuasive process can be broken
into three components: the source of the message,
the content of the message, and the target of
the message.
- A noncredible source is unlikely to induce immediate
attitude change, but with time, the sleeper effect
may occur. This is when attitude change occurs after
time has passed and the message has become dissociated
from its source.
- Vivid communications, including images of identifiable
victims, are usually more effective than more
pallid ones, and fear-evoking communications that
provide fear-reducing courses of action produce
more attitude change than either non-fear-evoking
communications or fear-evoking communications
that do not provide fear-reducing courses of action.
- Message content often varies in independent and
interdependent societies, with ads in independent
cultures emphasizing the individual and ads in
interdependent societies emphasizing the collective.
- The target, or audience, of a message also affects
whether a particular message is effective and
whether attitude change occurs. Audience, or receiver
characteristics, include the need for cognition (that
is, how deeply people like to think about issues),
mood, and age.
- According to the third-person effect, most people
believe that other people are more likely to be influenced
by the media than they are. But in fact the
media have surprisingly weak effects on most people.
This is true in the case of consumer advertising
(which rarely leads to long-lived effects), political
advertising (which has small effects on most voters
and mainly affects late-deciding voters), and public
service announcements (which are unlikely to have
a lasting impact on behavior unless they are also
accompanied by specific suggestions and practice in
avoiding negative behaviors).
- The media are most effective in agenda control—that
is, in shaping what people think about. They do so
through the number of stories and discussions they
present on various issues, like terrorism, moral values,
war, the environment, or the economy, and
which therefore are likely to be present in people's
minds.
- People can be quite resistant to persuasion because
of preexisting biases, commitments, and knowledge.
People selectively attend to and evaluate information
in accordance with their original attitudes, tuning
in information that supports their preexisting
attitudes and beliefs, and tuning out information
that contradicts them.
- Public commitment to a position helps people to
resist persuasion. Just thinking about an attitude
object can produce thought polarization, or movement
toward extreme views that can be hard for a
communicator to alter.
- People with more knowledge are more resistant to
persuasion because they are able to counterargue
against messages that take an opposite position to
what they know and believe.
- Resistance to persuasion can be encouraged through
attitude inoculation, or exposing a person to weak
arguments against a person's position and allowing
the person to generate arguments against it.
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