mass-communication-theory

152 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field
Examining the communicator, Hovland and his group studied the power of
source credibility, which they divided into trustworthiness and expertness. As you
might expect, they found that high-credibility communicators produced increased
amounts of attitude change; low-credibility communicators produced less attitude
change.
Looking at the content of the communication, Hovland and his group examined
two general aspects of content: the nature of the appeal itself and its organization.
Focusing specifically on fear-arousing appeals, the Yale group tested the
logical assumption that stronger, fear-arousing presentations will lead to greater
attitude change. This relationship was found to be true to some extent, but variables
such as the vividness of the threat’s description and the audience’s state of alarm,
evaluation of the communicator, and already-held knowledge about the subject
either mitigated or heightened attitude change.
The Hovland group’s look at the organization of the arguments was a bit more
straightforward. Should a communicator explicitly state an argument’s conclusions
or leave them implicit? In general, the explicit statement of the argument’s conclusion
is more effective, but not invariably. The trustworthiness of the communicator,
the intelligence level of the audience, the nature of the issue at hand and its
importance to the audience, and the initial level of agreement between audience
and communicator all altered the persuasive power of a message.
Regardless of how well a persuasive message is crafted, not all people are influenced
by it to the same degree, so the Yale group assessed how audience attributes
could mediate effects. Inquiry centered on the personal importance of the audience’s
group memberships and individual personality differences among people
that might increase or reduce their susceptibility to persuasion.
Testing the power of what they called “counternorm communications,”
Hovland and his cohorts demonstrated that the more highly people value their membership
in a group, the more closely their attitudes will conform to those of the
group and, therefore, the more resistant they will be to changes in those attitudes.
If you attend a Big Ten university and closely follow your school’s sports teams, it
isn’t very likely that anyone will be able to persuade you that the Atlantic Coast
Conference fields superior athletes. If you attend that same Big Ten university but
care little about its sports programs, you might be a more likely target for opinion
change, particularly if your team loses to an Atlantic Coast Conference team in a
dramatic fashion.
The question of individual differences in susceptibility to persuasion is not
about a person’s willingness to be persuaded on a given issue. In persuasion
research, individual differences refers to those personality attributes or factors that
render someone generally susceptible to influence. Intelligence is a good example.
It is easy to assume that those who are more intelligent would be less susceptible
to persuasive arguments, but this isn’t the case. These people are more likely to
be persuaded if the message they receive is from a credible source and based on
solid logical arguments. Self-esteem, aggressiveness, and social withdrawal were
several of the other individual characteristics the Yale group tested. But, as with
intelligence, each failed to produce the straightforward, unambiguous relationship
that might have seemed warranted based on commonsense expectations. Why?
None of a person’s personality characteristics operates apart from his or her
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