Attitude inoculation - Sozialpsychologie

Rolf van Dick
Social Psychology (Winter 2009/10)
Lecture 5: Persuasion and Attitude Change
Social Psychology

Sample MC-Items (last week)
1) According to which model are attitudes described variously as
containing feelings, likes, dislikes, behavioural intentions, thoughts and
ideas?
A) the three component model B) the dual model of attitudes
C) the cognitive consistency model D) the one-component model
2) Dissonance theory and balance theory are both examples of:
A) accidental discoveries in the study of attitudes
B) cognitive consistency theories
C) social identity theory
D) behaviourism in the study of attitudes
Social Psychology

Sample MC-Items (last week)
3) The theory of planned behaviour extended the theory of reasoned
action by:
A) specifying the questions that are asked in order to predict behaviour
B) re-arranging the three components of “beliefs“, “intentions“ and
“action“
C) adding the variable of perceived behavioural control
D) defining “intention“
4) In balance theory, a triad is balanced when there is (are):
A) two positive relationships
B) just one negative relationship
C) an odd number of negative relationships
D) none of the above
Social Psychology

Schedule
1. Introducing Social Psychology 14.10.
2. Attribution and Social Knowledge 21.10.
3. Self and Identity 28.10.
4. Attitudes 04.11.
5. Persuasion and Attitude Change 11.11.
6. Social Influence 18.11.
7. People in Groups 25.11.
8. Prejudice and Discrimination 02.12.
9. Intergroup Behavior 09.12.
10.Leadership and Decision Making 16.12.
11.Aggression 13.01.
12.Affiliation, Attraction, and Love 20.01.
13.Prosocial Behavior 27.01.
14.Revision 03.02.
15.Exam 10.02.
Social Psychology

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Some terms (1/2)
• Persuasion - Überzeugung/Überredung
• neatly – ordentlich
• extraneous – von außen
• to enhance – fördern / steigern
• uptight – angespannt
• distracted – zerstreut
• compliance – Folgsamkeit / Fügsamkeit
• to enhance – erleichtern
• ingratiation – Anbiederung
• to emphasise - betonen
• Elaboration-likelihood model – Modell der Verarbeitungstiefe
• attempt - Versuch
• Inoculation – Impfung

Some terms (2/2)
• trustworthiness – Vertrauenswürdigkeit / Zuverlässigkeit
• Source derogation – Abwertung der Quelle (der Botschaft)
• tedium – Überdruss
• slight – ein wenig
• heuristics – Faustregeln
• superficial – oberflächlich
• to preserve – bewahren / beibehalten
• obvious – offensichtlich
• to induce – herbeiführen / bewegen
• assault – Angriff
• conformity - Angepasstheit
Social Psychology

Focus Questions
• Someone offers you sum of money for your prized racing bike,
which you believe is a fair prize. After they have checked their bank
balance, the would-be purchaser reduces the offer by 15%, saying
that‘s all they can afford. Could such a tactic work?
• You have just joined the army. Along with other cadets you listen to
an amazing talk by an officer skilled in the use of survival techniques
in difficult combat conditions. Among other things, he asks you to
eat some fried grasshoppers. „Try to imagine this is the real thing!
You know, you might have to do this to save your live one day“, he
says. Despite your first reaction, you go ahead and eat them. Would
you end up liking the delicacy more if the officer‘s style of
presentation was warm and friendly or cold and distant?
Social Psychology

Teaching objectives
In General
The various models of the persuasion process; tactics for
enhancing compliance; the theory of cognitive
dissonance and factors which guard against attitude
change.
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Teaching objectives
Specific topics I
Attitudes, arguments and behaviour
• Discrepancies between attitude and behaviour allow attitude change
to occur.
• Two general approaches to attitude change – the first emphasises
the use of persuasive arguments; the second emphasises
behavioural involvement.
Social Psychology

Teaching objectives
Specific topics II
Persuasive communications
• The important links and steps in the persuasion process (e.g.
communicator, message, and audience).
• How persuasion is affected by features of the communicator (e.g.
source credibility), features of the message and the medium (e.g.
repetition, use of feararousal, appeals to affect versus fact, use of
video, audio and written forms) and features of the audience (e.g.
self-esteem, sex).
• Current models of persuasion – Petty and Cacioppo’s elaborationlikelihood
model; Chaiken’s heuristic-systematic processing model.
Social Psychology

Teaching objectives
Specific topics III
Compliance: Interpersonal influence
• Various tactics for enhancing compliance (e.g. ingratiation,
reciprocity, and multiple request techniques such as the foot-in-thedoor,
door-in-the-face and low-ball tactics).
• The concept of action research and its application to attitude change.
Social Psychology

Teaching objectives
Specific topics IV
Attitude behaviour discrepancy and cognitive dissonance
• The nature of the theory of cognitive dissonance and its application
to a variety of situations involving attitude or behaviour change.
• Three research paradigms associated with the theory of cognitive
dissonance – effort justification, induced compliance and free
choice.
• The strengths and weaknesses of cognitive dissonance theory and
to be aware of theoretical alternatives (e.g. self-perception theory).
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Teaching objectives
Specific topics V
When attitude change fails
• Three major reasons why attempts at persuasion fail – reactance,
forewarning and the inoculation effect.
• How knowledge of these factors can be used to reduce the likelihood
of attitude change.
Social Psychology

The persuasion process:
communicator, message, and audience
The field of attitude change is vast and complex.
Hovland headed the Yale approach to
communication and persuasion, which studied
variables dealing with the communicator, the
source of the message, the message itself, and
the context in which persuasion occurs.
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The Yale approach to communication and persuasion
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Based on Janis & Hovland (1959).

The effect of communicator credibility and position
discrepancy on opinion change
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Based on data from Bochner & Insko (1996).

The effects of source modality and message
difficulty on opinion change
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Based on Chaiken & Eagly (1983).

The persuasion process:
communicator, message, and audience
• Several aspects of a communicator affect
whether a person is evaluated favorably.
– Credibility
• Expertise
• Trustworthiness
– Liking
Social Psychology

The persuasion process:
communicator, message, and audience
• We are persuaded by the opinions of our
reference groups, those we like or identify
with.
– This occurs both because of the motivational
factors of liking and perceived similarity, and
because messages from in-groups are more likely
to be processed using the central route (see ELM
later).
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The persuasion process:
communicator, message, and audience
• Source derogation involves deciding the source
is unreliable or negative in some way. It can
make all future as well as current arguments
from that source less powerful.
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The persuasion process:
communicator, message, and audience
• Repetition and familiarity tend to increase
liking, but only up to a point.
• Repetition may help people process strong
arguments more completely but expose the flaws in
weak arguments.
• Repetition may lead to tedium; this can be dealt
with by having ads that provide slight variations on
a theme.
Social Psychology

Dual process models of persuasion
Two important areas of our lives that employ relevant
principles from social psychological research are
advertising and political propaganda.
Two models, each dealing with how a persuasive message
is learned, draw on developments in research on
cognition. Petty and Cacioppo’s elaboration likelihood
model proposes that, when people attend to a message
carefully, they use a central route to process it; otherwise
they use a peripheral route. Chaiken’s heuristic–
systematic model suggests that people use systematic
processing when they attend to a message carefully;
otherwise they use heuristic processing.
Social Psychology

Dual process models of persuasion
Both theories state that under certain
conditions, people are motivated to pay
attention to and think about the facts in a
message; this is referred to as the central
route to persuasion.
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Dual process models of persuasion
Under other conditions, people are not
motivated to pay attention to the facts a
message presents and only attend to
superficial characteristics such as who
delivers it and how long it is. In this case
people may be influenced by the peripheral
route to persuasion.
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The elaboration–likelihood
model of persuasion
Petty & Cacioppo (1986)
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Dual process models of persuasion
Which route to attitude change will people
take? One determinant is the personal
relevance of the topic. The more relevant the
topic, the more people will take the central
route to persuasion. Here, they will be
influenced the most by the strength of the
arguments.
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Dual process models of persuasion

Dual process models of persuasion
The route to attitude change also depends on
people’s ability to pay attention to the
arguments. The more distracted people are,
the more they will take the peripheral route.
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Dual process models of persuasion
Attitude change will be more long-lasting if it
occurs through the central route.
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Dual process models of persuasion
In order to get people to use the central
processing route, you need to get their
attention. This can be done by playing to
their emotions.
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Dual process models of persuasion
However, people want to preserve good
moods, so they will avoid activities that might
spoil their good mood. This means that
people in good moods will often avoid paying
close attention to a persuasive
communication, because they think that doing
so will lower their mood.
Social Psychology

Dual process models of persuasion
Fear-arousing communications are most
effective if they induce a moderate amount of
fear and people believe that listening to the
message will reduce this fear. If the
message is too scary or not scary enough, it
will fail.
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Social Psychology
The inverted U-curve relationship between
fear and attitude change

Tactics for enhancing compliance
A variety of techniques that deal with ways of
inducing another person to comply with our
requests has been intensively studied: these
include ingratiation, reciprocity and guilt arousal.
There are also multiple-request techniques (footin-the-door,
door-in-the-face and low-balling), in
which a first request functions as a set-up for the
second, real request.
Social Psychology

Social Psychology
Three classic techniques for inducing compliance

The foot-in-the-door technique: compliance with an
impossible request followed by a possible request
Based on data from
Dolinski (2000), Experiment 2
Social Psychology

The theory of cognitive dissonance
Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory is a major
approach to the topic of attitude change. It
addresses not only conflict between a person’s
beliefs but discrepancy between behaviour and
underlying attitudes, and behaviour and selfconception.
It includes three variations on the
way in which dissonance is brought about: effort
justification, induced compliance and free
choice.
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Social Psychology
The theory of cognitive dissonance

The effect of incentives on evaluating a boring task
in an induced- compliance context
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Based on data from Festinger & Carlsmith (1959).

Interest in a group discussion in relation to the
severity of the initiation procedure
Based on data from Aronson & Mills (1959).
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Change in weight among overweight women after
expending psychological effort
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Based on data from Cooper & Axom (1982).

Degree of liking fried grasshoppers as food by military
cadets in relation to the interpersonal style of an officer
Based on data from Zimbardo, Weisenberg, Firestone & Levy (1965).
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Resistance to persuasion
Reactance is an increase in resistance to
persuasion when the communicator’s efforts to
persuade are obvious. Techniques for building
up resistance include forewarning and the
inoculation defence. In recent years,
manufacturing companies have used inoculating
media releases to shore up consumer loyalty.
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Resistance to persuasion
• Attitude Inoculation
One way to bolster people against persuasion
attempts is to have them consider the arguments for
and against their attitude before somebody attacks it.
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Resistance to persuasion
• Attitude Inoculation
McGuire (1964)
Attitude inoculation procedure does this by exposing
people to a small dose of the argument against their
position; this induced them to counter-argue and
provide a “vaccination” that helps people ward off
later, stronger influence attempts.
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Resistance to persuasion
• Resisting Peer Pressure
Attitude inoculation that is designed to combat
affectively based persuasion techniques can be
effective at helping people resist peer pressure.
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Resistance to persuasion
• When Persuasion Attempts Boomerang:
Reactance Theory
Brehm (1966)
It is important not to use too heavy a hand when trying
to immunize people against assaults on their attitudes.
If you administer too strong a prohibition, the
prohibition may boomerang and lead to an increase in
the prohibited activity.
Social Psychology

Resistance to persuasion
• When Persuasion Attempts Boomerang:
Reactance Theory
Reactance theory explains this by saying that strong
prohibitions threaten a person’s feeling of freedom,
and engaging in the forbidden behavior is an attempt
to restore that feeling of freedom.
Social Psychology

Literature, Film and TV
• Tin Men: 1987 comedy written and directed by Barry Levinson,
starring Richard Dreyfuss and Danny Devito. Two aluminium
salesmen are in competition. They use all their skills to outsell each
other by persuading customers.
• Matchstick Men: 2003 black comedy by Ridley Scott, starring
Nicholas Cage. A pair of con artists spend their lives engaging in
persuasion and living a double life to avoid being caught. They pull
off scams, but the last huge scam backfires big time on Nicholas
Cage’s character who becomes the victim of his own con.
• Glengarry Glen Ross: 1992 film directed by James Foley, written by
David Mamet, and starring Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris,
Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin and others. The film is about real estate
office and the different ways in which salesmen under pressure try
to sell, and to persuade others.
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Your Portfolio
• Read the chapter along the slides!
• Answer the sample questions!
• What have I learned?
• What did I NOT understand?
• How can I apply the knowledge?
Social Psychology

Sample MC-Items
1) One of the following characteristics is a minimum requirement for a
persuasive message to have some success:
A) the message has to be written neatly
B) no extraneous factor should interrupt the information flow
C) the audience needs to give some attention to the message
D) the message must be very sensible
2) The content of a message has an impact on whether people are
persuaded or not. Which of the following is NOT directly related to the
message component?
A) Fear-arousing messages are more likely to persuade
B) Evaluatively biased terminology enhances persuasion
C) A message delivered by an expert is more persuasive than one
delivered by a non-expert
D) People are more easily persuaded if they think that the message is not
aimed at them
Social Psychology

Sample MC-Items
3) When Karen hears graphic news about disasters she becomes
somewhat stressed, focussed and attentive. However, when she gets
extremely stressed, she is so uptight that she becomes distracted from
the details of the story. This sequence characterises the:
A) J-curve B) boomerang effect
C) reactance response D) the inverted U-curve
4) In Petty and Cacioppo‘s (1986) elaboration-likelihood model
A) people are never assumed to take mental shortcuts
B) a central route is used when the message is delivered in visual form
C) a peripheral route is used when attention to the argument of a
message is low
D) persuasion occurs only when the source is likeable
Social Psychology