13.4: Attitudes and Persuasion: Changing Minds

There is indirect aggression marked by spreading rumors, gossiping, social exclusion, and using nonverbal put downs.

Results show that females are just as likely as males to express anger in subtle ways.
Boys have higher rates of being bullied than girls.
Males exhibit slightly higher rates of cyberaggression than females on the internet.

The culture shapes aggression.

Research shows that violent crime is less prevalent among Asian people than it is among Americans and Europeans.

The culture of honor may explain why the South has higher rates of violence than other parts of the United States.

The rates are higher for violence that arises in the context of disputes, not in robberies or other crimes.
The culture of honor can be seen in the laboratory.
In three experiments, a male confederate bumped into a male college student in a narrow hallway and then cursed at him before running away.
Students from southern states were more likely to show aggressive behavior against another person than students from other states.

Evaluate theoretical accounts of how we change our attitudes.

You can now understand the difference between beliefs and attitudes after going through this exercise.

A conclusion regard is a belief.

How we feel about an issue or a person is reflected in attitudes.

They are an important part of our social worlds.

People think that attitudes are good predictors of behavior.

Most people think that how we feel about a candidate predicts whether we'll vote for or against them.
It doesn't.
This finding explains why political polls are not always reliable.

When it comes to attitude, don't judge by it.

More than 70 years ago, Robert LaPiere surveyed 128 American hotel and restaurant owners to find out if they would serve guests who were Chinese.
The majority of LaPiere's participants said no.
127 of 128 owners of the same establishments had already served the Chinese couple when LaPiere was in the country.
There is no way to know if the people who filled out the survey were the same people who had served them.

His conclusion has stood the test of time.

According to a review of 88 studies, the average correlation between attitudes and behavior is 0.38, which is a moderate association.
Although attitudes forecast behavior at better-than-chance levels, they're not powerful predictors.
Our attitudes are only one of many factors that result in our behaviors.

LaPiere's participants may not have been fond of the idea of serving Chinese guests.

They may have found these guests more likable than they expected when they met them in person.
They may have been reluctant to give up the chance for good business.

Our attitudes can predict our behaviors.

It's easy to see that people's expressed voting preferences to come to mind.
We asked you two questions, one of which was about the idea of buying a new brand of yogurt.

The second question is easier to answer than the first because you've thought more about it.

If you think chocolate ice cream is better than yogurt, you're more likely to buy it.
When attitudes are firmly held and stable, they tend to predict behavior.

High self-monitors tend to be social chameleons, whereas low self personality trait that assesses the monitors tend to be straight shooters.

Correlation and Causation behaviors don't mean that they cause them.

Imagine if we started out with a negative attitude towards homeless people.

If a friend persuades us to volunteer to help the homeless for three hours a week and we end up enjoying it, our attitudes toward homeless people may improve.

Our prior experience and personality are some of the sources of our attitudes.

Some of the key influences on our attitudes will be reviewed here.

Our attitudes are shaped by our experiences.

It can help us make snap judgements.
When asking people who will win a big tennis match, many of them pick the player they've heard of; more often than not, this simple approach is effective.

The recognition heuristic can get us into trouble when a story is compelling.

It can lead us to fall for stories that are too good to be true, such as some urban legends, or buy products that seem familiar just because we've heard their names before.
Good advertisers cook up jingles that are easy to repeat.

Our attitudes are related to our personality traits.

Our personality can affect our political attitudes, even though we may think they derive from objective analyses of social issues.

In research that's stirred up more than its share of controversy, some researchers reported that political conservatives tend to be more fearful, more sensitive to 518 Chapter 13 threat, and less tolerant of uncertainty than are political liberals.

They and others have suggested that these personality traits are the "psychological glue" that glues conservatives' political attitudes toward the death penalty, abortion, gun control, school prayer, national defense, and a host of seemingly unrelated issues.
Conservatives show a higher skin conductance response than liberals when they see threatening stimuli, such as loud noises or pictures of badly wounded people.
Conservatives have more volume in the amygdala, a brain region associated with threat, than liberals.
We should not assume that conservatives are more mentally impaired than liberals.

Differences are not deficits.

One could easily say that liberals are undersensitive to threat and that conservatives are oversensitive to threat.

Our attitudes toward religion are influenced by our personality.

The specific religion we adopt is largely a function of our religious exposure while growing up and is mostly independent of our personality.

Some personality traits are linked to the depth of our religious convictions.
In most cultures, people with high levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness are more likely to become religious as adults.

Many of us are surprised to learn that our attitudes on abortion and the death penalty have changed over time.

We don't like to think of ourselves as weak willed flip-flops, so we tend to perceive ourselves as more consistent over time.

We dislike this state of tension because we want to reduce or eliminate it.

The first systematic test of Cognitive Dissonance Theory was conducted in the late 1950s by Festinger and J. Merrill Carlsmith.

At the lab, an experimenter will give you cognitive instructions for some manual tasks, as well as give you the second and third cognitive instructions.

Festinger and Carlsmith randomly assigned some Cognition A Cognition B Cognition C that participants to receive $1 to perform this favor and others to receive $20.

The social psychology participants should say that they enjoyed the watch task more.

Participants given $1 had almost no external justification.

The only way to resolve their cognitive dissonance was to convince themselves that they had enjoyed the task.

This prediction was supported by the results.

The people who were given less money reported enjoying the task more because they needed to justify their lies.

Their behaviors had changed.

Some people were assigned to receive the strange request from a friendly person while others were assigned to receive it from an unfriendly person.

The former participants liked fried grasshoppers more than the latter did.
The One classic study investigated how other participants didn't help out a nice person when they tasted the grasshoppers at the request of the friendly person.
The latter participants resolved their cognitive dissonance theory, which explains why some fraternities ask their members to perform bizarre and embarrassing dissonance by changing their attitudes.
People were found to be delicious.
Individuals with psychopathic tendencies who willingly undergo a severe initiation to a group feel a personality trait, who experience minimal guilt when lying, seem to need to justify this action and convince themselves to display little or no attitude change in the Festinger and Carlsmith that the group must be worthwhile.

Think about a time when you felt like you were acting hypocritical.

There are only a few conflicts between attitudes that produce cognitive dissonance.

There are at least two other explanations.

A primitive form of cognitive dissonance may be experienced by nonhuman primate.

According to this model, Festinger and Carlsmith's participants in the onedollar condition looked at their behavior and said to themselves, "I told the other participant that I liked the task, and I got paid only one lousy buck to do so."

We don't want to appear inconsistent that our behaviors are consistent.
Participants in the one-dollar condition didn't want to look like hypocrites because of Festinger and Carlsmith's attitudes.
They told the experimenter they enjoyed the task even though they didn't.
There may be some truth to each explanation.
Some people may exhibit attitude change because of cognitive dissonance, others because of self-perception, and still others because of impression management.

Every day, we encounter attempts at persuasion.

If you're like the average student entering college, you've already watched 360,000 commercials, and that number will reach 2 million by the time you turn 65.
The number doesn't take into account the number of advertisements you see on the internet.

Each time you walk into a store or supermarket, you see hundreds of products that marketers have carefully crafted to make you more likely to purchase them.

The central route operates through analytical thinking that we introduced earlier in the text.

When we're motivated and able to evaluate information carefully, we're more likely to take this route, as we have plenty of time and relevant information to make a decision.
The attitudes we acquire via this route tend to hold up over time.

The intuitive model of thinking that we introduced earlier in the text is what operates this route.

We're more likely to take this route when we're not motivated to weigh information carefully and don't have the ability to do so, as when we're watching a commercial.

Although the attitudes we acquire via this route tend to be weak and unstable, they can affect our short-term choices in powerful ways.

The danger of persuasive messages that travel through the peripheral route is that they can be easily fooled by superficial factors, such as how attractive the person is or how many times they've heard the message.

When researchers gave capuchin monkeys a choice between two different colored candy, their preference for the candy they didn't pick decreased.

By decreasing our liking of what we didn't pick, we reduce our cognitive dissonance.

A host of effective techniques for persuading others have been identified by psychologists.

Many of these methods use the peripheral persuasion route to appeal to our intuition and ignore our scientific thinking capacities.

Many successful business people have used these techniques.

We can ask her to volunteer one hour a week if we want to get her to volunteer five hours a week.

She will feel a need to justify her initial commitment once we get her to agree to that request.
She'll probably end up with a positive attitude towards the organization, boosting the odds that she'll volunteer even more of her time.

We can start with a large request, like ask for a $100 donation to our charity before asking for a small one, like a $10 donation.

If the initial request is so outrageous that it appears making an unreasonable large insincere or unreasonable, this method can backfire.
According to research, foot-in-the-door and door requests are effective for getting people to agree to requests and work about equally well.

The seller starts mentioning the add-ons that come with the product when the buyer agrees to purchase it.

By the time the deal is done, research low sales price and then mention all the add-on costs that the buyer may end up paying twice as much as he or she initially agreed to (Pascual et al., 2016).
This technique can be used to get favors from friends.

In one study, a confederate asked strangers to look after his dog while he visited his friend in the hospital.

In some cases, he first got the stranger to agree to the request and only then told him that he'd be gone for half an hour; in other cases, he told the stranger up front that he'd be gone for half an hour.
The first tactic worked better.

One way to get people to agree to a request is to make them feel free to say no.

If famous or attractive people deliver a persuasive message, we are more free to not do it.

They don't know anything about Persuasion Techniques products.

It is almost certain that this is the reason why so many drug commercials feature physicians dressed in white lab coats.

If the messenger seems friendly to us, messages are more persuasive.

In one study, students were asked to read a description of a Russian mystic.

Some students were assigned a description of his birthdate, while others were only given a description of his birthdate.

Students thought they shared a birthdate with Rasputin.

When asking for a raise, one approach is for a more positive one compared with students who didn't share his person to request a larger raise than his birthdate.

What is the marketing of pharmaceutical?

The appeal of door-in-the-face technique helps explain why so many intelligent people fall prey to pseu.

We need to recognize the tactics to resist them.

We should be aware that people can use these tactics to convince us of a variety of claims of both the pseudoscientific and everyday variety.

Several of these tactics use mental shortcuts that are appealing and seductive, but sometimes misleading.

It's less likely that we'll evaluate these claims scientifically because many take the peripheral route to persuasion.
Advertisers exploit the availability heuristic by using vivid testimonials.
A single dramatic case report of a person's psychological improvement following an herbal remedy can be more compelling than 20 carefully controlled studies.
The salesperson quotes the base price and then the edy is worthless.
Advertisers can use manufacturing source credibility to fool consumers into believing that a source is more trustworthy than it says it is.
A commercial for a weight-loss plan might show more than one per more.

Many people hold false beliefs regarding low-ball technique topics.

Despite the lack of compelling scientific evidence, 29 percent of Americans believe that vaccines contribute toautism.
It's difficult to distinguish fake news from real news on the internet or on social media.
There are a few intriguing insights from recent psychological research.

We might think that debunking a falsehood over and over again would be enough to reduce misinformation.

It's rare to get a copy of Dr. before midnight.

Thousands of psychologists use the "common knowledge", which is often wrong.

There is a belief that things that are "Mrs. Candy Cure's new over-the-counter Natural doesn't mean healthy, just look natural."

It's probably because the myth starts to sound familiar, like it's about vaccines causing products over others for irrational reasons.

When challenging assertions that threaten people's deeply held views of the world, we need to be especially careful, because doing so can lead them to bolster these beliefs.

It's possible that a parent who's spent a lot of time advocating for the view that vaccines don't cause autism will be resistant to evidence that vaccines don't cause it.

Research shows that if you give Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses ers an alternative explanation for their beliefs, they will listen.

It is important to emphasize the truth as much as possible in order to make the truth sound familiar.

The approach we've tried to adopt in this text is to counter psychological misinformation with accurate psychological information.

The United States and New Zealand have only two coun relationships.

It is possible to reach a large number of people with a commercial on a TV program.

The commercial begins with a testimonials from a young healthy skepticism, who says that she was depressed for more than well-demonstrated social psychological principles of persuasion.

It doesn't work for everyone.

It's a good start that the ad refers to several control ed studies.

We would need to be sure that the studies are careful and that the investigators have reported relevant outcomes, not just those favorable to the medication, and that the company isn't withholding failed attempts at replication.

Scientific skepticism requires us to evaluate all claims with an ies to be more effective than placebo for severe depression, which is why the claim that Tranquilex is "effective for some cases of depression" isn't extraordinary.

The ad acknowledges that the medication isn't them.

Consider the six principles of scientific thinking.

You can evaluate this claim with the help of the Razor evant.

The opening has important alternative explanations for the findings, and one of them is Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses.

Sally was described in the ad.

It is possible that she improved on her own or in response to the placebo effect, as a result of the controlled studies that compared Tranquilex with a placebo.
We need to know if all alternative treatments are available.

The summary was reported to the FDA.

Sally's ad for Tranquilex shows the use of vivid effectiveness and avoids making extreme claims.
In particu testimonials, a common persuasive tactic, it acknowledges that the medication doesn't work for everyone.
Like most forms of anecdotal evidence, people with depression shouldn't be aware of its potential side effects.

Among other things, we don't know if Sally's experience with the drug is typical, and we don't know if she company reported relevant outcomes, not just positive improved because of the medication.

We would need to be certain that the company didn't.

The ad says that depressed people with intense anxi will benefit from using testimonials, but we don't know if this is effective for marketing purposes.