Role of Persuasive Communication in Attitude Change

In attitudes and attitude change, psychologists have identified the role of communication in persuading others. There are few Techniques that are used by the communicators to persuade the other people. Lets have a basic idea of them first.

• Impression Management Theory: Theory that we don’t really change our attitudes, but report that we have so that our behaviours appear consistent with our attitudes.
• Foot in the door technique: Persuasive technique involving making a small request before making bigger one.
• Door-in-the-face technique: Persuasive technique involving making an unreasonably large request before making the small request.
• Low-ball technique: Persuasion technique in which the seller of a product starts quoting a low sales prices and them mentions all of the “add on” costs once the customer has agreed to purchase the product.

Many of these methods operate by means of the peripheral persuasion route, especially; successful business people have used such persuasive communication for decades. Communication persuades the audience with the aim of changing their attitudes and these include authoritarianism/dogmatism, and need for closure.

Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism refers to a general inclination to have a closed mind, to be intolerant, and to be deferential to authority, independent of specific ideological or political beliefs. Individuals who are low in dogmatism tend to be persuaded by strong, but not by weak, arguments. Highly dogmatic individuals in contrast, are persuaded by strong arguments only when the source is non-expert. When the source is an expert one, highly dogmatic individuals respond to the authority of expertise and are equally persuaded by strong and weak arguments.

Dogmatism

Dogmatism also influences the processes by which people respond to persuasive communications. For example, dogmatism is associated with more confident judgments as a result of generating more supportive and less contradictory evidence.

Need for closure

Another individual factor that influences persuasion is the need for closure. Need for closure is the desire to have a definite answer on a topic as opposed to remaining in a state of confusion or ambiguity. Participants who are high in need for closure are typically more resistant to persuasion than people low in need for closure because they don’t like to change; those low in need for closure are more tolerant of the ambiguity that a persuasive communication creates and are more willing to change their attitudes. However, if a persuasive communication involves an issue on which people have relatively little information and they are distracted while listening to the persuasive communication, individuals with a high need for closure show more attitude change than those low in need for closure presumably to escape the confusing state in which they find themselves.

Mood

A more transitory factor that can influence how a person processes a persuasive message is mood. Mood can act as information, and so people who feel negative when they are exposed to a message process that message more systematically than people who feel positively. Essentially, people interpret their negative mood as a signal that the situation might be problematic or threatening and therefore adapt a careful analytic strategy for processing the message.
Mood acts not only as information in the persuasion process but also as a resource. Often, the persuasive messages we encounter have threatening consequences for the self. However, a persuasive communication is usually delivered within a broader situational context, in which other things are happening that also affect the degree to which efforts to persuade succeed.

Distraction

The ability to resist persuasion is weakened by anything that makes it harder to counter-argue the discrepant communication. In particular, distracting the attention of listeners may enable a persuasive message to get through.