Psych 586: Psychology of Persuasion Historical Perspective

Professor: Office: Email: Tel:

Icek Aizen Tobin 625 aizen@psych.umass.edu 545.0509

Political Commercials
Sample TV commercials from 1960, 1980, 1984, and 2004 presidential elections.

Election A ds.wpl

The Hovland Paradigm

(After Hovland & Janis, 1959)
SOURCE FACTORS

Expertise Trustworthiness Likability Status/Power/Sex

Opinion change ATTENTION Perception change COMPREHENSION Affect change ACCEPTANCE

MESSAGE FACTORS

Order of arguments One- vs.two-sided High vs. low fear Rational vs. emotional

AUDIENCE FACTORS

Need for approval Intelligence Sex/Age Self-esteem

Action achange

Elements of a Persuasive Communication

EVIDENCE "Factual" information to bolster the major arguments

ARGUMENTS Support for conclusion or recommended action

Conclusion or Recommended Action

Among smokers, cell division stops 32% earlier than among non-smokers

Smoking causes -- accelerated aging -- lung cancer -- heart disease -- emphysema -- birth defects

Stop Smoking

Example of Persuasive Communication (Eagly, 1974): Introduction and Preview of Conclusion

Introduction of Communicator

The lecture that you will read is about sleep research. It was delivered by a physiological psychologist who agreed to participate in this study. He is a faculty member in the Psychology Department who has been doing research on sleep for the past five years. He has published a number of journal articles on sleep and is currently completing a book on the subject.
Persuasive Message In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of research on the nature and function of sleep. Recently there have been some important discoveries about sleep and I want to tell you about them. You may find many of the things that I'll tell you quite novel because they go against conventional ideas--even against some of the classic psychological theories about sleep. Let me present this research to you by first telling you my overall conclusion. This is that you are probably sleeping too much. It is not necessary for the average person to sleep the eight hours each night that we have all been taught to believe is best. In fact, psychological research demonstrates the overall superiority of only about three hours for the average person provided that these hours are of a very special type. As I will explain, there is really no danger in cutting down sleep to three hours (if you do it in a certain way), and there certainly are some advantages. I would like to review for you the evidence that leads me to this conclusion. I will make six main points.

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): First Argument
My first point about the cultural nature of how much we sleep is a background fact that you should understand. The amount we sleep is actually arbitrary. People believe that 8 hours are necessary mainly because they have been told this is so and have been 'taught to sleep a lot when they were children. A University of California anthropologist pointed out that in some cultures, the norm is markedly less sleep than 8 hours; while in other cultures, people are expected to sleep even more than in our society. Also anthropologists point out that the amount of sleep people get varies with the season, especially for primitive and peasant peoples who live close to the land--they sleep when it is dark, so sleep more in the winter. Northern people like Laplanders and Eskimos sleep, according to one study, 1.8 times more in the winter than in the summer. In industrialized civilizations, we are not so affected by these rhythms of nature sleep patterns become more purely cultural.

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): Second Argument
My second point is very important: studies show that how rested a person feels when he wakes up depends on how much REM sleep he gets rather than his total amount of sleep. This REM sleep gets its name from the words Rapid Eye Movement since during this type of sleep, persons move their eyes back and forth rapidly. We also know that most dreaming takes place during REM sleep--though not all of REM sleep coincides with dreaming. For reasons we don't understand completely, dreaming and REM sleep make us feel rested. Sleep without these Rapid Eye Movements occupies much of the night, but it doesnt do nearly as much good as REM sleep and can largely be dispensed with. Experiments were done that involved awakening people after differing amounts of REM and non-REM sleep and interviewing them on how they felt (and also putting them through certain laboratory performance tasks). These experiments (which have so far involved 347 subjects from all walks of life) show that REM sleep brings 2 times as much reduction of fatigue as does non-REM sleep. This is a new and important discovery about sleep. Thus, one hour of REM sleep is as effective as 2 hours of nonREM sleep. Simply stated "It's REMs that rest us." Also, studies show that if persons are allowed to sleep as much as they want but are awakened when they enter REM sleep, they remain tired and experience adverse effects such as hallucinations and other perceptual maladjustments and distortions. People even verge on a state not unlike schizophrenia after several days of sleep without the REM phase.)

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): Third Argument
My third point comes from some training studies that were done at the University of Oregon. They took volunteers and retrained them to sleep less time per day. Now, there are two things that a person must do if he is to sleep fewer hours per day: he must divide his sleep into at least three naps rather than one 8-hour period and he must know how to go into REM sleep quickly. Naps are important because people go into REM sleep early in the night--the last four hours of the 8-hour night don't provide much REM sleep. Thus, the shorter naps provide more REM sleep since they are like the first part of the usual nighttime sleep. It takes the average person who is untrained at least 45 minutes to get into REM sleep. They knew that this period had to be cut, and through trying different methods, they finally hit on a method that works fairly well. This is the procedure: a person lies down, relaxes his muscles very thoroughly, and thinks about a single image of what is called a "bland" object. 11 bland object might be a blank wall or a cloudless sky. It is important to concentrate on just one object and not to let one's thoughts wander. One must not think of activities or problems, and not try to think logically. Just a single "bland" object. It's a sort of meditation technique. Using the bland object technique, most people can go into REM sleep within 10 minutes of falling asleep. There are really no special talents involved in being able to do this--anyone can do it. By the way, you might be interested to know that with alcohol or drugs a person tends to miss REM sleep and go right into deeper non-REM sleep. This is one reason why people don't feel as rested after alcohol or drug-induced sleep. The program, then, involved training in REM-inducing concentration and learning to take three or four evenly spaced naps of equal duration. Most subjects cut down their sleep a great deal and still carried out their daily work at what they felt was their usual level of efficiency. Still, the program didn't work for a few subjects, but these people evidently didn't do a very good job of spacing out the naps and were trying to do most all of their sleeping at night.

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): Fourth Argument
A fourth line of evidence comes from studies of the physical effects of longer periods of sleep these were done primarily by a psychobiologist at Princeton University. Subjects were put into quiet rooms and encouraged to sleep for long periods--given the right conditions, most subjects could sleep between 10 and 16 hours. Measurements showed that reaction time was impaired, as was the ability to solve complex logical syllogisms. Many people have personal experience with this--they have known the sluggish feeling and dull headache that follow long periods of sleep. Also, sleeping for long periods is bad for a person physically because his body is in such a lowered state of arousal during a long period of sleep-his heart rate is slow, his muscles are completely relaxed. His heart and internal organs tend to lose muscle tone. If a person puts his body under strain after a long period of sleep, he is more apt to be injured--or, in the extreme, to suffer a heart attack. While long sleep weakens a person, the body is not so severely affected by shorter periods of sleep. Also, a study relating length of life to number of hours of sleep showed a slight, but statistically significant, relationship between the hours a person sleeps and the length of life. This means that persons who live longer tend to sleep less than average while those who die younger sleep more than average. Of course, other factors affect length of life, but sleep is involved here.

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): Fifth Argument
As a fifth point, let me explain that sleep can be defensive. People often sleep to escape from their problems: It's a socially acceptable mode of escape while other forms of escape seem odd or even a little crazy to people: This idea about sleep being an escape has some empirical support in a study by a Swedish psychologist Lindstrom. He related the number of hours a person sleeps to tests of psychoneurotic symptoms (projective tests) and found that people who sleep a lot have more neurotic symptoms. Therapists often realize that excessive sleeping is a habit that must be broken in getting a patient to face reality. I guess that many people are only mildly affected by this psychoneurotic sleep syndrome--but excessive sleeping can become pronounced during periods of special stress.

Example of Persuasive Communication

(Eagly, 1974): Sixth Argument and Recommendation
As my sixth point I want to comment on how sleep relates to achievement. Many successful people sleep considerably less than 8 hours. Some notable examples of persons known for their tendency to sleep much less than average are Charles Percy, Robert McNamara, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. One likely reason for the success of these men is the fact that they were able to use the day effectively and to devote rather little time to sleep. After all, the extra time gained from sleeping less is a tremendous advantage since the average person works 8 hours, sleeps 8 hours, and then spends (according to one study) about 4h hours in routine tasks such as commuting, eating, and such. This leaves less than 4 hours for important things like reading, entertainment, leisure, working to develop talents and interests, and doing special work connected with one's job or schooling. It is clear that cutting down sleep would give a person more time for his own personal development.

To summarize most people are sleeping their lives away. My recommendation to the average person is that he or she make the effort to learn more about how sleep really works. Then he could benefit considerably if he developed a living and napping pattern that involves only about three hours of sleep during each 24.

Message Opposed to Fraternities: Attitudes of Fraternity Members (Festinger & Maccoby, 1974)

30

Attitude toward fraternities

25 20 15 10 5 0 Speaker Irrelevant/Amusing Visual Content of Film

Cognitive Response Model of Persuasion

(Brock, Greenwald, Petty, Cacioppo, 1970s)

MESSAGE Major arguments Factual evidence

COGNITVE RESPONSES Pro-arguments/ Con-arguments

PERSUASION Attitude change Change in behavior

PERSUASION CONTEXT Source factors Message factors Channel factors Receiver factors

Counter-Arguments and Attitude Toward Tuition Increase (Osterhouse & Brock, 1970)

1.6

Attitude

40 35

Counter-arguments

1.4 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4

25

Counterarguments

20 15 10

None

Moderate

High

Degree of Distraction

Attitude

30

Distraction: Ps call out which of 4 lights come on. 12/min vs. 24/min.

The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

(Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)
n Ce l tra de Mo Pe rip
Persuasive communiction

her

al M

od

Retain original attitude

Personal relevance

Motivated to process?
Need for cognition

no no

yes
Distraction

Ability to process?
Message repetition

no

Credible source

Peripheral cue present?

Number of arguments

yes
Nature of Cognitive Processing:
(initial attitude, argument quality)

yes
Nature of Peripheral Cue Neither or neutral thoughts predominate

Favorable thoughts predominate

Unfavorable thoughts predominate

Positive
(high credibility)

Negative
(low credibility)

Cognitive Structure Change New positive beliefs become accessible New negative beliefs become accessible

Central Central positive negative attitude change attitude change New attitude is enduring, resistant, and predictive of behavior

Peripheral positive attitude change

Peripheral negative attitude change

New attitude is temporary, susceptible, and unpredictive of behavior

Comprehensive Exam: Strong Argument

(Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)

The National Scholarship Achievement Board recently revealed the results of a five-year study conducted on the effectiveness of comprehensive exams at Duke University. The results of the study showed that since the comprehensive exam has been introduced at Duke, the grade point average of undergraduates has increased by 31%. At comparable schools without the exams, grades increased by only 8% over the same period. The prospect of a comprehensive exam clearly seems to be effective in challenging students to work harder and faculty to teach more effectively. It is likely that the benefits observed at Duke University could also be observed at other universities that adopt the exam policy.

Comprehensive Exam: Weak Argument

(Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)

The National Scholarship Achievement Board recently revealed the results of a five-year study conducted on the effectiveness of comprehensive exams at Duke University. One major finding was that student anxiety had increased by 31%. At comparable schools without the exam, anxiety increased by only 8%. The Board reasoned that anxiety over the exams, or fear or failure, would motivate students to study more in their courses while they were taking them. It is likely that this increase in anxiety observed at Duke University would also be observed, and be of benefit, at other universities that adopt the exam policy.

Postmessage Attitudes Toward 20% Tuition Increase (Petty, Well, & Brock, 1976)

1.5 Strong arguments 1 Weak arguments

Attitude

0.5 0 -0.5 -1 No Low Med High

Distraction

Postmessage Attitudes Toward Comprehensive Exam (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979)

2 1.5 1 Strong arguments Weak arguments

Attitude

0.5 0 Low -0.5 -1 Personal Relevance High