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Updated September 15, 1996; Copyright © SBB, 1996
Thus, even before the student has even started the persuasive appeal, you are already dug in and ready to defend your position. Such a highly motivated and prepared person is very difficult to influence. This explains the main point with persuasive intent. When receivers believe that a source is trying to change them, they frequently respond defensively. Sources who "forewarn" of their intent persuade often put themselves at a major disadvantage precisely because of the maxim, "Forewarned is forearmed."
As a general rule, influence agents are more effective when they minimize forewarning. It is better to simply begin the persuasive appeal without making a big deal about it. Of course, there are important exceptions.
First, when you know that your receivers will probably agree with most of what you will suggest (you are seeking only small changes), then forewarning can be very effective. A forewarning stimulates the receivers to begin thinking about things you want them to think about. In essence a "self-persuasion" process can begin. When you start talking, your receivers will hear you say things they have already considered and will hence find your claims to be more familiar and acceptable.
Second, when your receivers already expect you to attempt persuasion, it is a good idea to "forewarn" them. Politicians often find themselves in this position. Everyone in the audience knows that politicians are trying to get people to vote for them. The situation is clearly a persuasive one. Therefore, a politician is smarter to stand up and declare the obvious, "I'm gonna be honest with you. I am here to persuade you to vote for me." A politician who tries to pretend that we're all here to listen to the band is probably less effective.
The importance of message organization is obvious. If your message is incoherent and confusing, then receivers will have difficulty merely understanding. The source may have good arguments, but the receivers will not comprehend them. Again, teachers know this lesson well. Most of us have had the experience of presenting information to our students in a way that was less than well organized. And we know what happens. The students get confused. They get worried and anxious because they do not understand. Some of them get angry at us. It is very bad medicine to confuse the class.
The question is, how well organized does the message have to be? Interestingly, most receivers most of the time are fairly flexible. Minor discrepancies apparently do not cause much trouble for comprehension and persuasion. Thus, if a source says, "There are three reasons we should do . . ." and then the source gives two reasons or four reasons, most receivers will still respond favorably. It appears that messages must be significantly disorganized before serious problems arise.
"Mary Brown (not her real name), a thirty-two year old mother of two, was driving home from grocery shopping when a pickup truck ran a red light. The truck, driven by a drunken farmer trying to escape the police, struck Mary's car head-on. But tragedy was averted as the airbag in Mary's car inflated within 20 milliseconds, and Mary bounced off the gray cushion instead of being impaled on the steering column."
Now, if you were reading Consumer Reports, you would see a different approach to explaining the effectiveness of airbags. There would be charts and illustrations and statistical summaries and simply loads of data. Which message, example or statistic, would be more effective?
The research indicates that examples tend to be more powerful and persuasive than statistics. There are several reasons for this. First, examples are easy to comprehend and require less effort. From the chapter on the paths to persuasion, we know that most of the time most people prefer to minimize the amount of thinking they must do. Therefore, examples can function as effective persuasion cues.
Second, even in those situations where receivers are systematically and effortfully considering all the vital information in the situation, examples can be more effective than statistics because people will think more about them. With statistics, about all people do is learn them. They exist as statements that are either true or false. Examples, by contrast, make people think a bit more. They react more fully to examples as they recollect their own similar personal experiences.
Now, of course, examples will not always be preferred to statistics. If the audience is highly sophisticated and very well informed, statistics would be considerably more effective. In fact, overuse of examples could reduce the credibility of the speaker.
Generally speaking, a two sided message is more persuasive than a one sided message. To be most effective, a two sided message must do two things:
1) defend one side;
2) attack the other side.
When two sided messages merely mention that there are competing perspectives and there is no attack on the competition, two sided messages are no more effective than one sided messages. The question is, why are two sided messages better?
First, two sided messages may simply appear to be more fair and balanced. Thus, for receivers who are not thinking very carefully, two sided messages make sources more credible. Second, for receivers who are thinking carefully, the combination of defense and attack makes them think even more systematically about the issue and to start questioning the validity of the "other" side. Thus, two sided messages can provide a double-barreled strategy where the source gets more support because receivers like one side and dislike the other.
Interestingly, repetition has two different outcomes. First, a little repetition leads to a lot of persuasion. Second, a lot of repetition leads to frustration. There is a balance point with the lever of repetition. Using repetition up to that point is effective, but once you move past the balance point, you get diminishing returns.
In the first outcome a little repetition works for an obvious reason: Comprehension. As you repeat a message, over and over, more and more receivers understand the message. For example, advertisers know that if a hundred people are exposed to a TV commercial, most of them won't even remember it. But if you show that same over many different times, more and more people in the audience will finally begin to "see" it for the first time. And even if a particular receiver recognized that new ad the very first time, repeated viewings are still effective. They permit the receiver to learn more about the ad and consider it more carefully.
But, if this repetition is overused, the second outcome occurs. You've heard the expression, "Familiarity breds contempt." That is exactly what happens with messages that are repeated too much. The ad comes on the TV and you go, "Oh, no, not that again!" Instead of thinking about this wonderful new ad, you start getting angry or frustrated or bored with it. That is not good persuasion.
It is important to know what that balance point is. At present, there is no research which provides a good way to figure this out in advance. The typical rule is this. Use repetition until some receivers start to get annoyed. Then stop.
Now, redundancy (saying the same thing a different way) can permit repetition to work effectively for awhile. Redundant messages essentially fool the receivers into thinking that they are seeing something new. However, even with redundant messages, you will still reach that balance point eventually.
Let's make sure we know the terminology. A rhetorical question is an utterance that is really a statement, but looks like a question. Rhetoricals are polite ways of making claims without appearing to take a stand.
People who study longer get better grades, don't they?
Advanced persuasion courses build character, don't they?
He's made his point, hasn't he?
The research with rhetoricals is interesting. It reveals one very strong conclusion: Using rhetoricals can change how people think. If receivers are not thinking very carefully about the persuasive appeal, a rhetorical question jerks their attention and makes them think. The reason for this is due to our social training. When somebody asks us a question, it is required that we respond to it. To respond correctly requires that we understand the question.
Okay, follow this. A rhetorical question is not a real question, it only looks and sounds like one. If you are really paying attention, when you hear a rhetorical question, you know that the source is not really asking you to do anything. By, if you are not paying close and careful attention, when you hear that rhetorical question, whoops, it grabs you because you think that the source has just asked you to do something and you must respond to be polite. Now, you start listening and really thinking about the rest of the persuasive message.
So, rhetoricals can be persuasive because they can make receivers think more carefully. There is also some evidence that rhetorical questions can be persuasion cues. That is, when receivers hear a source using rhetorical questions, they think the source and the message are more believable and correct.
The timing of the rhetorical appears to determine its effect. If a source uses rhetoricals very early in the appeal, then the rhetoricals will make the receivers pay more attention. If a source uses rhetoricals at the end of an appeal (when it is too late to pay attention), receivers will use that device as a persuasion cue.
The purpose of "Signal-30" was to provoke fear in my class of beginning drivers. The question to ask is, do fear appeals like this work?
The short and quick answer is, "yes." Fear appeals do persuade. However, the research in fear appeals reveals an incredibly diversity of findings and no good theory to account for this diversity.
At best we do know that as there is more fear, there is more influence. In other words, there is a direct linear relationship between the amount of fear the message elicits and the amount of influence that follows. More fear, more change. Less fear, less change.
Some have thought that fear appeals work in what is called the "inverted-U" pattern. This model holds that low and high fear appeals are ineffective, while moderate fear appeals work best. If you plot this on a chart it looks like an upside-down U. The theory is obvious. At low fear, nothing happens because receivers do not really process the message. At high fear, nothing happens because receivers are too frightened to process the message. Thus, only in the middle can the fear stimulate the desired response. Unfortunately, there is little supporting data for this model and in fact most data contradicts it. Clearly more research is needed to test this model.
Why does the fear cause change? One explanation is that the fear motivates greater thinking about the persuasive message. The more fear, the more one thinks about that bad thing and what to do about it. The research also strongly suggests that a fear appeal must do more than increase fear. It should also include information about how to avoid the bad thing.
The research is surprisingly consistent on the effects of evidence. It works. Sources who use good evidence persuade their receivers much better than sources who do not use evidence or who use poor evidence. And the use of good evidence also leads to stronger perceptions of that source's credibility.
The effects of evidence are so robust and so strong that they should not be overlooked. There is no research that shows good evidence produces negative effects. There is only data which shows positive effects.
If you remember the chapter on the paths to persuasion you should realize that evidence works best with receivers who are systematically considering the most important aspects of the persuasive situation. These people truly want evidence and if it is good, they will think about it carefully, deeply, and effortfully. This will produce long lasting change.
And even if people are taking the other path to persuasion, evidence can still influence. The research demonstrates that when people are heuristic processors, they may not be willing or able to think about the evidence. But they can still count. And when a source uses several pieces of evidence, the heuristic thinker will simply cue off the amount of evidence (If there are that many things supporting the issue, it must be true.)
Boster, F., & Mongeau, P. (1984). Fear arousing persuasive messages. In R. Bostrum (Ed.), Communication yearbook 8, (pp. 330-375). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
McCroskey, J. (1986). Introduction to rhetorical communication, (5th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Petty, R., & Cacioppo, J. (1986). Communication and persuasion: The central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Reinhard, J. (1988). The empirical study of the persuasive effects of evidence: The status after fifty years of research. Human Communication Research, 15, 3-59.
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Updated September 15, 1996; Copyright © SBB, 1996