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Social Psychology I > Social Thinking > Attitudes & Attitude Change

Persuasion: Changing attitudes

Not only do people spend a lot of time asking us about our attitudes, they often want to change them. Indeed, an entire industry has grown up around advertising and persuasion. So what are the factors that influence attitudes?

The communication approach to persuasion

Perhaps the oldest approach to persuasion can be found in the writings of Aristotle. In Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that persuasive speech should be analyzed from the perspective of who says what to whom. In other words, persuasion can be seen as an act of communication from one person to another. More than two millennia later, Carl Hovland and his colleagues <REF>(Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953) formalized the communication approach and began a program of research that systematically explored the influences that source (i.e., who), message (i.e., what), and audience (who) factors have on attitude change.

On the source side of the equation, a number of factors have been shown to influence attitude change. Fast speakers are more persuasive than slow speakers <REF>(Miller et al. 1976). Experts are more persuasive when it comes to questions of perceived fact <REF>(Hovland & Weiss, 1951; Olson & Cal, 1984), while ordinary people are more persuasive in matters of opinion <REF>(Brock, 1965). Attractive people are more persuasive than unattractive people are <REF>(Chaiken, 1979).

Similarly, how the message is constructed influences attitude change. Messages that produce or are associated with good feelings tend to be persuasive <REF>(Janis, Kaye, & Kirshner, 1965), which helps to explain why sex is a staple in the world of advertising. Messages that invoke moderate levels of fear are persuasive provided the audience for the message knows how to avoid the feared consequences <REF>(Leventhal, 1970).

And finally, the persuasiveness of a message also depends on factors inherent to the target. If the audience is likely to be hostile, a two-sided message that acknowledges the audience's concerns is likely to be more effective than a one-sided message that ignores their position <REF>(Jones & Brehm, 1970). Or, if an audience knows that a persuasive message is coming, they are less likely to be persuadedóan effect known as forewarning <REF>(Freedman & Sears, 1965).

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