16.1 Persuasion – An Overview

Learning Objective

1. Define and explain persuasion.
2. Explain how the three theories of persuasion, namely social judgment theory, cognitive dissonance theory, and the elaboration likelihood model, can be applied to strengthen a persuasive message.

In his text The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st Century, Richard Perloff noted that the study of persuasion today is extremely important for several reasons:

1. The sheer number and reach of persuasive communications have grown exponentially.
2. Persuasive messages travel faster than ever before, aided by digital technologies.
3. Persuasion has become institutionalized.
4. Persuasive communication has become more subtle and devious.
5. Persuasive communication is more complex and mediated.

Additionally, social media and the Internet have democratized persuasive discourse, blurred boundaries, and change the contours of persuasion. (Perloff, 2017).

In essence, the nature of persuasion has transformed over the last fifty years as a result of media technologies. People are bombarded with persuasive messages in today’s world, so thinking about how to create them effectively is very important for modern public speakers. A century (or even half a century) ago, public speakers had to contend only with the words for attracting and holding an audience’s attention. Today, however, public speakers must contend with billboards, smart TVs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and social media platforms available on mobile devices — all of which can deliver persuasive messages to a targeted audience. Thankfully, scholars who study persuasion have kept up with the changing times and have found a number of persuasive strategies that help speakers be more persuasive.

What Is Persuasion?

We defined persuasion earlier  as an intentional effort to influence a person to embrace a point of view, or behave differently, on issues related to values, attitudes, and beliefs, assuming the receiver of the message has the freedom to choose and adopts the change voluntarily.

Change Attitudes, Values, and Beliefs

The first type of persuasive public speaking involves a change in someone’s attitudes, values, and beliefs. An attitude is defined as an individual’s general predisposition toward something as being good or bad, right or wrong, or negative or positive. You might believe it’s unwise that some states do not mandate annual vehicle safety inspections, and you want to persuade others to view such laws negatively.

You can also attempt to persuade an individual to change how he or she values something. Value refers to an individual’s perception of the usefulness, importance, or worth of something. We can value a college education or technology or freedom. Values, as a general concept, are fairly ambiguous and tend to be very lofty ideas. Ultimately, what we value in life actually motivates us to engage in a range of behaviors. For example, if you value technology, you are more likely to seek out new technology or software on your own. Conversely, if you do not, you are less likely to do so unless someone, or some circumstance, requires you to.

Lastly, you can attempt to get people to change their personal beliefs. Beliefs are propositions or positions that an individual holds as true or false without positive knowledge or proof. Typically, beliefs are divided into two basic categories: core and dispositional. Core beliefs are beliefs that people have actively engaged in and created over the course of their lives (e.g., belief in a higher power, belief in extraterrestrial life forms). Dispositional beliefs, on the other hand, are beliefs that people have not actively engaged in but rather judgments that they make, based on their knowledge of related subjects, when they encounter a proposition. For example, imagine that you were asked the question, “Can stock cars reach speeds of one thousand miles per hour on a one-mile oval track?” Even though you may never have attended a stock car race or even seen a live race on TV, you can make split-second judgments about your understanding of automobile speeds and say with a fair degree of certainty that you believe stock cars cannot travel at one thousand miles per hour on a one-mile track. Dispositional beliefs are sometimes referred to as virtual beliefs (Frankish, 1998).

When it comes to persuading people to alter core and dispositional beliefs, persuading audiences to change core beliefs is more difficult than persuading audiences to change dispositional beliefs. For this reason, you are very unlikely to persuade people to change their deeply held core beliefs about a topic in a five- to ten-minute speech. However, if you give a persuasive speech on a topic related to an audience’s dispositional beliefs, you may have a better chance of success. While core beliefs may seem to be exciting and interesting, persuasive topics related to dispositional beliefs are generally better for novice speakers with limited time allotments.

Change Behavior

The second type of persuasive speech is one in which the speaker attempts to persuade an audience to change their behavior. Behaviors come in a wide range of forms, so finding one you think people should start, increase, or decrease shouldn’t be difficult at all. Speeches encouraging audiences to vote for a candidate, sign a petition opposing a tuition increase, or drink tap water instead of bottled water are all behavior-oriented persuasive speeches. In all these cases, the goal is to change the behavior of individual listeners.

Why Persuasion Matters

Frymier and Nadler (2017) enumerate three reasons why people should study persuasion. First, when you study and understand persuasion, you will be more successful at persuading others. If you want to be a persuasive public speaker, then you need to have a working understanding of how persuasion functions.

Second, when people understand persuasion, they will be better consumers of information. As previously mentioned, we live in a society where numerous message sources are constantly fighting for our attention. Unfortunately, most people just let messages wash over them like a wave, making little effort to understand or analyze them. As a result, they are more likely to fall for half- truths, illogical arguments, and lies. When you start to understand persuasion, you will have the skill set to actually pick apart the messages being sent to you and see why some of them are good and others are simply not.

Lastly, when we understand how persuasion functions, we’ll have a better grasp of what happens around us in the world. We’ll be able to analyze why certain speakers are effective persuaders and others are not. We’ll be able to understand why some public speakers can get an audience eating out of their hands, while others flop.

Furthermore, we believe it is an ethical imperative in the twenty-first century to be persuasively literate. We believe that persuasive messages that aim to manipulate, coerce, and intimidate people are unethical, as are messages that distort information. As ethical listeners, we have a responsibility to analyze messages that manipulate, coerce, and/or intimidate people or distort information. We also have the responsibility to combat these messages with the truth, which will ultimately rely on our own skills and knowledge as effective persuaders.

How are People Persuaded?

Understanding how people are persuaded is very important to the discussion of public speaking. Thankfully, a number of researchers have created theories that help explain why people are persuaded. While there are numerous theories that help to explain persuasion, we are going to examine only three here: social judgment theory, cognitive dissonance theory, and the elaboration likelihood model.

Social Judgment Theory

Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland created social judgment theory in an attempt to determine what types of communicative messages and under what conditions communicated messages will lead to a change in someone’s behavior (Sherif & Hovland, 1961). In essence, Sherif and Hovland found that people’s perceptions of attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors exist on a continuum including latitude of rejection, latitude of noncommitment, and latitude of acceptance (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1: Latitudes of Judgements

Image Long Description

The image is a black-and-white diagram titled “Latitudes of Judgments,” depicting three regions along a horizontal arrow pointing from left to right:

• Latitude of Rejection (left section): Indicates positions the audience disagrees with.
• Latitude of Noncommitment (middle section): Indicates positions the audience is neutral or uncertain about.
• Latitude of Acceptance (right section): Indicates positions the audience agrees with or finds acceptable.

Each section is labeled clearly, and the arrow suggests a continuum of audience response to persuasive messages.

Text Transcription

Latitudes of Judgments

• Latitude of Rejection
• Latitude of Noncommitment
• Latitude of Acceptance

Imagine that you’re planning to persuade your peers to study a foreign language in college. Some of the students in your class are going to disagree with you right off the bat (latitude of rejection). Other students are going to think majoring in a foreign language is a great idea (latitude of acceptance). Still others are really going to have no opinion either way (latitude of noncommitment). Note that in each of these different latitudes, there is a range of possibilities. For example, one of your listeners may be perfectly willing to accept the idea of minoring in a foreign language, but when asked to major or even double major in a foreign language, he or she may end up in the latitude of noncommitment or even rejection.

Not surprisingly, Sherif and Hovland found that persuasive messages were the most likely to succeed when they fell into an individual’s latitude of acceptance. For example, if you are giving your speech on majoring in a foreign language, people who are in favor of majoring in a foreign language are more likely to positively evaluate your message, assimilate your advice into their own ideas, and engage in desired behavior. On the other hand, people who reject your message are more likely to negatively evaluate your message, not assimilate your advice, and not engage in desired behavior.

In an ideal world, we’d always be persuading people who agree with our opinions, but that’s not reality. Instead, we often find ourselves in situations where we are trying to persuade others to attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors with which they may not agree. To help us persuade others, what we need to think about is the range of possible attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors that exist. For example, in our foreign language case, we may see the following possible opinions from our audience members:

• Complete agreement. Let’s all major in foreign languages.
• Strong agreement. I won’t major in a foreign language, but I will double major in a foreign language.
• Agreement in part. I won’t major in a foreign language, but I will minor in a foreign language.
• Neutral. While I think studying a foreign language can be worthwhile, I also think a college education can be complete without it. I really don’t feel strongly one way or the other.
• Disagreement in part. I will only take the foreign language classes required by my major.
• Strong disagreement. I don’t think I should have to take any foreign language classes.
• Complete disagreement. Majoring in a foreign language is a complete waste of a college education.

These seven possible opinions on the subject do not represent the full spectrum of choices, but give us various degrees of agreement with the general topic. So what does this have to do with persuasion? Well, we’re glad you asked. Sherif and Hovland theorized that persuasion was a matter of knowing how great the discrepancy or difference was between the speaker’s viewpoint and that of the audience. If the speaker’s point of view was similar to that of audience members, then persuasion was more likely. If the discrepancy between the idea proposed by the speaker and the audience’s viewpoint is too great, then the likelihood of persuasion decreases dramatically.

Figure 16.2: Discrepancy and Attitude Change

Image Long Description

The image is a simple black-and-white line graph demonstrating the concept of discrepancy and attitude change. The graph has:

• A horizontal axis labeled “Discrepancy”, representing the degree of difference between a message and the audience’s existing beliefs.
• A vertical axis labeled “Attitude Change”, representing how much a person’s attitude shifts in response to a message.
• A parabolic curve (∩-shaped), which starts low, rises to a peak in the middle, and falls again—indicating that moderate discrepancy leads to maximum attitude change, while low or high discrepancy results in minimal change.

This visual supports the idea that people are most open to persuasion when a message moderately differs from their current views—not too little, not too much.

Text Transcription

• Vertical axis: Attitude Change
• Horizontal axis: Discrepancy
• The curve shows maximum attitude change at moderate discrepancy.

Furthermore, Sherif and Hovland predicted that there was a threshold for most people where attitude change wasn’t possible and people slipped from the latitude of acceptance into the latitude of noncommitment or rejection. Figure 16.2 represents this process. All the area covered by the left side of the curve represents options a person would agree with, even if there is an initial discrepancy between the speaker and the audience member at the start of the speech. However, there comes a point where the discrepancy between the speaker and audience member becomes too large, which moves into the options that will be automatically rejected by the audience member. In essence, it becomes essential for you to know which options you can realistically persuade your audience to and which options will never happen. Maybe there is no way for you to persuade your audience to major or double major in a foreign language, but perhaps you can get them to minor in a foreign language. While you may not be achieving your complete end goal, it’s better than getting nowhere at all.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

In 1957, Leon Festinger proposed another theory for understanding how persuasion functions: cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957). Cognitive dissonance is an aversive motivational state that occurs when an individual entertains two or more contradictory attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors simultaneously. For example, your roommate values environmental protection but purchases an iced latte sold in a disposable cup several times a week. In this case, protecting the environment and frequent consumption of disposable plastic cups are inconsistent with each other. The goal of persuasion is to induce enough dissonance in listeners that they will change their attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors.

Frymier and Nadler (2017) noted that for cognitive dissonance to work effectively, there are three necessary conditions: aversive consequences, freedom of choice, and insufficient external justification. First, for cognitive dissonance to work, there needs to be a strong enough aversive consequence, or punishment, for not changing one’s attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors. For example, maybe you’re giving a speech on why people need to use reusable drinkware instead of disposable cups. If your aversive consequence for continuing to use disposable cups is that your audience is polluting the ocean, then most people will simply not be persuaded, because the punishment isn’t severe enough to be personally relevant. Instead, for cognitive dissonance to work, the punishment associated with not using reusable drinkware needs to be significant enough to change behaviors. If you convince your audience that traces of disposable plastics have now entered human bodies by way of drinking water and seafood, they might fear the aversive consequences enough to change their behavior.

The second condition necessary for cognitive dissonance to work is that people must have freedom of choice. If listeners feel they are being coerced into doing something, then dissonance will not be aroused. They may alter their behavior in the short term, but as soon as the coercion is removed, the original behavior will reemerge. It’s like the driver who slows down when a police officer is nearby but ignores speed limits once the officer is no longer present. As a speaker, if you want to increase cognitive dissonance, you need to make sure that your audience doesn’t feel coerced or manipulated, but rather that they can clearly see that they have a choice of whether to be persuaded.

The final condition necessary for cognitive dissonance to work has to do with internal and external justifications. While both types of justifications support one’s behavior, beliefs, and attitudes, external justification resides outside of one’s control. Internal justification, on the other hand, occurs when someone voluntarily changes a behavior, belief, or attitude to reduce cognitive dissonance. When it comes to creating change through persuasion, external justifications are less likely to result in change than internal justifications (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959).

Imagine that you’re giving a speech with the specific purpose of persuading college students to choose public transportation over driving personal vehicles. Your audience analysis, in the form of an anonymous survey, indicates that a large percentage of your listeners rely heavily on personal vehicles for commuting. Which would be the more persuasive argument: (a) “Dependence on personal vehicles inevitably leads to higher expenses, traffic congestion, and increased carbon emissions”— or (b) “If you think of yourself as an environmentally conscious and responsible citizen, you’ll choose public transportation to reduce your impact”? With the first argument, you have provided external justification for using public transportation (i.e., negative consequences will occur if you keep driving everywhere). Listeners who reject this external justification (e.g., who don’t believe these consequences are inevitable or significant) are unlikely to change their behavior. With the second argument, however, if your listeners think of themselves as environmentally conscious and responsible citizens and they currently drive everywhere, the conflict between their self-image and their behavior will elicit cognitive dissonance. To reduce this cognitive dissonance, they are likely to seek internal justification for the view of themselves as responsible citizens by changing their behavior (i.e., taking public transportation more often). In this case, according to cognitive dissonance theory, the second persuasive argument would be the one more likely to lead to a change in behavior.

Elaboration Likelihood Model

The last of the three theories of persuasion discussed here is the elaboration likelihood model created by Petty and Cacioppo (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Elaboration refers to “the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message.” The deeper an audience member processes the information related to an argument, the higher the elaboration. There are also two pathways for processing the information in support of an advocacy, the central route or the peripheral route, and persuasion can take place through either route. In an ideal world, everyone would process information through the central route by identifying strong or weak arguments. Unfortunately, many people often use the peripheral route without ascertaining the arguments presented. Instead of evaluating the argument in the persuasive message and thinking about its implications, bias, and values, peripheral information processing relies on simple cues in the persuasion context, such as the appeal of the communicator, the format of the message, or the speaker’s style, to decide if the persuasion is acceptable.

Figure 16.3: Central vs. Peripheral Route of ELM

Image Long Description

The image is a flowchart titled “Persuasive Message” at the top, with two arrows branching downward into two distinct paths:

Left Branch – Central Route:

• Audience: More motivated, analytical
• Elaboration: High elaboration, deep thinking, evaluate the merit of the argument
• Persuasion Outcome: Lasting change

Right Branch – Peripheral Route:

• Audience: Less motivated, not analytical
• Elaboration: Low elaboration, shallow thinking, use superficial cues outside of the argument
• Persuasion Outcome: Temporary change

Each route follows a top-to-bottom layout and ends with a distinct persuasion result. The left path emphasizes thoughtful processing, while the right focuses on surface-level cues.

Text Transcription

Persuasive Message

Central Route

• Audience
• More motivated, analytical
• Elaboration
• High elaboration, deep thinking, evaluate the merit of the argument
• Persuasion
• Lasting change

Peripheral Route

• Audience
• Less motivated, not analytical
• Elaboration
• Low elaboration, shallow thinking, use superficial cues outside of the argument
• Persuasion
• Temporary change

For researchers of persuasion, the question then becomes: how do people select one route or the other when attending to persuasive messages? Petty and Cacioppo noted that there are two basic factors for determining whether someone centrally processes a persuasive message: ability and motivation. First, audience members must be able to process the persuasive message. If the language or message is too complicated, then people will not engage in high elaboration because they will not understand the persuasive message. Motivation, on the other hand, refers to whether the audience member chooses to elaborate on the message. Frymier and Nadler (2017) discussed several factors that can lead to high elaboration. We discuss a few of them below: personal relevance and personal involvement, personal responsibility, incongruent information, and need for cognition.

Personal Relevance and Personal Involvement

The first reason people are motivated to take the central route or use high elaboration when listening to a persuasive message involves personal relevance and involvement. Personal relevance refers to whether the audience member feels that he or she is actually directly affected by the speech topic. For example, if someone is listening to a speech on why vaping is just as harmful as smoking cigarettes, and that listener has never used tobacco products or intended to, he or she may think the speech topic simply isn’t relevant. Obviously, as a speaker you should always think about how your topic is relevant to your listeners and make sure to drive this home throughout your speech. Personal involvement, on the other hand, asks whether the individual is actively engaged with the issue at hand: sends letters of support, gives speeches on the topic, fundraises for the cause, and so forth. If an audience member has witnessed the harm of tobacco products, then he or she would be highly involved (i.e., would engage in high elaboration) in a speech that attempts to persuade listeners that vaping is harmful.

Personal Responsibility

When people feel that they are going to be held responsible, for the evaluation or the outcome of a message, they are more likely to critically think through the message using the central route. For example, if you are selected to serve as a juror, it’s your responsibility to carefully evaluate the case based on the information presented during the trial and arrive at a verdict. You are unlikely to invest the same amount of time or energy if you are not the juror and just learn about the case from the news.

A series of research has also shown that the greater the responsibilities an individual holds for evaluating an issue, such as serving as the sole evaluator vs. one of the ten evaluators, the more likely he/she is willing to put in the mental effort. When people feel that their evaluation is important, they take more responsibility and are more likely to engage in high elaboration. (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Incongruent Information

Some people are motivated to centrally process information when it does not adhere to their own ideas. For example, if you believe that the earth is overly populated and natural resources are running out, a speech on how problem-solving through innovation will continue to keep the planet endlessly abundant will very likely catch your attention. The incongruence between your belief and what the speech advocates is in direct contrast. As such, you are interested in listening to the speech, especially in looking for flaws in the speaker’s argument.

Need for Cognition

The final reason some people centrally process information is because they have a personality characteristic called need for cognition. Need for cognition refers to a personality trait characterized by an internal drive or need to engage in critical thinking and information processing. People who are high in need for cognition simply enjoy thinking about complex ideas and issues, even if the idea or issue being presented has no personal relevance. High need for cognition people are more likely to process information using the central route.