The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason Thomas Paine

Internet Marketing through logic and reason for persuasion

The Jeffersonian democratic tradition, with its foundations stretching back as far as Milton, elevates reason to be "good" in that logic drives decision, while persuasion is "bad" because it is driven by emotion.

It is the resistance that requires Logical Persuasion.

We will cover the complete list of strategies on this page. Selling and marketing is in fact the art of logical persuasion. In this page we also outline the recent theories and research findings in the field of psychology and logical persuasion. The bulk of research does not focus on how to persuade. Rather, the focus is on how to remove resistance with logic and reason.

Logical persuasion is often discussed under a focus on problems of real social import (e.g., tobacco uptake and use, alcohol abuse, use of illegal and often dangerous substances, engaging in high-risk behaviors of various and sundry kinds). Increasingly, the study of logical persuasion is taking an applied turn toward attempting to change attitudes and behaviors in real time and among large segments of the population. Millions of dollars from special taxes and court settlements have been spent to target young people who are most susceptible to tobacco uptake and use.

Internet message producers create "content," which is always intended to be persuasive, to the degree that they embed meaning in symbols. Television and the Internet are especially persuasive to the degree that they can compel the message receiver's psychological apparatus into processing mediated information as if it were the result of direct sensory experience.

Resistance to persuasion is not simply the inverse of persuasion. That is, resistance is not necessarily the same thing as not being persuaded. We define resistance to persuasion as a motivated state in which the goal is to withstand the effect of persuasive communication weather it is logical or emotional. Resistance hounds persuasion the way friction frustrates motion. Hence, some efforts should be focused on removing the resistance with logic and reasons. Here in this page we will discuss recent studies and strategies to remove resistance.

Here is an interesting example why our research matters:

Much of the current interest in mood and persuasion can be traced to a study by Worth and Mackie (1987). That project is valuable not only for its place in the history of this area but also because its design is so typical of subsequent investigations. In Worth and Mackie's study, positive mood participants won $1.00 in an allegedly random lottery, while neutral mood participants were simply asked whether or not they had participated in a lottery. All participants then read a message about acid rain containing either strong or weak arguments that was attributed to either an expert or nonexpert source. The results indicated that, relative to the neutral mood participants, those in the positive mood condition recalled fewer arguments, were less sensitive to the argument strength manipulation, and were more sensitive to the source cue manipulation. Overall, the evidence suggested that positive mood dampened systematic processing. From these and other findings (Mackie & Worth, 1989), the researchers concluded that positive moods consume cognitive capacity, thereby constraining participants' ability to engage in systematic message processing.

The notion that positive mood participants might have suffered motivational deficits provides the cornerstone to an alternative explanation. The mood-as-information hypothesis suggests that affective states may function as heuristics conveying to individuals whether there is a need to process the message carefully (Bless, Bohner, Schwarz, & Strack, 1990; for a revision of this position, see Bless & Schwarz, 1999). A positive mood signals that all is well, and by implication so is the advocacy of the suasory appeal.

By contrast, a negative mood gives notice that something is amiss. The individual should, therefore, devote cognitive resources to an analysis of the environment, including the persuasive message.

Our analysis shows how resistance can be reduced, and therefore logical persuasion achieved. We will show strategies such as training people to be appropriately resistant, postponing consequences to the future, focusing resistance on realistic concerns, fore­warning that a message will be coming, simply acknowledging resistance, raising self-esteem and a sense of efficacy, and consuming resistance. New insights, new influence strategies, and new facets of persuasion has emerged from a focus on resistance.

Here are some of the strategies that might apply to web sites and Internet Marketing:

1) First, we examine the pulse of society, the current beliefs and attitude. The current attitude, in the case of Health web sites, is Healthy Living and Healthy Eating. The website www.dinner-movie.com promotes healthy way of life, free of parasites and germs and then the link to HerbaLabs.org is very visible.

2) We usually designe websites with these three powerful components: affective, cognitive and behavioral. This tripartite model applies the concepts of "I like it", "I believe it", and "I will buy it".

3) We confirm the visitor autonomy, freedom by creating motivational pages that reasserts such freedom.

4) We give the visitor other choices and ways of treatments.

5) We make our health message indirect, legitimate, subtle and delicate.

6) We do not give a message to change, influential, and offensive that the visitors become defensive or argumentative.

Theory Detail: Brehm's theory of reactance was among the first to suggest that any message aimed at changing one's current attitudes and behaviors might, in fact, be perceived as a threat to freedom, whether in the best interest of the intended persuadee or not. When people perceive that freedoms are being threatened, psychological reactance is claimed to result. This reactance can result in a variety of responses including simply ignoring the persuasive attempt, derogating the source, and even producing even more of the undesired behaviors as a means of demonstrating choice or restoring attitudinal freedom. People do not appreciate being told how they should behave, especially in areas where they feel it is simply no one else's business. People at different developmental stages value independence and freedom and tend to reject many, if not most, authority-based appeals. Members of specific groups can be resistant to any appeal that they consider to be even remotely controlling. That people value freedom and their right to consider and make choices, and that they react negatively to attitudinal and behavioral constraints with some regularity, seems so obvious as to not require further elaboration.

7) By providing the visitor unbiased information, we allow the visitor to know all the sides and/or even to disagree with us.

8) We have strong arguments that justify and compel actions.

9) We have done our best to increase the site credibility and trust building. We have asked expert and Doctors to answer emails and visitor questions. We provide the source of our herbs and the book that these sources were published.

10) We provide consensus information.

11) We emphasize the scarcity of and the significance of the product or service we might offer.

12) We emphasize consistency, commitments, fighting what is not justice, and sticking with good principles.

13) We engage in a norm of Reciprocity and Consultancy.

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14) We use narratives to make sure the visitor knows how to use the product (see the section called "How I cured myself"). This strategy is very powerful and very effective. Let us examine this further:

Why might narrative persuasion strategies be especially suited to overcoming resistance? We believe that there are two general means by which narratives might overcome resistance, each of which reflects a variety of specific processes. First, narratives may overcome resistance by reducing the amount and effectiveness of counterarguing or logical consideration of the message. Second, narratives may overcome resistance by increasing identification with characters in the story.

Theory Detail: Narratives should reduce counterarguing in a number of ways. First, narratives may overcome biased processing (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) in response to counter-attitudinal messages. When presented with a communication advocating a position with which we do not agree, there is a tendency to ignore the message, counterargue the information, or belittle the source.

Also, the structure of narratives may impede forewarning of a counterattitudinal message. A story often unfolds with some degree of suspense-it is not always clear what situation might next befall a protagonist or how that protagonist will react to it. "Predictable" is commonly used as a criticism in popular film reviews. Studies have shown that individuals avoid attending to intonation that is incongruent with their existing attitudes (e.g., Sweeney & Gruber, 1984).

The content of narrative arguments may also be more difficult to discount than that of rhetorical arguments. Narratives are often concerned with relating the life experiences of other people, be they real or fictional. As Slater (2002) suggested, it may be especially difficult to counterargue the lived experiences of another real or fictional person. Although one might be able to argue against hypothetical examples ("That would never happen"), it is much more difficult to argue against another's "real" experiences as conveyed in a narrative. It is true that the experiences of fictional characters are not real. However, experiences of fictional characters that are construed as being plausible may be equally difficult to refute. As Green and Brock (2002) have noted, plausibility seems to be the yardstick by which we measure truth-the implausible must be untrue, regardless of whether it is fact or fiction, whereas the plausible, if not true, at least could be.

Narrative also differs from rhetoric in the way that messages are communicated. Whereas the aim of advocacy is to present clear, logical, specific arguments, the aim of narrative is to tell a story. In a narrative, beliefs are often implied as opposed to stated explicitly. This may inhibit counterarguing because it leaves the reader with no specific arguments to refute.

Implied beliefs, however, are not the only means by which narrative may inhibit counterarguing. We agree with others (e.g., Green & Brock, 2000; Slater, 2002), that the cognitive and emotional demands of absorption into a narrative leave readers with little ability or motivation to generate counterarguments. Absorption into a narrative is believed to be a convergent process, where all mental faculties are engaged in the narrative experience (Green & Brock, 2000). We lose access to real-world facts and suspend disbelief. Such a constriction of cognitive capacity should make it exceedingly difficult to scrutinize messages in the narrative and to generate counterarguments. The ability to counterargue is impaired not only because we have a limited amount of cognitive attention to devote to the endeavor, but also because many of the arguments we would call to mind are inaccessible. Add to this a lack of motivation brought about by a desire to remain engaged with the narrative (which counterarguing would necessarily disrupt), and counterarguing a narrative message should become increasingly difficult as absorption increases.

If narrative messages are less threatening than comparable rhetoric, then we may have a very powerful persuasive tool at our disposal. One of us (Zanna, 1993) has argued that resistance should result when listeners are faced with arguments that support an attitudinal position that falls outside their latitude of acceptance. That is, people have some degree of "wiggle room"-a latitude of acceptance-around their attitudes (see Sherif & Hovland, 1'961). The latitude of acceptance can vary in size, from very narrow (indicating a fairly rigid attitudinal position) to very wide (indicating a more flexible attitudinal position). On either side of the latitude of acceptance lie 1atitudes of rejection-attitudinal positions that are unacceptable or objectionable because they are considered too extreme. Consider the following example: People hold very different opinions on gay rights. On one end of the spectrum one finds those who feel that gay and lesbian relationships should not be recognized as legitimate, or indeed, should be outlawed.

Thus, narratives may indeed be useful in overcoming resistance by reducing negative thoughts associated with the persuasive message. In addition, we argue that narratives may also function by increasing positive thoughts about a behavior or an attitude object. This would be especially true if a liked protagonist behaves in a particular way or endorses a particular attitude, creating a positive association with the action or thc attitude. Identifying with a story character may result in persuasion in a number of ways.

We know from research on rhetorical persuasion that a liked source can be more persuasive under conditions in which it is more difficult to process arguments (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). We have already suggested some reasons why narratives, by their very nature, may limit the desire and ability to scrutinize messages, In addition, many narratives are visual presentations (e.g., film and television) in which the speed of the message is controlled, and this has implications for persuasion. Chaiken and Eagly (1983) found that a likeable source was more persuasive when the speed of exposure to rhetorical messages was forced (i.e., when presented on audio or video tape) than when the participants were allowed to self-pace the speed of exposure (i.e., when the same message was presented in written form). Therefore, it seems highly plausible that liking for a protagonist might be an important mediator of persuasion in the narrative context, especially when exposure is not self-paced.

Thus, the narrative context may be especially suited to overcoming resistance to persuasion. We believe the power of narratives lies in reducing the amount and effectiveness of counterarguing and through identification with narrative characters that leads to positive associations with specific beliefs and behaviors.

15) Let the visitor imagine the future.

16) Positive Thinking

Theory in Detail: Everyone, lay people and social psychologists alike, knows that "strong" arguments are more persuasive than "weak" arguments. If we take the strong versus weak contrast at face value, strong arguments induce persuasion but weak arguments do not. Put another way, presumably, persuaders who present cogent, rational arguments achieve the desired effect, whereas specious arguments fail to persuade. By this interpretation, weak arguments induce resistance in message recipients, who maintain their initial views and are not swayed.

The basic thrust of our view is that the persuasive impact of argument quality, as it has been operationalized, is much less about logic than it is about valence. That is, persuasion is more about suggesting good rather than bad consequences (valence) for the message recipient than it is about creating impeccably logical-a.k.a truthful or likely argumental. Much of this work supports the conclusion that the-valence of actively generated cognitive responses to a message underlies persuasion: When the valence of these thoughts is positive (i.e.; good consequences for the message recipient) then persuasion is likely to occur, but if the thoughts are negative there is evidence of true resistance sticking to one's guns.

In sum, the foregoing literature further informs the nature of resistance, which we define as no attitude change in response to a message. People may resist persuasive attempts for a variety of reasons. Under conditions of low involvement, resistance may result from decreased motivation to cognitively-engage with the issue and the arguments presented. When involvement is high, in contrast, resistance may be due to active counterarguing against the message content, in which case resistance implies the presence of a very persistent attitude that has stood a significant test. Additionally, people may resist persuasive messages because acceptance of a new may require more cognitive restructuring than the person is willing to undergo. Our definition of resistance assumes that the target of the persuasive message actively receives the message, thereby ensuring that some amount of force was applied that could either be resisted or could produce attitudinal change.

The research shows the varied role that argument quality played for the studies that used messages with counter-attitudinal positions, divided for whether involvement was manipulated to below or high, or not varied ("other"). As a generalization across all of these comparisons, strong messages were significantly more persuasive than their weak counterparts and weak tended to be associated with resistance rather than boomerang. Yet this tendency for strong arguments to effect greater change than weak arguments depended on level of involvement.

When resistance as a motivation is operating, individuals will do whatever it takes to prevent change.

17) Sidestep resistance. Most people sense that the most effective strategy to use on resistance is not to raise it in the first place. There are a variety of things one can do to sidestep resistance.

18) Redefine the relationship. Jolson (1997) instructed salespeople to avoid resistance by redefining the relationship with buyers. Thus, an insurance agent calls not to sell you insurance, but to help you assess the ways your assets might be at risk, to see how your need for protection might have changed over the past several years. Straight (1996) advised salespeople to redefine all sales pitches as a cooperative interaction, beginning by exploring the interests and needs of the buyer to see if a mutually acceptable basis for doing business can be established. Redefining the sales pitch as a cooperative interaction or as a consultation is a way of sidestepping the resistance that would be raised by a sales call. The "buyer beware" wariness does not translate into "consultee beware!" (Ales sandra, 1993).

A "consultation" has many implications. First, it implies that both consultant and target are working cooperatively on the target's goals. By implication, the target is in charge and, therefore, has less need to be wary. Second, a consultancy defines the situation more as a communal relationship (Clark, Mills, & Corcoran, 1989; Mills & Clark, 1994), which focuses attention away from negotiating an equitable exchange to developing a common plan. Third, a consultancy implies a longer-term relationship with more opportunities for interaction than a sales call. A long-term relationship implies that there will be future opportunities to reciprocate or repair any inequities that may result from this interaction.

19) Address resistance directly. Resistance that is raised by a request, an offer, or a message can be addressed directly. To do this, identify the source of resistance and remedy it.

20) Guarantees. One good strategy that addresses resistance directly is the guarantee. A money-back guarantee doesn't make the refrigerator any larger, colder, more efficient, or stylish. What a guarantee does is address and remove some of the customer's fears involved with buying a product. What if it doesn't work? What if it doesn't fit? What if it looks terrible?

Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, had his stores institute a no-questions asked, money-back guarantee. Just return the item and you will get a refund. Walton guessed that the increased sales prompted by the return policy would greatly outweigh the added expense of returns and refunds. The customer, looking at some product, asks "Is this the kind I need?", "Will it fit?", "Does it match?", and puts the item in the shopping cart knowing that the item can always be returned. Walton (1992) said, "The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: 'Satisfaction Guaranteed.' They're still up there, and they have made all the difference" (pp. 316-317). This Omega strategy is one of the things that has made Wal-Mart the largest retail corporation in the world.

Guarantees help reduce any reluctance. If one's partner is worried about feeling trapped at a party, one could say, "Anytime you want to go, just wave at me, and we'll leave immediately."

21) Address the resistance indirectly. Resistance may be dealt with more indirectly by taking away the need for resistance.

22) Pushing the Choice Into the Future. The more distant a choice is, the more it is determined by hope and aspiration and the less by fear and inconvenience. Thus, offers are more likely to be accepted if they require future action than if they require immediate action, e.g., "Buy now, pay later!", "Could I borrow your truck for the third Saturday of next month?", or "Let's start Weight Watchers, not now, but three months and four days from now."

23) Acknowledging Resistance. One of the ways to turn resistance against itself is to acknowledge it. Usually persuaders are reluctant to mention resistance, mistakenly believing that to identify it and label it is to give it power and credence. The approach-avoidance conflict theory of persuasion proposes that a persuasive message raises both an accepting consideration of the message and a counteractive resistance to that message. Although the message is overt, the resistance is to some extent covert, automatic, and hidden. However, if resistance is present, it is already powerful. Acknowledging the resistance, labeling it, and making its role overt may have the paradoxical effect of defusing its power and rendering that resistance less influential. We have conducted two studies to investigate whether acknowledging the resistance in a message would make the message more persuasive (Linn & Knowles, 2002b).

24) Minimize the Request. Breaking a large, unreasonable request down into smaller, more acceptable steps is one of the ways that Stanley Milgram (1965) used to create extraordinary compliance in his obedience studies. He asked people assigned to the role of "teacher" to deliver seemingly fatal shocks as punishment to a "learner" who repeatedly failed at a task. Rather than saying, "Give this guy 450 volts!", Milgram's experimenter said, "The learner made another error. He needs another shock, 15 volts stronger than the last one." The slippery slope of incremental increases makes it hard to resist giving just 15 volts more than the last time.

The even-a-penny-will-help social influence technique (Cialdini & Schroeder, 1976) provides a third example of minimizing a request. Solicitors went door-to-door in Phoenix and Tempe , Arizona , to collect money for the American Cancer Society. When solicitors asked, "Would you contribute? Even a penny will help!", they received donations from 50% of the households as opposed to 29% when they simply asked, "Would you contribute?" Importantly, the average donation was quite similar in both conditions. Thus, the phrase "Even a penny will help" served to reduce people's reluctance to donate without greatly changing how much they decided to donate. The mechanism appears to be that the "even a penny" made the request seem smaller and, thus, less necessary to resist (Brockner, Guzzi, Kane, Levine, & Shaplen, 1984; Reingen, 1978; Weyant & Smith, 1987).

25) Raise the Comparison. A request for $1 may engender resistance because it is compared to the alternative of not giving at all. A request for $10 that has been refused may create less resistance because the request for $1 seems like a bargain in comparison to the $10. Burger (1986) thought that invoking a high judgmental anchor might be one of the processes that explain why a price reduction is effective. Telling a customer that an item used to be $1 but is now only 75 cents makes it more attractive than simply telling a customer that the item sells for 75 cents. The function of the high anchor is to reduce resistance to the price by changing the implicit comparison price from zero (not buying the product) to some higher value (the original price). The shopper returns loaded down with purchases from a store-wide 50%-off sale and says, "Look at all the money I saved!" Thomas Mussweiler's (2000, 2002) research suggests that a variety of high numerical anchors might make a request seem more reasonable, even when the anchors are unrelated to the request, e.g., "There are two hundred uses for this eight-dollar item!" and "Eighty thousand customers have purchased this thirty Dollar service."

26) Counterarguing Resistance. Persuasion research has examined addressing resistance directly in its study of the persuasiveness of one-sided versus two-sided communications (Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949; Insko, 1962; Lumsdaine & Janis, 1953). Most of these studies have used political issues, such as abortion or gun control, and messages that attempt to sway opinion rather than instigate behavior. A one-sided message advocates one alternative, giving reasons for believing it. A two-sided message advocates this same alternative and gives the same reasons, but it also refutes the opposing side. As such, the two-sided message includes an Omega element, identifying arguments opposed to the side advocated and directly countering these claims.

Two-sided messages seem to be generally more effective than one-sided messages in situations where listeners would be resistant enough to the message to think of the counterarguments themselves. For instance, higher-educated listeners and listeners who were initially opposed to the direction advocated in the message respond better to two-sided messages (Hovland et aI., 1949; Faison, 1961). Two-sided messages are not always effective, however. Sometimes they lead to less change in the advocated direction, but these situations seem to be ones in which the refutations introduce resistance that was not initially there.

27) Raise Self-Esteem. Jacks and O'Brien (this volume) report that self affirmation reduces people's resistance to persuasion. That is, people who have been praised, reminded of crowning accomplishments, or allowed to succeed at a task are more likely to agree with, that is, less likely to resist, an unrelated persuasive message. The Jacks and O'Brien study suggests that activities that build up people's sense of efficacy, self-esteem, or confidence have the added effect of making people less wary. This makes psychological sense. If a person feels efficacious and accomplished, these feelings imply that the person can overcome any difficulty. These indirect strategies reduce resistance by reducing the need to be resistant.

28) Focusing Resistance. Sagarin and Cialdini report that training people to be critical of advertisements and to identify credible and noncredible sources for messages has two effects. First, training sometimes made people more resistant to illegitimate advertisements, especially if their susceptibility to influence had been demonstrated clearly. Second, the training made people less resistant to legitimate and appropriate sources. People who have been trained to be critical of advertisements end up being more persuaded by legitimate ads than do people who have not been trained. It is as if a general wariness that untrained participants applied to all advertisements was lifted from the legitimate ads after training. People who are provided with a sense of power, efficacy, control, and competence seem to have less need to be wary. They are more confident that they can handle or repair any breach. Pratkanis (2000) suggests another strategy that indirectly disables resistance.

He reminds us that influence is an interaction between two people who cast each other into specific roles (see also, Dolinski et aI., 2001). Assuming the role of "teacher" implicitly demands that the other person take the role of "learner"; the role of "expert" implies that the other person take the role of "novice." Pratkanis observes that an influencer can disable a target's resistance by casting the resister in the role of "expert." Ascribing the "expert" to the customer places the customer in a double-bind. To keep his status as an expert, the customer has to agree with the salesperson. Presumably, recasting the customer in a traditionally persuasive role (e.g., "Well, you're a teacher, you can explain better than I can why this is the best alternative") disables the customer's resistance and/or the customer's willingness to employ whatever resistance he might have.

29) Choices. If a person is going to be resistant to a suggestion, one effective strategy may be to offer that person a choice between alternatives. If there is only one alternative, then acceptance and resistance are focused on that alternative, creating the approach-avoidance conflict. However, offering a person a choice between alternatives allows that person to separate the acceptance and the resistance and to apply them to different alternatives. The motivation to resist is satisfied in the rejected alternative at the same time that the approach motivation is satisfied in the accepted alternative. Thus, for children who are resistant to bedtime, the sensitive parent asks, "Do you want to brush your teeth first or do you want to put on your pajamas first?"

30) Reduce the chance of future regrets. The reinstatement of freedom explanation has remained pretty much intact over the years as the explanation for cognitive reactance. In light of the recent work on anticipated regret, we wondered whether there might be a feasible alternative explanation. We proposed that reactance findings might be reconceptualized in terms of the anticipation of the amounts of future regret for compliance versus reactance, That is, the choice to go against the dictates of another may be due, in part, to the amount of future possible regret that is anticipated for negative consequences after choosing either the "forbidden" or the "promoted" alternative, In that individuals reliably go against the demands of the other, it seemed possible that they anticipate greater regret if negative outcomes follow compliance with the dictates of another than if the same negative outcomes follow defiance against the dictates. To minimize future regret, individuals will exhibit reactive behavior rather than compliance.

31) Tailored Information. Websites act as tools when they tailor information, offering people content that is pertinent to their needs and contexts. Compared to general information, tailored information increases the potential for attitude and behavior change (Beniger, 1987; Dijkstra et al., 1998; Jimison, Street, & Gold, 1997; Nowak et al., 1999; Strecher et al., 1999; Strecher et al., 1994).

One notable example of a tailoring technology is the Chemical Scorecard Web site (www.scorecard.org), which generates information according to an individual's geographical 10 cation in order to achieve a persuasive outcome. After people enter their zip code in this Web site, the Web technology reports on chemical hazards in their neighborhood, identifies companies that create those hazards, and describes the potential health risks. Although no published studies document the persuasive effects of this particular technology, outside research and analysis suggests that making information relevant to individuals increases their attention and arousal, which can ultimately lead to increased attitude and behavior change (Beniger, 1987; MacInnis & Jaworski, 1989; MacInnis, Moorman, & Jaworski, 1991; Strecher et al., 1999).

Although our findings suggest that reactance is spontaneous, one may wonder why reactance wou1d be relativly automatic process. Western culture values autonomy, self-determination, and independence (e.g., Bandura, 1997; Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Triandis, 1995), and that the importance of these values is reinforced often and from a very early age. Thus, the need for autonomy becomes a chronic construct that automatically guides behavior (Higgins, King,&: Mavin, 1982). Even though compliance may not be a spontaneous response in influence situations, it certainly may triumph in decision making once more controlled processes are invoked. For example, if people explicitly consider how much regret they might feel following an undesirable outcome if they follow or if they do not follow another's demands, their focus may shift from concerns about "me losing my freedom" to "me feeling bad for the actions I choose to take." Consciously choosing a course of action that rejects another's request is likely perceived as increasing the sense of volition, action (vs. inaction), and thus blameworthiness for one's bad decision, making the prospect of choosing an independent course of action that results in now-considered failure especially unattractive (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995; Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Markman et aI., 1995). To the extent that decision makers focus on how their not going along with another's demand is an action they are taking that could result in undesirable consequences, they may find compliance more attractive. Again, this line of reasoning is consistent with our empirical findings (Crawford et aI., 2002).

 

32) Why do predictions of future behavior increase compliance rates?

The key to increasing compliance rates by predicting the future is that the prediction of a behavior arouses less resistance than actually committing to the behavior. It is simply far easier for one to predict that one will do something than to agree to do it. Agreeing to an action in the "hypothetical future" is benign and one need not resist any direct persuasive attempt. Thus, the technique of increasing compliance through future prediction works by diminishing the negative aspects associated with compliance. In this way, resistance is weakened.

 

33) Imagining and Explaining Hypothetical Future Events

Similar to the effects of predicting the future on subsequent judgments and behavior, simply imagining or explaining the future can increase one's subjective likelihood that an event will occur. Thus, Carroll (1978) asked participants to imagine one or the other outcome of the 1976 presidential election (prior to its occurrence). Those who imagined a victory by Carter judged that outcome as more likely, and those who imagined a Ford victory judged that Ford was more likely to win. Similarly, asking participants to imagine and explain a hypothetical victory by one or the other team in an upcoming football game very much influenced their judgments of who would win the game, with the team imagined as winning being seen as more likely to actually win (Sherman, Zehner, Johnson, & Rirt, 1983).

 

34) Self-Affirmation Theory and Resistance to Persuasion

Research has also shown that self-affirmations are most effective in obviating the need for attitude change when they are not related to the dissonance-arousing act. For example, Aronson, Blanton, and Cooper (1995) have shown that following a dissonance induction, individuals chose not to affirm the self in the domain that had been threatened; instead, they preferred to affirm the selfconcept in an unrelated domain. Further, Blanton, Cooper, Skurnik, and Aronson (1997) argued that self-affirmations make the standards that individuals have in that domain very salient. Therefore, affirmations that are relevant to dissonant behavior should not help reduce dissonance, but may, in fact, make people feel worse. In their research, when participants who had written a counter-attitudinal essay that contradicted the value of compassion were later affirmed on that value, the affirmation exacerbated dissonance and led to more attitude change compared to a no-affirmation control. Individuals who were self-affirmed in a domain unrelated to compassion, however, did not change their attitudes compared to no-affirmation controls. These findings suggest that only unrelated affirmations will mitigate the need for self-justifying attitude change in the dissonance paradigm.

 

35) Implicating the Self: A Self-Consistency View of Dissonance; Persuaion and attitude change using Dissonance

People strive for consistent views of themselves. If people feel reasonably positive about themselves, they see themselves as competent and moral human beings. Anything that challenges that view will result in dissonance. Cognitive inconsistency results in dissonance because good, competent, and moral people do not usually act in ways that run contrary to their beliefs. They do not convince other students that a dull task is interesting, they do not extol the virtues of marijuana to high school youngsters, they do not write essays about raising college tuition fees if they believe that the fees should not be raised. When people find that they have acted in ways that compromise their sense of competence or moral integrity, they are motivated to change their attitudes.

One implication of the self-consistency position is that people who do not chronically think of themselves as competent would not be as likely to change their attitudes following counterattitudinal behavior. That is, people with lower self-esteem should experience little dissonance after behaving in a counterattitudinal fashion. Self-esteem establishes an expectancy about how a person is likely to behave. When people violate that expectancy, dissonance is created. Several pieces of evidence converge to support this viewpoint. Aronson and Mettee (1968) manipulated what people thought about themselves. Those whose self-esteem had been lowered were less bothered by an attitude-discrepant act than were people whose self-esteem had been raised. Similarly, Glass (1964), Maracek and Mettee (1972), and Gibbons, Eggleston, and Benthin (1997) also found that dissonance arousal was lower for people with low self-esteem. In short, Aronson's view is that behavior that calls into question one's competence and morality, such as advocating something you do not believe in, creates cognitive dissonance, provided you expect positive outcomes for yourself-that is, that you have a positive sense of self-esteem.

 

36) Self-Affirmation

Claude Steele and his colleagues (e.g., Steele, 1988; Steele & Liu, 1983; Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993) have also linked the experience of dissonance to a person's self-esteem. Like the self-consistency position, the selfaffirmation view of dissonance holds that people are primarily motivated to affirm the competence and morality of their self-view. However, selfaffirmation makes a drastically different prediction when it comes to the role of self-esteem. Steele et al. (1993) argued that people with low selfesteem are the ones who feel particularly threatened when they engage in counterattitudinal behavior. Their self-view is already fragile, and acting in a counterattitudinal fashion further compromises their sense of competence. On the other hand, a solid sense of self-esteem can serve as a resource-a buffer against the feeling of incompetence. Steele, Spencer, and Lynch (1993) found that when people with high self-esteem engage in counterattitudinal behavior, they change their attitudes less than do people with low self-esteem. This, of course, is opposite to the prediction made by the self-consistency view.

It should come as no surprise that there are issues left unresolved. The SSM helps us understand why the self is sometimes involved in dissonance and sometimes not. It posits that all dissonance emanates from the same judgment: How shall I interpret the behavior I have chosen, and against what standard of judgment shall I make this interpretation? Dissonance is activated by an assessment of whether I have done something unwanted or aversive. However, the question of what is aversive has been expanded. It can be aversive because it violates my sense of what I expect of myself, or it can be aversive because it violates my normative judgment of what most people consider to be unwanted or immoral.

37) Evidence. We are now able to say with little reservation that an advocate "quotes" information in support of an argument and the recipients of message process the information as legitimate evidence, the advocate will be more persive than if the information was not presented or was not processed by receivers.

CONDITIONS FOR THE EFFECTIVE USE OF EVIDENCE

There are some very obvious conditions underlying the effective use of evidence. First, the must be some awareness that "evidence" indeed been presented. Second, the audien must be reasonably expected to process the mesage and the evidence. Finally, the audien must perceive the evidence to be legitimate. The traffic police officer carefully documents the calibration of the speed radar equipment to be used each day because that question of calibration will be the first one asked by the judge as the traffic cases come up in court. There are many different types and forms of evidence (see Reinard, 1991; Rothstein, Raeder, & Crump, 1997). In the vast majority of the research studies on evidence (for detailed reviews of the early research, see Reinard, 1988; Reynolds & Burgoon, 1983), the researchers operationalized evidence as testimonial quotes attributed (or not attributed) to a particular source (usually a person qualified to make the observation being made).

The strongest items in the scale are presented here:

The evidence presented in the message:

• was sufficient to prove the points being supported.
• was irrelevant to the conclusions drawn in the message.
• was not clear and understandable.
• contained clear and understandable statistical information.
• taken as a whole, supported the point being made.
• came from experts on the topic.

Considering what we know about evidence, the conditions for the effective use of evidence, and what we need to know, there is a strong future for researchers interested in the study of evidence. The quality and quantity of research relevant to the study of the use and effects of evidence have advanced far beyond the early stages of doubt about the worthiness of the enterprise. Now there is an evolving research literature base on which evidence researchers can draw. There might not be a flood of studies over the next few decades, but there should be a continuing steady stream of theses, dissertations, and research articles. Perhaps some entire academic departments may wish to make evidence research a focal point in their collective efforts at development and advancement.

 

38) Persuasion or attitude change;

SHARON SHAVITT MICHELLE R. NELSON

Attitude. During the 1950s and 1960s, a class of theories was proposed that was the first to focus attention on the motives or functions that attitudes serve for the individual. These functional theories of attitude held that attitudes serve a variety of purposes important to psychological functioning (Katz, 1960; Katz & Stotland, 1959; Kelman, 1958, 1961; Smith, Bruner, & White, 1956). Functional theories were the first to recognize attitudes as instrumental constructs designed to serve individuals' physical, social, and emotional needs.

In addition, attitudes likely serve any of a number of other motives. Many attitudes serve a utilitarian function (Katz, 1960; see also Smith et al., 1956), helping to maximize the rewards and minimize the punishments obtained from objects in the environment. Such utilitarian attitudes serve to summarize the outcomes intrinsically associated with objects and to guide behavioral responses that maximize one's interests. For example, one's attitude toward ice cream may serve a utilitarian function because it is likely to be based on the rewards (e.g., enjoyable taste) and punishments (e.g., weight gain) associated with ice cream and to guide behavior that maximizes benefits while minimizing costs (e.g., eating low-fat ice cream).

Finally, attitudes can serve to build and maintain self-esteem in a variety of ways. The original functional theories focused on psychodynamic mechanisms by which attitudes support self-esteem, suggesting that attitudes can serve as defense mechanisms for coping with intrapsychic conflict (Katz, 1960; Smith et aI., 1956). The assumption was that attitudes distance the self from threatening out-groups or objects by projecting one's unacceptable impulses onto them. This analysis was particularly pertinent to the conceptualization of prejudiced attitudes and resulted in important contributions in this domain (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Katz, Sarnoff, & McClintock, 1956; McClintock, 1958; for a review and critique, see Shavitt, 1989).

Attitudes serve a self-esteem maintenance function in other ways as well. Indeed, recent research has shown that attitudes toward a variety of targets are motivated by their implications for self-assessment (Dunning, 1999; Klein & Kunda, 1993, 1994). For instance, attitudes toward people with whom we affiliate are based in part on their implications for self-enhancing social comparison (Tesser & Campbell, 1983). Attitudes that associate the self with successful groups (e.g., winning sports teams) may be based on their implications for boosting self-esteem through a process of "basking in reflected glory" (Cialdini etal.,1976).

Functional theories have been influential and widely cited in the domain of attitudes and persuasion. In particular, they have offered critical insights into persuasion processes. Functional theories held that in order to change an attitude, it is necessary to know the motivational basis for that attitude. The central principle of these theories is that attitudes that serve different functions will change in response to different types of appeals.

Personality Differences ; High Self-Monitoring and Low Self-Monitoring; who are your audiences?

The focus of this research is on the contrasting aspects of the social identity function. Snyder and DeBono (1985) suggested that high self-monitoring individuals, who strive to fit into various social situations, should tend to form attitudes that guide behavior appropriate to the relevant reference groups in each situation. This, they argued, implies that high self-monitors' attitudes generally serve to establish their public identity (what Smith et al., 1956, labeled the social adjustment function). By contrast, low self-monitoring individuals, who strive to remain true to their inner values and preferences, should tend to form attitudes that reflect and express their true selves and establish their private identities (what Katz, 1960, labeled the value-expressive function). Research has generally supported these assumptions, suggesting that personality differences tend to predict differences in the functions that one's attitudes tend to serve.

 

CONSEQUENCES OF ATTITUDE FUNCTIONS

Persuasion Consequences

As mentioned earlier, one of the key predictions of functional theory is that messages will be persuasive to the extent that they match the functional underpinnings of the attitude they target. This matching hypothesis, as it has come to be known, has received extensive empirical support across studies using a variety of functional operations and outcome measures (e.g., DeBono, 1987; Prentice, 1987; Shavitt, 1990; Shavitt et al., 1992; Snyder & DeBono, 1985, 1987; Spivey, Munson, & Locander, 1983).

For instance, DeBono (1997) showed that persuasive appeals are accepted by high self-monitors to the extent that the appeals address the social adjustive function (e.g., messages about the consensus of their peers). By contrast, appeals are accepted by low self-monitors to the extent that the appeals address the value-expressive function (e.g., messages about the values reflected by the advocated attitude). In the context of advertising, Snyder and DeBono (1985,1987) showed that high self-monitors respond more favorably to image-oriented ads (social adjustive appeals), whereas low self-monitors respond more favorably to ads about product quality (what Snyder & DeBono called value-expressive appeals).

 

Information Processing Consequences

What processes underlie this matching effect? A variety of answers to this question have been offered. Lavine and Snyder (1996) showed that the effect can be mediated by the perception that functionally matched messages are higher in quality. In other words, matched messages may induce favorably biased processing of their content. By contrast, DeBono (1987) suggested that the effect is largely a peripheral process that does not require the processing (or even the presence) of substantive message arguments.

However, several studies (including DeBono, 1987, Study 1) have indicated that functionally matched messages can trigger elaborated processing of message elements. Indeed, this processing can be relatively objective, resulting in counterarguments as well as supportive responses (DeBono & Harnish, 1988; Petty & Wegener, 1998; Shavitt, Swan, Lowrey, & Wanke, 1994). For instance, DeBono and Harnish (1988) demonstrated that an attractive source can stimulate elaborated processing of message arguments among high self-monitoring persons, whereas an expert source can stimulate such processing among low self-monitors. Therefore, high self-monitors agreed with an expert source regardless of the quality of the arguments that he presented (i.e., expertise served as a peripheral cue regarding the merits of the message) but agreed with an attractive source only when he presented strong arguments. By contrast, low self-monitors agreed with an attractive source regardless of argument strength but agreed with an expert source only when he presented strong arguments.

Similarly, Petty and Wegener (1998) showed that matching the substantive content of a message to the attitude function influences the degree of scrutiny that the message receives. Specifically, the attitudes of high and low self-monitors were strongly affected by the strength of message arguments when those arguments matched rather than mismatched the functional basis of their attitudes.

Finally, Shavitt et al. (1994) demonstrated that the attractiveness of endorsers in an ad, a message element that is particularly relevant to social identity goals, is used as a shortcut or cue to product evaluation when utilitarian goals are made salient (and involvement is low), whereas it is scrutinized as relevant information about the image of the product when social identity goals are made salient (and involvement is high). In other words, the attractiveness or unattractiveness of endorsers elicits greater scrutiny and elaboration when their presence is relevant to the functional basis of the attitude. When recipients are involved in evaluating the focal product with social identity goals in mind, the presence of endorsers who are less than attractive may be worse than no endorser at all.

 

Implications for Predicting Long-Term Message Effectiveness

If function-relevant material in a message can elicit increased scrutiny, then one might expect thoughts that reflect the by-products of such scrutiny to be more important to persuasion than other thoughts. This would be expected both because such thoughts may reflect more systematic processing and because such thoughts are relevant to the goals associated with one's attitude. Thus, to the extent that cognitive responses to a message are functionally relevant, those thoughts should also link more closely to one's attitudes.

Will function-relevant thoughts be more important in predicting attitudes than thoughts that reflect other functional goals? This issue was investigated in the context of a study on long-term advertising effectiveness (Nelson et aI., 1997). Long-term effects of a message are particularly important in consumer contexts, where delayed thoughts and attitudes about brands can be critical to the decisionmaking process. For example, one's first exposure to an advertisement for a new product may trigger cognitive responding but mayor may not trigger formation of an attitude toward the brand. Evaluating the brand might not become relevant until, say, one is at the grocery store a week later. At that point, the cognitive responses that one remembers may help to determine one's judgment.

In a two-session study of advertising effects, Nelson et al. (1997) investigated the role of functionally relevant cognitive responding to an ad in predicting ad persuasiveness, focusing on the functions associated with product categories and personality categories. For instance, it was expected that the relevance of listed thoughts to the function associated with the advertised product would influence the predictiveness of those listed thoughts-perhaps because functionally relevant thoughts reflect more systematic processing than do functionally irrelevant thoughts.

In the first session, participants were shown print advertisements for a number of products varying in the functions they were expected to engage (e.g., utilitarian products such as a toothbrush, social identity products such as flowers, multiple-function products such as mineral water). The product functions were determined by pretesting. The ads employed were for fictitious brands but were designed to appear realistic. Utilitarian and social identity claims were balanced within each ad. Therefore, there was consistency in the type of advertising content used across products and function categories, and participants could focus on any combination of utilitarian claims or social identity claims for any product. After looking at each ad, participants listed their thoughts. A week later, participants returned and reported their attitudes toward the advertised brands and then attempted to recall the thoughts that they had listed during the first session. Finally, participants completed several other measures, including the 25 -item Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder, 1974).

 

THEORIES OF PERSUASION

The results indicated that the types of thoughts that tended to be more predictive of attitudes at a I-week delay were those that were more relevant to the functional basis of the attitude. Specifically, there was a consistent trend for the predictive value of each thought type to vary with the type of product (see Table 8.1). For utilitarian products, the utilitarian thoughts that one recalled at a delay were significantly more consistent with attitude than were the social identity thoughts that one recalled. The opposite was the case, although not significantly, for social identity products. These findings are consistent with assumptions about the functions associated with these product categories, as the types of thoughts that were predictive corresponded with the ascribed functions of the products.

In addition, interactive effects were found for product and personality, which might be explained in terms of how well the functions of the product correspond to the goals of the individual. In general, the thoughts that low self-monitors listed initially, as well as the thoughts that they recalled (see Table 8.1), were more consistent with their attitudes than were those of high self-monitors. More important, for low self-monitors, recalled utilitarian thoughts were significantly more consistent with attitudes for utilitarian products than with those for social identity products. The reverse was true for high self-monitors, for whom recalled social identity thoughts were significantly more consistent with attitudes for social identity products than with those for utilitarian products. Thus, the responses that participants recalled to an advertisement correlated with persuasion to the extent that the function associated with the responses and with the target product matched the goals of the individual.

These findings suggest that cognitive responses that "match" the functional basis of one's attitudes may play a more important role in persuasion than do other cogllltive responses. This makes sense from the functional theory perspective of attitudes as goalrelevant constructs; that is, thoughts that reflect one's goals matter more than thoughts that do not. It also fits well with research described earlier that showed enhanced processing of function-relevant material. Apparently, the by-products of such processing con tin1io be important in long-term persuasion.

 

39) Language; Persuasive messages contain various elements, but one of the most critical is language.

LAWRENCE A. HOSMAN

ASSUMPTIONS AND QUESTIONS UNDERLYING RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE AND PERSUASION

The central question that scholars of language and persuasion address is deceptively simple:

What effects do variations in the phonological, syntactical, lexical, textual, and use elements of a message have on persuasion?

Two aspects of the question are critical. First, what language variations are important? As Bradac, Bowers, and Courtright (1979) pointed out, variations in nearly all of the levels of language can be important. Later sections of this chapter review language variations that scholars have studied.

The second critical element is what aspects of the persuasion process these language variations affect. Most research assumes that language variations affect one of three elements of the persuasion process: judgments of the speaker, message comprehension or recall, or attitude toward the message. Numerous studies have focused on judgments of the speaker. The assumption is that language variation affects the impression formation process, and in a persuasion context an important impression affected is that of the speaker. Language variations may affect listeners' judgments of a speaker's source credibility, attractiveness, likability, and/or similarity. Other research has examined the impact of language variation on listeners' comprehension, recall, and/or understanding of a message. Finally, some research has investigated the effect of language variations on attitude toward the message. Research focusing on judgments of the speaker and message comprehension or recall implicitly assumes that effects in these two areas will ultimately affect attitude toward the message and persuasion. That is, research assumes that if a particular language variation has a positive impact on speaker credibility, it will also have a positive impact on attitude toward the message. These assumed links among various elements are intuitively plausible but do not always exist. As discussed later in this chapter, researchers need to investigate these assumptions more explicitly.

Although the research literature is sparse, it suggests that the complexity with which persuasive materials are written affects their outcomes.

Research has also begun to look at units larger than a sentence. Thorson and Snyder (1984) looked at the structure of television commercial scripts and their impact on the recall of these commercials. They used an "advertising language model" based on Kintsch and van Dijk's (1978) macropropositional model of discourse. This model provides several structural measures of advertising content. They found that several of these measures predicted commercial recall.

Adaval and Wyer (1998) studied the effect of narratives on the perceived attractiveness of vacation promotion literature. Two travel brochures described a vacation. One brochure described the vacation in a narrative form, while the other brochure described it in a list form. The authors also looked at the effect of undesirable information being contained in the two conditions. The results showed that participants evaluated vacations presented in a narrative form more positively than when the vacations were presented in a list form. This effect was enhanced when the brochure included undesirable information about the vacation site. That is, participants attended to negative information more when presented in a list form than when presented in a narrative form. The effects of a narrative information presentation were also enhanced when pictures accompanied the text.

The nature of a sentence's grammatical construction or of a narrative's construction has important persuasive consequences. Grammatically complex materials are more difficult to recall than grammatically simple material. This research has yet to address whether these differences have consequences for other aspects of the persuasion process such as speaker judgments and attitude change.

 

Lexical Level

Persuaders' choices about the words to use and the meaning of words in a persuasive message are critical. This section reviews research that has looked at the effect of lexical variation and semantic variation on the persuasion process.

Lexical Diversity. Lexical diversity refers to the vocabulary richness or vocabulary range that speakers exhibit and is assessed via a typetoken ratio (TTR)-the number of different words in a message (types) divided by the total number of words (tokens). A low TTR means that a speaker's vocabulary is relatively redundant, while a high TTR means that it is relatively diverse. Lexical diversity affects listeners' judgments of speakers through a principle of "preference for complexity" (Bradac, Desmond, & Murdock, 1977). Simply stated, listeners prefer complexity because it is interesting, and lexical diversity should be preferred because it represents more complex lexical choice.

In a series of studies, Bradac and his associates (e.g., Bradac, Courtright, Schmidt, & Davies, 1976; Bradac, Davies, Courtright, Desmond, & Murdock, 1977; Bradac, Desmond, & Murdock, 1977) supported this principle, finding that lexical diversity is directly related to judgments of a speaker's competence and socioeconomic status and to perceptions of message effectiveness. Another study (Burroughs, 1991) found that these types of evaluations occurred when adults evaluated child speakers.

Subsequent studies (e.g., Bradac et aI., 1976; Bradac &Wisegarver, 1984) found that ascribed speaker status interacted with diversity to affect a number of speaker judgments. A high-status speaker exhibiting high lexical diversity was perceived positively, while a high-status speaker exhibiting low lexical diversity was perceived negatively. In addition, some studies (Carpenter, 1990; Dulaney, 1982) have found that those who lie or are duplicitous exhibit higher lexical diversity than do those who do not lie. The explanation for this latter finding is that the process of lying requires speakers to plan their utterances more carefully, thus increasing the use of new words.

In sum, these studies show that the richness of a speaker's vocabulary is related to listeners' judgments about a speaker's credibility or status. No research has explored the relationship between lexical diversity and attitude change. The preference for complexity principle would suggest that high lexical diversity would have a positive effect on the persuasion process.

Language Imagery and Vividness. Another aspect of the lexicon studied by language and persuasion scholars is verbal imagery or the ability of words to elicit images in listeners. Some researchers call this the vividness effect. Some words or expressions seem to elicit more imagery than others. Typically, concrete words, use of detail, and/or emotional language should elicit more images or be more vivid than should abstract or unemotional language. Similarly, one would expect verbal imagery or vividness to have more of a positive impact on persuasion than would pallid language. Vivid language should be more memorable and accessible and should more favorably influence attitude change than should pallid language (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). These predictions are consistent with theories that focus on attitude accessibility (Fazio, 1989), theories such as information processing (McGuire, 1969) that include attention to the message, and theories such as the HeuristicSystematic Model (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993) that incorporate the availability of heuristics as part of the persuasion process.

Despite these expectations, research on the persuasive impact of language imagery is contradictory. Some early studies found that verbal imagery had a positive impact on persuasion. For example, Rossiter and Percy (1978) found that concrete words produced nearly twice as many favorable attitudes toward a product than did abstract words. An important literature review (Taylor & Thompson, 1982) concluded, however, that no conclusive evidence existed demonstrating that vividly presented information was more persuasive than nonvividly presented information.

Other scholars have argued that the effect of vivid information depends on other receiver characteristics. Block and Keller (1997) found, for example, that vivid information in health communications was more persuasive when the receivers were high in self-efficacy.

Language Intensity. Hamilton and Hunter (1998) noted that two major approaches exist to the definition of language intensity. The first views language intensity as a stylistic feature of messages. Intense language could include emotion-laden words, such as horrible and excellent, or specific graphic language, such as astronomical and completely. The second approach views intensity as reflecting the extremity of a source's position on an issue (e.g., Bowers, 1963). A speaker describing a government policy as horrible is using more intense language than a speaker who describes the policy as disconcerting, and this shows greater deviation from attitudinal neutrality on this issue.

As this second causal path suggests, the positive correlation between language intensity and attitude change may depend on the message's position-whether the persuasive message is attitudinally congruent with or discrepant from receivers' attitudes. The metaanalysis supported this. When a message was attitudinally congruent, language intensity had little persuasive impact. However, when a message was attitudinally discrepant, language intensity's effect was dependent on a receiver's ego involvement. With a receiver high in ego involvement, language intensity had a negative relationship with attitude toward the source. When the receiver was low in ego involvement, language intensity positively affected attitude toward the source. A field study of language intensity's effects in skin cancer prevention messages supported this meta-analysis (Buller, Borland, & Burgoon, 1998). This study found that high-intensity messages produced less attitude change in listeners not intending to increase their skin protection than in those intending to increase their skin protection, particularly when the message drew explicit conclusions for the listeners.

Thus, the diversity of words used by persuaders, the images words create in listeners' minds, the intensity of their language choices, and the vagueness of their language choices affect judgments of speaker credibility and attitude change. As noted in this section, the vividness research suffers from inconsistent operationalizations of the concept. Some operationalizations of vividness are similar to those used in the equivocal language research. Conceptual overlaps between the work in language intensity and equivocal language also exist. Equivocal language also hides the degree to which a speaker's attitude deviates from neutrality. These are issues for future researchers to pursue.

The other line of research has focused on the individual components contained in the styles and their implications for the impression formation process. This chapter earlier discussed one of these components-language intensity. Other studies (e.g., Bradac & Mulac, 1984a; Haleta, 1996; Hosman, 1989; Hosman & Siltanen, 1994) examining individual components have found that participants perceive speakers exhibiting hedges and hesitations as less credible, attractive, and dynamic than speakers not using them. Polite forms, however, constitute something of an anomaly. Bradac and Mulac (1984a) found that listeners perceive polite forms to be as powerful as a powerful style. Other researchers (e.g., Lakoff, 1975) have contended that polite forms are a powerless form of speech.

Two links exist between power of speech style and the persuasion process. The first is an indirect link among power of speech style, impression formation, and attitude change. Most of the research shows that a powerful speech style will enhance a speaker's perceived credibility, attractiveness, dynamism, and sociability, and to the extent these impressions will positively affect attitude change, a powerful style should be more persuasive.

Two studies (Erickson et aI., 1978; Hahn & Clayton, 1996) found that a powerful speech style resulted in a more favorable verdict than did a powerless style. A meta-analysis of studies prior to 1991 found that powerful speech styles produced positive effects on attitude change (Burrell & Koper, 1998). One recent study (Sparks et aI., 1998) suggested that differences in the ability to find direct effects of power of speech style may be due to the modality of message presentation. The authors found that a powerful speech style was more persuasive than a powerless style when the message was presented via audiotape, but no significant differences between styles emerged when the messages were written.

Summary on language: More than 20 years ago, Miller and Burgoon (1978) lamented on the decline of research on language and persuasion. Since then, research has slowly increased as scholars in fields such as advertising, marketing, psychology, and communication investigate a variety of language variables. Some variables have been investigated extensively. We know, for example, the impact of lexical choices or standard and nonstandard language varieties on judgments of speaker credibility and attractiveness. We also have a better understanding of the factors that moderate and mediate the relationship between language intensity and attitude change.

At the same time, we still lack substantial knowledge about some important aspects of the relationship between language and persuasion. How do the various levels of language structure affect persuasion, and how do the various levels of language structure relate to each other in the persuasion process? For example, the syntactic complexity of a message may affect its recall or comprehension, but we are less able to draw conclusions about its impact on attitude toward the message. More generally, we have substantial knowledge about how some language variables affect attitude toward the speaker, but we have little (if any) information about how it affects the attitude toward the message. Alternatively, how do lexical diversity and syntactical complexity affect each other in a persuasive message?

The future of this area of research seems bright both theoretically and practically, but to achieve its potential, scholars must meet certain challenges. They should apply more systematic frameworks to organize their study of language variables. This chapter has suggested a process model of language attitudes as one possibility. A general model such as this not only helps to integrate research but also points to variables relatively unexamined such as the effect of listeners' moods on the processing of language variables.

Even using such frameworks, investigators must integrate more research into comprehensive theories of persuasion such as dualprocess models. These theories will help investigators to focus on how language affects attitude change and how listeners respond cognitively to language variables.

Finally, researchers must increasingly worry about the generalizability of their resultsgeneralizability that extends beyond the particular messages used in a study. Increasing the generalizability of results presents its own challenges, but being concerned with the issue is critical for practitioners to find the research valuable and useful.

 

39) Figurative Language and Persuasion; Metaphor;

PRADEEP SOPORY JAMES PRICE DILLARD

Public discourse is rife with figurative comparisons designed to change people's minds. Metaphor is the typical trope of comparison in such messages, although use of other nonliteral comparisons such as similes, analogies, and personifications is also common. Despite this widespread use, do we know whether figurative comparisons in persuasive message are really effective? And if so, what is the process by which they achieve their impact? This chapter reviews possible answers to these two questions. After providing some background, we start by summarizing what is known about effect of metaphor on attitude and communicator credibility, sketch out relevant theories of metaphor comprehension, evaluate different views of metaphor and persuasion, and finally make suggestions for future research.

 

TERMINOLOGY AND SCOPE

A metaphor is customarily defined as a linguistic phrase of the form "A is B," such that a comparison is suggested between the two terms leading to a transfer of attributes associated with B to A. For example, "The global marketplace is a dictatorship" (from a flyer advertising a protest march) consists of two parts, A (global marketplace) and B (dictatorship), such that there is a comparison between A and B and properties associated with dictatorship are transferred to global marketplace. The two terms, A and B, are seen as representing different concepts or conceptual domains, and various theorists have used different terminology to describe the two parts. The more recent use is target and base (e.g., Gentner, 1983) for A and B, respectively.

Simile, analogy, and personification, albeit different in some surface respects, cognitively function similar to metaphor in that all three also involve comparison of concepts or systems of concepts.! Hence, their study is generally subsumed into that of metaphor. Accordingly, in this chapter, we use metaphor as a general term to refer to all tropes of comparison.

Usually the word metaphor is used to denote, as above, a particular language device or a characteristic of language, what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) called linguistic metaphor. In this sense, metaphor is a rhetorical property that is observed in spoken or written language. However, the term metaphor is also used in two other ways: as a cognitive process and as a cognitive structure. In the first instance, metaphor is a conceptual process by which one mental entity is understood via mapping to another mental entity. This is commonly referred to as metaphorical processing or reasoning. In the second instance, metaphor is a structure inherent in mental entities that come about as a consequence of a cognitive mapping process. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) referred to such metaphorically structured concepts as conceptual metaphors. This section employs the term metaphor in all three senses; and distinguishes among them wherever necessary.

 

METAPHOR EFFECTS ON ATTITUDE AND COMMUNICATOR CREDIBILITY

Do metaphor-using messages exert a greater effect on attitude and communicator credibility than do literal messages? Sopory and Dillard (in press) provided an answer to this question in their meta-analytic review of the empirical literature on metaphor and persuasion. The main results of their meta-analysis are summarized briefly in what follows as nine propositions about the effects of metaphor.

Proposition 1: Relative to their literal counterparts, metaphorical messages are more likely to produce greater attitude change. The results of the meta-analysis clearly revealed that metaphor-using messages do exhibit a small persuasive edge over literal-only messages for attitude change (r = .07). This relationship was positive across all moderator variable conditions except 2. In other words, the meta-analysis uncovered only 2 conditions (out of 14) in which the use of metaphor may be detrimental to the goal of generating agreement with the message advocacy. Thus, the positive effect of metaphor on attitude seems to be a reliable one.

The small effect size found here is not unlike the magnitude of effects obtained meta-analytically for other message variables in persuasion research. For example, a two-sided message containing refutation of counterarguments is superior to a one-sided message by roughly the same effect size of .07 (Allen, 1998). Similarly, Dillard (1998), after perusing effect sizes for nine different persuasion meta-analyses, observed that all were less than .30 and that their mean was only .18, which may be considered to be on the small side by Cohen's (1987) criteria. Hence, the effect of metaphor on attitude is in the same order as other observed effects in persuasion research. Moreover, the effect of metaphor becomes more pronounced when particular moderator variables are taken into account, as the results that follow show.

Proposition 2: Use of 1 metaphor is associated with greater attitude change than is use of larger numbers. A metaphor-using persuasive message may contain any number of metaphors. In the message pool collated from the different studies, three ranges of metaphor use were identified: 1,2 to 8, and 9 or more. The effect sizes from the meta-analysis showed that it was 1 metaphor that was associated with maximum attitude change (r = .08) as compared to the 2 to 8 (r = .06) and 9 or more (r = .02) ranges. Thus, less may be more when it comes to using figurative comparisons in a persuasive message, as there is a decreasing suasory effect with increasing number.

Proposition 3: Extended metaphors are associated with greater attitude change than are nonextended metaphors. Metaphors may be extended or nonextended. An extended metaphor uses one base to construct a number of different sub-metaphors with the same target. As seen on a flyer, for example, the base dictatorship may be used for the following metaphors, all with the target global marketplace:

"The dictatorship of the global marketplace has set up a framework of rules that citizens have not voted for," " ... in the name of the good of the citizenry, unaccountable despotic power given to corporations and elites ... ," and " ... global marketplace ... conspiring to chain dissenters in the dungeons of media non-access." A nonextended metaphor, by contrast, uses a given base only once to suggest a comparison with a target.

The effect sizes from the meta-analysis showed that extended metaphors (r = .09) were associated with greater attitude change than were nonextended metaphors (r = .05). Thus, a message intending to use multiple metaphors to affect attitude may be better off using the same base repeatedly than using many distinct bases.

Proposition 4: Metaphors are associated with greater attitude change when positioned in the introduction of a message" rather than in the conclusion or the body of the message. A metaphor may be placed in the introduction, body (i.e., middle), or conclusion of a message. The effect sizes from the meta-analysis showed that metaphors were more persuasive when placed in the introduction (r = .12) than when placed in the body (r = .07) or the conclusion (r = -.01) of a message. Similarly, in the case of a message with multiple metaphors, a trope may first appear in the message in either the introduction, the body, or the conclusion of the message. Results for "first appearance in introduction" and for "first appearance in body or conclusion" also showed a similar pattern. Thus, using a metaphor to provide a title to a message or to frame a message at the beginning may be more persuasive than using it to summarize the message.

Proposition 5: Metaphors are associated with greater attitude change when there is high familiarity of the target than when there is low familiarity. The target and base of a metaphor may have varying degrees of familiarity for a message recipient. To facilitate transfer of information from base to target (as a metaphor does), the familiarity of the base is generally high. By contrast, the target term of a metaphor (typically the attitude object) may be familiar or unfamiliar to an audience of a particular message. For example, "Aid to Colombia is like ... " is a low-knowledge target for North American undergraduate audiences, while "Seat belt use is like ... " is most likely a high-knowledge target. The effect sizes from the meta-analysis showed that metaphors were more persuasive when there was high familiarity of the target (r = .07) than when there was low familiarity (r = .06). Thus, having more, rather than less, familiarity with the target of a metaphor may foster enhanced persuasion.

Proposition 6: Metaphors are associated with greater attitude change when more novel than when less novel. Novelty of a metaphor for a given message recipient may be defined in terms of knowledge of the similarities between the two terms of a metaphor. 2 That is, novelty of an "A is B" equation depends on whether the similarities between A and B exist in the minds of a message recipient prior to encountering the metaphor. For example, the common saying, "She has a heart of gold," is of low novelty because the correspondences between the base and target already exist in the minds of people prior to the reception. On the other hand, the stanza from a classical Sanskrit poem, "Now the great cloud cat, darting out his lightning tongue, licks the creamy moonlight from the saucepan of the sky" (Ingalls, 1968, p. 104), will be of high novelty because (most likely) the similarities between cloud and cat do not exist for readers prior to comprehending this metaphor. It should be emphasized that the focus is on the familiarity of the similarities between the terms and not the familiarity of the target and base themselves per se. For example, people may be highly familiar with the terms cloud and cat, but the similarities between the two might not exist in their minds prior to encountering the metaphoric expression.

The effect sizes from the meta-analysis showed that novel metaphors (r = .12) were associated with more attitude change than were non-novel ones (r = .01). Thus, metaphors that create new similarities between entities, as their function has been traditionally described, may be more persuasive than ones that do not produce such new linkages.

Proposition 7: Metaphors in the audio modality are associated with greater attitude change than are metaphors in the written modality. People encounter persuasive messages through different media such as print, radio, and television. The effect sizes from the meta-analysis revealed that metaphors presented in the audio modality were more persuasive (r = .09) than those presented in the written modality (r = .06). Thus, metaphorusing messages may be more effective when listening, when one can process a message only once in a limited amount of time, than when reading, which allows for more processing time as well as multiple reviews of the message.

Proposition 8: Metaphor messages used by low-credibility communicators are associated with greater attitude change than those used by high-credibility communicators. Message recipients may perceive communicators as having low or high credibility prior to processing a message. The effect sizes from the metaanalysis showed that messages containing metaphors were associated with greater attitude change when the communicators had low credibility (r = .12) than when the communicators had high credibility (r = .02). Thus, message sources with low credibility may benefit more from using metaphors to affect attitudes than may message sources with high credibility.

Effect of Metaphor on Communicator Competence, Character, and Dynamism Judgments

Perceptions of credibility of a communicator can be determined at two points during message processing: pre-message, or before the audience members process a message (initial credibility), and post-message, or after the receivers process the message (terminal credibility). Metaphor's persuasive effects can also be assessed in terms of its impact on judgments of terminal credibility.

Many writers have asserted that communicators who use metaphorical language are judged more favorably than those who use literallanguage (e.g., Aristotle, 1952; Bowers & Osborn, 1966; McCroskey & Combs, 1969; Osborn & Ehninger, 1962). However, credibility is not a unitary construct (Berlo, Lemert, & Mertz, 1969; McCroskey & Young, 1981), and there are a number of subcomponents of credibility, with the three most common being competence, character, and dynamism. 3 For the credibility meta-analysis, 12 data-based studies with a metaphor versus literal experimental design and at least one of these three credibility aspects as the dependent variable were used. These studies yielded 20 metaphor-literal comparison data points for the effect size (r) with approximately 2,000 participants.

Proposition 9: Metaphors are more likely to be effective for enhancing terminal communicator credibility judgments for the dynamism aspect than for competence and character aspects. Of the three post-message credibility facets, the effect of metaphor was functionally nonexistent for character and competence aspects. For the competence aspect of credibility, the effect size r was -.01. Analysis ofthe moderator variable of initial (low and high) credibility showed the same null results. Similarly, there was no effect of metaphor on the character aspect of credibility (r = -.02). For both low and high initial credibility communicators, use of metaphors again did not affect character judgments. On the other hand, the r for dynamism was .06. Furthermore, the effect for both low- and high-credibility communicators was posItIve. Thus, of the three facets of terminal credibility, metaphor has its strongest effect on judgments of communicator dynamism.

 

THEORIES OF METAPHOR COMPREHENSION

Several answers have been proposed to the question of how metaphor may achieve its persuasive effects. To help explicate and evaluate these varied explanations, the theories dealing with metaphor comprehension need to be presented first. There are many views of how metaphor is understood. The four that have been used to theorize about metaphor and persuasion are summarized in what follows.

The literal primacy view (Beardsley, 1962, 1976; MacCormac, 1985; Searle, 1979) sees metaphor as literally false or logically contradictory language, that is, a semantic anomaly. According to this view, there are three stages in the process of understanding a metaphorical expression: (a) deriving the literal meaning of the expression, (b) testing whether the literal meaning makes sense and consequently detecting an anomaly, and then (c) seeking an alternative meaning (i.e., the metaphorical meaning) because the literal meaning fails to make sense (for an elaborated discussion, see Gibbs, 1994). According to one variation of this view (e.g., MacCormac, 1985), when an interpreter confronts a semantic anomaly, cognitive tension is generated along with a desire to reduce it. By finding the nonliteral meaning of the literally false statement, the anomaly is resolved and the tension is dissipated.

While the literal primacy view treats metaphorical language as semantically deviant and exceptional, the next three positions reject the notion of metaphor as anomalous language. These theories assume that metaphoricity and literalness of language is a matter of degree and that the same general psychological mechanism underlies processing of both forms of language.

Ortony's (1979, 1993; see also Ortony, Vondruska, Foss, & Jones, 1985) salience imbalance theory uses the notion of salience of attributes to explain how metaphors are comprehended. Salience is defined empirically as the relative importance of an attribute; that is, the first attribute that comes to mind is the most salient, and so on. The theory says that a metaphorical expression of the type "A is B" is understood by constructing the ground (i.e., the set of shared attributes) by selecting only those attributes that have low salience for the target and high salience for the base. For example, the metaphor "Encyclopedias are gold mines" is understood by choosing for the ground attributes such as valuable nuggets and dig, which have a high salience for gold mines and a low salience for encyclopedias. If the two terms are reversed (i.e., "Gold mines are encyclopedias"), then a different set of the shared attributes would be chosen; because the attributes that would be highly salient for encyclopedias would be different.

Gentner's (1982, 1983, 1989; see also Gentner & Clement, 1988) structure mapping theory, using an associative network model of memory, proposes that instead of comparing lists of attributes, the relations among the attributes are compared for similarities to interpret a metaphor. Gentner (1983) linked metaphor explicitly to analogy and defined a metaphor as "an assertion that a relational structure that normally applies in one domain can be applied in another domain" (p. 156). This view posits that metaphors convey a system of connected knowledge, not a mere collection of independent facts. In interpreting a metaphor, people attempt to obtain a match between target and base by seeking a relational mapping. For example, the metaphor "Encyclopedias are gold mines" is interpreted by noting the common relation valuable nuggets found by digging rather than the independent similar attributes valuable nuggets and dig.

The conceptual structure theory (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987, 1993; Lakoff & Turner, 1989; see also Albritton, McKoon, & Gerrig, 1995; Gibbs, 1994) considers metaphor as a thought process and defines it as "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing or experience in terms of another" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 5). As a result of this metaphorical processing, long-term memory is organized as a system of metaphorical correspondences or mappings between different domains of experiences. These mappings are called conceptual metaphors. For example, the conceptual metaphor "Relationship is a journey" is a label for the mappings that exist in the long-term memory between the domains of relationship and journey. The conceptual system contains thousands of such correspondences among different domains that are used to produce and understand both conventional and novel metaphorical statements. For example, the expressions "Our relationship is on the right track," "We seem to be stuck and going nowhere," and "When did you end the relationship?" are conventional metaphors in which the domain of relationship is compared to the domain of journey. All of these expressions are understood via the conceptual metaphor "Relationship is a journey." Novel metaphorical expressions are understood by extending these preexisting conceptual metaphors through patterns of inferences authorized by them. For example, the novel metaphor "Hope their space shuttle doesn't blow up on launch" is understood by generalizing the existing mappings of "Relationship is a land journey" as a pattern of inferences to space journeys.

The preceding four theories of metaphor comprehension have been directly employed to derive different explanations of metaphor's persuasive impact. These metaphor and persuasion theories are examined next.

 

THEORIES OF METAPHOR AND PERSUASION

How does metaphor achieve its suasory outcomes? There are five general views of metaphor and persuasion available in the existing empirical literature that try to explain this process: pleasure/relief, communicator credibility, cognitive resources, stimulated elaboration, and superior organization. These views are evaluated next based on the results of the Sopory and Dillard (in press) metaanalysis and evidence from other relevant research.

Pleasure/Relief

The pleasure/relief view (e.g., Bowers & Osborn, 1966; Reinsch, 1971, 1974; Tudman, 1971) stems from the assumptions of the literal primacy view (e.g., Beardsley, 1962, 1967, 1976). There are two variants of this explanation, both arguing that a metaphorical expression is a semantic anomaly, recognition of which leads to negative tension that gets relieved when the metaphorical meaning is finally understood. In the persuasion literature, these three steps are called perception of defect/error, conflict (or recoil), and resolution. In the first variant, finding the metaphorical meaning, and thus the "unexpected similarities" between the target and base, is pleasurable. According to the second variant, finding the metaphorical meaning dissipates the negative tension, leading to relief. The reward of pleasure and relief leads to a reinforcement of the metaphorical meaning and the evaluation associated with it. By contrast, literal language does not pose any linguistic puzzle to resolve and consequently yields neither pleasure nor relief.

The data from the meta-analysis did not speak directly to the reinforcement principle of the pleasure/relief view. However, the assumptions of literal primacy theory that underlie this view are disputed by the results of the moderator analysis for modality of presentation. The literal primacy view suggests that the literal meaning of an expression is obligatorily understood before the metaphorical meaning is understood. As such, the comprehension of a metaphor should take longer than the comprehension of (equivalent) literal language. This should be an advantage for written modality by ensuring that cognizers have enough time to comprehend a message and, at the same time, depressing the likelihood of pleasure/relief in the audio modality. The results showed that audio modality was more persuasive, contradicting the prediction from the literal primacy view. In addition, Hoffman and Kemper (1987), after a review of reaction time studies, concluded that idioms, indirect requests, metaphors, and proverbs (i.e., different types of figurative language) did not take longer to be understood than did literal language. In fact, their review showed that some metaphors in the proper discourse context were processed faster than their literal counterparts in the same discourse context.

The assumption of the pleasure/relief view that metaphor represents defective language such that a prior step to understanding metaphorical meaning is identification of a defect is also untenable. Research shows that people draw metaphorical meanings out of metaphorical statements long before they judge such expressions anomalous in any way (McCabe, 1983). The perception of error and tension steps may perhaps be fruitfully resurrected in terms of expectancy violations of linguistic conventions (Nelson & Hitchon, 1999; see also Burgoon & Miller, 1985), but the process of persuasion suggested in the pleasure/relief model remains based on an incorrect understanding of the nature of metaphor and the process of metaphor comprehension. Therefore, the pleasure/relief view of metaphor's persuasive advantage does not have any empirical support.

Communicator Credibility

The enhancement of communicator credibility view (e.g., Bowers & Osborn, 1966; McCroskey & Combs, 1969; Osborn & Ehninger, 1962; Reinsch, 1971) proposes that communicators who use metaphors are judged more credible than are those who use literal language. In turn, this enhanced source judgment leads to greater persuasion by making the attitude towardS' the message advocacy more positive. This higher credibility judgment may occur for two related reasons. First, as Aristotle (1952), in his Poetics, argued, "But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius" (p. 255). The assumption of this view is that metaphors are exceptional language and are like "ornaments" on the literal language that are used only by poets and writers, not by ordinary folks in everyday discourse. Thus, people who use metaphors are perceived as highly creative and are judged quite positively. The second reason (e.g., Bowers & Osborn, 1966; Osborn & Ehninger, 1962) is derived from metaphor's ability to point out previously unknown similarities between entities to a person. This newfound appreciation of commonalties is a source of interest and pleasure to the comprehender, who consequently is grateful to the message source, leading to enhanced judgment of communicator credibility. In contemporary terms, the key idea of the communicator credibility view is that the source judgment may act as a persuasion heuristic (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989).

The communicator credibility explanation was clearly not supported by the results of the meta-analysis, which showed that on the whole, people do not judge metaphor-using communicators more favorably than they do those who use literal language. Another line of research on effects of rebuttal analogy on receiver perceptions of communicators and message arguments corroborates this finding (Whaley, 1997, 1998; Whaley, Nicotera, & Samter, 1998). A rebuttal analogy serves two communicative functions: as a method of counterargumentation and as a method of social attack. Communicators who use such analogies are perceived as less polite, less ethical, and less competent, and their arguments are seen as less ethical and less effective than those of sources who use nonanalogy messages. Thus, the view that use of metaphor prompts a positive source heuristic to be engaged, leading to greater persuasion, is not the right explanation.

The assumption that metaphor is "exceptionallanguage" is also not defensible. Metaphors are not mere ornaments on literal language used only by poets and writers; rather, they are common in everyday language. For example, Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio (1977), after examining various psychotherapeutic interviews, essays, and the KennedyNixon presidential debates, estimated that 1.80 novel metaphors and 4.08 dead metaphors were used per minute of discourse. Another study looking at use of metaphors in news and public affairs programs found that one novel metaphor was used for every 25 words (Graesser, Mio, & Millis, 1989). Thus, use of metaphor does not seem to require any special genius, and as such, there is little reason to expect its use to enhance credibility, at least as related to expertise and character, of a communicator.

Cognitive Resources

Two views of metaphor and persuasion employ the assumption that understanding metaphors demands more cognitive resources than does understanding literal language. According to the reduced counterarguments view (Guthrie, 1972), the process of metaphor comprehension generates a great number of associations that result in "an overload in the receiver's mental circuitry" (p. 4). As a result, a high proportion of the cognitive resources of a comprehender are used up when encountering a metaphorical persuasive message, and consequently (assuming a counterattitudinal message) fewer resources are left to "derogate or exclude the message content or the source" (p. 4). The outcome is reduced counterargumentation and greater agreement with the message advocacy.

A more sophisticated version is the resource matching view Gaffe, 1988). This perspective proposes that deriving meaning of a metaphorical expression requires elaboration to construct the ground (Ortony, 1979, 1993), which ensures better memory for (highquality) message arguments and hence improved comprehension, leading to greater persuasion relative to a literal message. However, elaboration also requires greater mobilization of cognitive resources. If there is a match between the high cognitive resources required to understand the metaphorical message and the cognitive resources available to an interpreter, then maximum elaboration and thus maximum comprehension occurs; if there is a mismatch, then less comprehension occurs. Thus, if limited resources are available, then the message (whether pro- or counterattitudinal) is not adequately understood and persuasion is inhibited; similarly, the persuasive impact of a message is diluted when excess resources are available (e.g., for cliched expressions) because irrelevant and idiosyncratic thoughts are generated. In this view, then, novel metaphorical messages have a persuasive advantage over literal messages only under resource-enhanced conditions, such as message repetition, where the knowledge generated by repetition ensures a match of resources to the requirements of a metaphorical message but leads to excess resources for a literal message.

Cognitive resource or effort was not indexed in any of the studies included in the meta-analysis, so the question of whether metaphors require more resources than do literal messages cannot be answered directly from its results. However, other findings run counter to the claims of the resource matching explanation. According to this view, metaphors should be persuasive only under resourceenhancing conditions such as message repetition. Contradicting this, all experiments in the meta-analysis presented messages only once, and the results do show that metaphors led to more attitude change than did literal language. Along the same lines, the greater amount of time spent processing a message in the written modality may be seen as enhancing cognitive resources facilitating resource matching. However, it was the audio modality, which allows only a single pass through a message, that was more persuasive. Similarly, evidence based on reaction time studies discussed earlier suggests that understanding metaphors does not demand greater cognitive resources than does understanding literal language. Furthermore, studies that have compared metaphor and literal processing using indexes of cognitive effort, such as eye movement tracking and gaze duration (Inhoff, Lima, & Carroll, 1984) and speech pauses (Pollio, Fabrizi, & Weedle, 1982), have also found that understanding metaphors requires no more effort than does understanding literal language when appropriate contextual information is provided. Therefore, given the outcomes of the meta-analysis and other relevant research, these two cogmtlve resources views are not the ideal candidates for a theoretical explanation of metaphor's persuasive effects.

Stimulated Elaboration

The stimulated elaboration view is linked to two different metaphor processing theories. Hitchon (1991), using concepts of salience imbalance theory (Ortony, 1979, 1993), proposed that when the ground is assembled from the common attributes of target and base to comprehend a metaphor, the evaluation (valence) associated with the attributes is also part of the ground. In her view, formation of the ground requires elaboration of the groundrelevant attributes as well as their associated valence. Thus, elaboration leads to a greater number of valenced thoughts, which (when in the appropriate direction) lead to greater persuasion. By contrast, extracting the meaning of a literal expression does not require constructing a ground and hence elaboration of the message content.

Whaley (1991) used structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1982, 1989) to propose that understanding analogies stimulates thought through a focus on similar target-base relations (rather than attributes) and hence the evoking of a richer set of associations in semantic memory compared to literal language. This greater number of semantic connections produces greater elaboration of message content, which in turn leads to increased persuasion given suitable processing conditions. Whaley proposed that certain types of analogies (explanatory analogies [Gentner, 1982]) function as high-quality arguments, so their processing results in more elaboration than do literal messages. Then, if both motivation and ability are high and the message is compelling, the outcome is a greater number of thoughts agreeing with message advocacy and thus greater persuasion (Chaiken et aI., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

The key variable in the stimulated elaboration account is the number of thoughts generated in response to a metaphorical language message as compared to a literal one. Studies investigating metaphor's persuasive effects that have measured this type of elaboration (Hitchon, 1991; Mitchell, Badzinski, & Pawlowski, 1994; Morgan, 1997; Sopory, 1999; Whaley, 1991) have not found that metaphorical language results in a greater number of cognitive responses than does literallanguage.

However, it may be the case that elaboration is influenced by other variables in tandem with type of language. This idea is developed as a more refined version of the stimulated elaboration hypothesis in the motivational resonance view (Ottati, Rhoads, & Graesser, 1999). Using the dual-process approach to persuasion (Chaiken et aI., 1989; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), this view proposes that metaphorical language creates greater interest in a message than does literal language, thereby increasing motivation to more systematically process the message. This motivation to elaborate the message content is moderated by argument strength/quality and prior interest toward the metaphor target. When the quality of message arguments is high and message recipients have a positive interest toward the metaphor target, such that the metaphor "resonates" with their prior preferences, maximum elaboration and hence greatest suasion occurs. Results of two studies (Ottati et aI., 1999) largely confirmed this prediction as a condition for enhanced metaphor impact.

It may also be the case that linguistic metaphor does facilitate more thinking but that this thinking is not propositional (i.e., linguistic). For example, Coulson and Oakley (in press) used the theory of conceptual blending (Fauconnier, 1994; Fauconnier & Turner, 1998) to contend that comprehension of persuasive messages does require elaboration, but they conceived of elaboration in terms of mental simulation of the situation being described by the message content. Similarly, Paivio and Walsh (1993; see also Lakoff, 1993) pointed out that many linguistic metaphors may use more imagistic than linguistic processing. Along the same lines, Zaltman's metaphor elicitation technique (Zaltman & Coulter, 1995; Zaltman & Higie, 1993) also suggests that metaphorical thinking may engage substantial image-based processes. This research technique successfully assesses customers' metaphoric representations of products and consumer services using selection and arrangement of pictures and images, that is, via primarily nonlinguistic measures. Thus, the number of linguistic expressions might not be the only processual variable indexing elaboration as an explanation of metaphor's greater persuasive capacity.

Superior Organization

The superior organization view (Read, Cesa, Jones, & Collins, 1990), also derived from Gentner's (1982, 1989) structure mapping theory, proposes that a metaphor helps to better structure and organize the arguments of a persuasive message relative to literal language. A metaphor evokes a greater number of semantic associations, and the different arguments, when consistent with the metaphor, get connected together more coherently via the many available semantic pathways. In addition, the links to the metaphor "highlight" the arguments making them more salient. Consequently, this more coherent organization, and the resulting highlighting of the arguments, increases the persuasive power of metaphor using messages. Literal-only messages lack this organizing function of metaphor and therefore are not as persuasive.

Results of the meta-analysis point to direct support for the superior organization view only. Metaphors were most persuasive when extended and when placed in the introduction position of a message. This suggests that persuasion occurred due to the organizing potential of metaphor as theme, which facilitated selection and integration of information from the message and prior knowledge. The results also showed that a single metaphor was more persuasive than greater numbers of metaphors. As the superior organization view implies, it is only a single metaphor that should provide the optimal opportunity for enhanced organization of the message information. Similarly, the persuasive superiority of metaphors with high knowledge of target over lowknowledge ones suggests that higher prior knowledge allowed recipients to better organize the target-base linkages. Therefore, the meta-analytic results favor superior organization's explanation of how metaphor may be more persuasive than literal language.

The structural consistency view (Sopory, 1999) adopts the superior organization view's insight but proposes a different account of how metaphor-using messages may lead to increased organization of information. Using the conceptual structure theory (Lakoff, 1987, 1993), this view claims that it is the emergent structural match between linguistic and conceptual metaphor during message processing that organizes the information. A unique property of this coherent information set is that it manifests high evaluative consistency of cognitive-affective-behavioral information available for attitude construction (i.e., high intra-attitudinal structural consistency), which in turn makes it more likely that receivers show enhanced attitude change in the desired direction with metaphorical messages than with literal ones. Results of two studies (Sopory, 1999) provided moderate support for this view. Thus, metaphor may persuade not only by linking various arguments of a message into a coherent whole but also by organizing the attitude-relevant information into an evaluatively consistent package.

Other Metaphor and Persuasion Views

Research on effects of language intensity and message vividness on attitude has attempted to subsume metaphor under these two types of language variables. The metaphor and persuasion meta-analysis speaks directly to both views.

Metaphor as Intense Language. The empirical tradition of metaphor and persuasion originated with metaphor conceptualized as a form of intense language. Language intensity is defined as "the quality of language which indicates the degree to which the speaker's attitude toward a concept deviates from neutrality" (Bowers, 1963, p. 345; for an updated version, see Hamilton & Stewart, 1993). Based on the principle of reinforcement, Bowers (1963) proposed that such intense language messages should be more persuasive than nonintense ones and went on (Bowers, 1964) to distinguish four features of intense language: number of syllables, obscure words, qualifiers and intensifiers, and metaphors. Subsequent research (Bowers & Osborn, 1966; Reinsch, 1971; Siltanen, 1981) found that metaphors did behave as intense language and led to more persuasion than did literallanguage.

However, one of the key predictions of the language intensity view is that intense language either decreases the impact of or has no effect on attitude for low initial credibility sources (Hamilton & Hunter, 1998; see also, Burgoon, 1989). A meta-analytic model of language intensity effects on attitude (Hamilton & Hunter, 1998) largely confirmed this prediction. The results of the metaphor metaanalysis, by contrast, present an opposite pattern: Use of metaphor was more beneficial for communicators with low initial credibility than with high initial credibility. On the other hand, the finding of the language intensity meta-analysis that high-intensity language directly increases perceptions of communicator dynamism only, and not competence and trustworthiness, is in accord with the results of the metaphor meta-analysis, which showed a positive effect on the dynamism facet of credibility only. Overall, then, despite certain processing differences, intense and metaphorical language may bear some similarity in how they exert their suasory power.

Metaphor as Vivid Language. Metaphorical language has also been conceived of as a type of vivid language (Frey & Eagly, 1993; Mitchell et aI., 1994). Nisbett and Ross (1980) defined vividness as information that is "(a) emotionally interesting, (b) concrete and imagery-provoking, and (c) proximate in a sensory, temporal, or spatial way" (p. 45). Vivid language has been operationalized in a variety of ways, and even then its effects on attitude have been generally hard to discover (Collins, Taylor, Wood, & Thompson, 1988; Taylor & Thompson, 1982). Frey and Eagly (1993) conceptualized vivid language to include "provocative metaphors" and found that vivid messages were not more persuasive than pallid ones, both when the participants' attentional focus on the message was high and when it was low. They interpreted the results in terms of vividness as a distraction/interference, especially for "complex messages ... that contain a number of arguments that are logically related by virtue of their all being linked to a general position" (p. 41). The studies in the metaphor meta-analysis data set were characterized by high attentional focus, and many of the messages were fairly complex. The results still showed that metaphorical messages were more persuasive than literal ones. Furthermore, there was little support for the view that metaphors consume cognitive resources (which can be a5-seen as similar to the interference explanation), but there was strong support for the claim that metaphors contribute to message organization and comprehension. Thus, metaphor may not function similar to vivid language as distraction because this explanation cannot account for the trope's persuasive effects.

Conditions of Metaphor Effectiveness

The metaphor and persuasion meta-analysis identified a number of variables that allow us to differentiate effective from ineffective conditions for metaphor use, and future research should continue their testing. Recent research points to six additional factors that may have bearing on metaphor's persuasive potential. Literal-mindedness (Morgan, 1997), an individual differences variable, is defined as the ability to understand figurative language. Metaphorical messages are more persuasive with people who are low on literal-mindedness because they find it easy to understand figurative language. The metaphor extension hypothesis (Mio, 1996) proposes that, in a debate type situation, a metaphor is more effective when it builds on and extends the opponent's metaphor. A retort that uses a new metaphor or is literal is relatively ineffective as a persuasive tactic. Novel synesthetic metaphors may be particularly potent for persuasion (Nelson & Hitchon, 1995, 1999). Synesthesia is a neurological process whereby perceptions from one sensory modality are mapped onto perceptions from another modality, and utterances based on these cross-sensory mappings (e.g., auditory-visual as in "loud red") are called synesthetic metaphors (Cytowic, 1989; Marks, 1982). Message recipients' positive prior involvement (Johnson & Eagly, 1989) with the attitude objects may also contribute to the increased impact of metaphors (Ottati et aI., 1999). Besides attitude, metaphor may be equally effective in successfully shaping other desired persuasion outcomes; such as behavior change (Mio, Thompson, & Givens, 1993) and agreement with implications of the metaphor (Bosman, 1987; Bosman & Hagendoorn, 1991). Future research should investigate all of these factors to develop a model of the conditions under which metaphor can have maximum persuasive effect.

Process of Metaphor Effects

Future research should concentrate on determining a more precise specification of the mechanism by which metaphor exerts its suasory effect. Of the different metaphor and persuasion theories, the superior organization view holds the greatest promise in this regard. New research can compare this view to other plausible explanations of the process and establish which one has the most accurate descriptive and predictive power.

Alternatively, future research can also attempt to integrate compatible metaphor and persuasion theories into a single framework.

For example, McGuire's (1972, 1985) view that the persuasion process requires at least two sequential information processing components, reception and yielding, can furnish such a framework. In this model, reception of a message consists of two sub steps, attention and comprehension; to make a judgment about yielding to the message advocacy, the information available after the comprehension stage is used. It may be that the presence of a metaphor in a persuasive message, under proper processing conditions, affects the perception of communicator dynamism (communicator credibility view), leading to improved attention to the message arguments. After helping to focus attention onm the message content, the metaphor may next aid its comprehension by encouraging relevant thinking (stimulated elaboration view) and by organizing the available information (superior organization view). In turn, this more detailed and organized information may make it more likely that the message advocacy will be accepted. A comprehensive multiple-process framework of this sort may be better able to explain and systematically predict the persuasive effects of metaphorical language under different conditions.

Pictorial Metaphors

Pictures and images can also assert the "A is B" equation and thus be metaphorical in their meaning (Forceville, 1996; Indurkhya, 1992; Kennedy, 1982; Whittock, 1990). Although images are ubiquitous in and integral to advertising (Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1986; Messaris, 1997), there is a paucity of studies on the use of pictorial (or visual) metaphors in persuasive messages (for an exception, see Mcquarrie & Mick, 1999). One reason for this lack of research may be the difficulty in deciding whether pictorial metaphors function similady to linguistic metaphors or not (Kaplan, 1992; Kennedy, Green, & Vervaeke, 1993), and whether visual rhetorical tropes in general can parallel those found in language so that they can be classified according to linguistic rhetorical tropes (for such an exercise, see Mcquarrie & Mick, 1996). These are, however, empirically resolvable questions that can be easily incorporated into any pictorial metaphor and persuasion investigations, although when doing so researchers should exercise appropriate caution to prevent overgeneralization from linguistic to visual metaphors.

Development of Attitudes

Abelson (1986; see also Abelson & Prentice, 1989) contended that a process of metaphorical mapping motivates the development of the attitudinal system. He considered attitudes to be evaluative beliefs and claimed, based on linguistic evidence (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), that humans think about their beliefs in the same terms as they think about their possessions. He also provided developmental evidence showing that when children start understanding the concept of belief, they do so by thinking about their beliefs in the same way as they think about their possessions. That is, the belief system of children is developed and structured through a metaphorical mapping to the domain of their possessions. This metaphorical organization of the belief system can be tapped for persuasive ends by matching messages to the underlying and constitutive conceptual metaphor of "Beliefs are like possessions." Thus, research on how information from linguistic and conceptual metaphors combines to affect beliefs and attitudes may lead to identification of rewarding theoretical insights regarding how attitudes develop.

Figurative comparisons, and in particular metaphors, have a long history as a persuasion tool. However, there are two interrelated questions not yet fully answered regarding (a) their persuasive superiority over literal language and (b) the process by which this effect may arise. The summary of the empirical research on metaphor and persuasion presented in this chapter brings us closer to some probable answers to the two questions and contributes to more effective use of this trope to influence evaluations.

NOTES

1. A simile is usually regarded as an explicit comparison between two concepts, where the similarities are clearly defined. It is considered an overt nonliteral comparison and is identified by the use of as or like as in the statement "The global marketplace is like a dictatorship." An analogy is a kind of mapping or isomorphism between the relations and entities of two systems of concepts and explicitly states the comparison of relational similarities between its referents. For example, in the analogy "Old age is to life as autumn is to year," the relation between old age and life from the domain of human life cycle is mapped to the relation between autumn and year from the domain of seasonal cycle. A personification compares humans to inanimate entities and applies properties that are normally associated with humans to the nonhuman entity. An example is "Look at the face of the clock," where the human property of face is used for describing a machine.

2. Although metaphor novelty and aptness may be related, the two should not be conflated. Metaphor aptness may be defined as a global judgment of the appropriateness of a metaphor to its discourse and message context (for an alternative definition, see Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1981). This judgment may depend on the persuasive context (e.g., consumer advertising vs. politics), discourse type (e.g., headline or slogan vs. a long message), communicative goals (e.g., explanation of factual evidence vs. presentation of testimony and opinion), and logical fit with the message content.

3. The other major theories of metaphor interpretation are comparison (Miller, 1979), interaction (Black, 1962, 1979; Richards, 1936), domains interaction (Tourangeau & Sternberg, 1981, 1982), parallel constraint satisfaction (Holyoak, 1985; Holyoak & Thagard, 1989, 1995; Spellman & Holyoak, 1992), and class inclusion (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990, 1993; Glucksberg, Keysar, & McGlone, 1992).

4. There also are other dimensions of credibility such as attractiveness and sociability. However, the studies in the database of the meta-analysis did not assess other credibility components in any consistent manner, so there was not enough of a pool of studies to conduct an analysis.

 

40) Advertise; A Variable-Based Typology and a Review of Advertising-Related Persuasion Research During the 1990s

XINSHU ZHAO

Following an effort to summarize research on humor in advertising, Weinberger and Gulas (1992) concluded that "the broad question of humor's effectiveness is unanswerable" due to too many contingencies in terms of persuasion goals, message factors, the audience, the product advertised, and equivocal findings of the studies. The even broader question of what we know about the persuasive effects of advertising generally may be equally unanswerable, at least within the confines of a single chapter. This chapter, therefore, does not purport to summarize everything we know about the persuasive effects of advertising. Its more modest objective is to present a framework for the organization of advertising related persuasion research.

THEORIES VERSUS VARIABLES

Many advertising researchers aim to build theories that predict and explain human behavior in a wide variety of persuasive situations. Those researchers often define areas of research in terms of the theories they test: spiral of silence, agenda setting, third-person effect, and framing. From this perspective, theory itself is the objective.

To theoretically oriented researchers, the history of advertising research is a history of one dominant theory following another (Alwitt & Mitchell, 1983; Maloney, 1994). An admittedly oversimplified history of the field would be something like this: Hovland, Janis, and Kelley's (1953) source credibility theory during the 1950s, McGuire (1968) and others' learning theory during the 1960s, Krugman's (1965, 1966-1967) involvement theory during the 1970s, and Petty and Cacioppo's (1981) Elaboration Likelihood Model during the 1980s.

The regular emergence and replacement of one dominant theory with another seems to have stopped during the 1990s. During that decade, for the first time in nearly half a century, there was no single dominant theory in the field of advertising. Even before the midpoint of the decade, Maloney (1994) had anticipated that "advertising researchers in this century's closing decade may seem confused and floundering". Now, after the end of the decade, things do not seem any brighter. There is still no dominant theory or theories. The field seems no nearer to an answer for "how advertising works" than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

This gloomy view ignores the other tradition of the field. Unlike many other areas of persuasion research, advertising has a parallel applied focus that is manifested in the existence of the advertising industry. From the beginning, the industry had a need for credible knowledge to guide practitioners' daily decision making. Pragmatically oriented advertising researchers were initially inspired to address questions such as "Should we run a 30-second or 60-second ad?" and "Should we use humor in this ad?" Such researchers often define their sub-areas of interests in terms of the variables they study including ad length research, celebrity effect research, and clutter research. One particular type of industry research, copy testing, attempts to predict advertising effectiveness in terms of a variety of variables, such as recall and ad liking, before the ads are released. While those researchers often evoke theories to predict or interpret results, the utility of theory lies in its implications for message design rather than for explanation.

A quick glance at issues of the Journal of Advertising Research shows that there have always been a substantial number of studies in this tradition. This literature has been largely ignored by previous academic syntheses of the field, as all of those syntheses were organized according to theories and psychological behavioral processes (e.g., Alwitt & Mitchell, 1983; Cafferata & Tybout, 1989; Clark, Brock, & Stewart, 1994). Implicitly, variables oriented researchers rejected the assumption that answers to grand questions were possible. Instead, they attempted to make advertising questions more tractable by making them more narrow.

In that sense, the lack of a dominant theory is not an indication of floundering and confusion but instead a sign of progress. While fewer studies seek to produce the next dominant theory, new theories continue to be proposed, although they are often variable specific. The meaning transfer theory for celebrity effect (McCracken, 1989), the fourcolor theory for humor effect (Spotts, Weinberger, & Parsons, 1997), and the preceding-succeeding theory for clutter and serial effect (Zhao, 1997) are just a few examples. Many researchers have come to realize that theories, although useful, apply appropriately only within certain boundaries. Within such boundaries, published studies continue to use the theories, including source credibility theory, the Elaboration Likelihood Model, and every other theory in between. From a practical point of view, this signals the beginning of real successes for the theories; they are beginning to have an impact in the real world.

The focus on variables, especially independent variables, is an important distinction that separates much advertising research from other persuasion research. Furthermore, even those advertising studies aimed at testing theories inevitably have variables. So a typology of advertising studies based on variables would not exclude those theoryoriented studies, while an organizing scheme based on theories would exclude many of the variable-oriented studies. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a typology of advertising effect studies according to the types of variables they investigate.

TABLE 25.1 A Typology of Advertising Studies

			Media	,
Independent Variables
	Outdoor	Print	Radio		Television	Computer
Directly manipulable
Internal characteristics
Directly manipulable
External relations
Indirectly manipulable
Measured

A TYPOLOGY OF ADVERTISING VARIABLES

From an advertiser's point of view, two factors may serve as starting points: the independent variable and the type of media in which the independent variables exert their effects. Although the type of media is itself a type of independent variable, it is granted special status here for reasons discussed in what follows.

Classifying the Independent Variables. Table 25.1 displays a four-category typology of independent variables based on their manipulability (in the leftmost column). From the perspective of a potential persuader, a most salient characteristic of an independent variable is the degree to which it can, in principle, be controlled. Previous writers have cast this distinction in terms of active versus attribute variables (Kerlinger, 1986) and, equivalently, manipulated versus measured variables. Manipulable variables include all those features of the advertising process that can be shaped by one or more message sources (e.g., ad placement, type of appeal), whereas measured variables are features of the product or audience that cannot be altered (e.g., age of the audience members).

As Table 25.1 shows, we propose some additional distinctions within these two broad categories. Manipulable variables are of two types. The phrase "manipulable internal characteristics" refers to features of the message or its implementation. Loosely speaking, these are variables most closely associated with the creative side of advertising. "Manipulable external relations" are relational, and they have two aspects. The first is the advertisement's relationship with other messages (e.g., news, entertainment, other ads) that surround the ad. Traditionally known as the media strategy variables, they are usually not directly controllable by an advertiser or advertising agency alone. The second aspect of external characteristics of advertising is its comparative relationship with other nonadvertising strategies. Advertisers have the choice of using advertising versus not using advertising at all or of using advertising versus using other strategies such as public relations (PR) news releases and coupon promotions. Advertisers may also choose the level of advertising budgets. Traditionally known as ad-related marketing variables, they are often decided by marketers/ producers in consultation with their advisers and business partners such as advertising agencies, PR agencies, retailers, and marketing research firms.

Some psychological and behavioral variables, such as attitude toward an advertised product and involvement in the product, are often treated as dependent variables in advertising research. However, message senders may hope to influence those variables in order to produce downstream changes in purchase intention or behavior. And these variables are only indirectly manipulable through more controllable variables such as creative and media strategies. In Table 25.1, they are labeled indirectly manipulable variables.

The final row of Table 25.1 pays homage to the fact that some aspects of the advertising process are functionally uncontrollable. These variables are characteristics of the products themselves or of the members of the target audience. Age, gender, and educational level are beyond the control of advertisers. Thus, this row represents measured variables.

Types of Media. Today, there are several different types of media from which advertisers can choose. One might argue that media type is another directly manipulable independent variable. That is true, but media are more than that. Different media evoke different sensory channels, evoke different levels of interactivity, and require different ways of managing fundamental parameters such as time and space. Furthermore, particular independent variables are differentially relevant to different media. Image and color are important for print, television, and computer-related media but have no meaning for radio. Interactivity is fundamental for computer-related media but becomes a near constant for some other media. The clutter is a spatial concept for print media but a sequential concept for broadcast media. The juxtaposition of these five media (see Table 25.1) with the four types of independent variables yields a 4 X 5 matrix that is used to organize the remainder of this chapter.

EFFECTS OF DIRECTLY MANIPULABLE INTERNAL VARIABLES

Celebrity Endorsement in All Media. The analysis of 110 announcements of contracts of celebrity endorsements by various companies indicate that, on average, the announcements have led to higher stock prices for the companies. This suggests that the investors generally view the contracts as worthy investment in advertising (Agrawal & Kamakura, 1995).

Negative Strategy in Political Ads for Various Media. Based on a meta-analysis of 52 studies published between 1984 and 1998, Lau, Sigelman, Heldman, and Babbitt (1999) concluded that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is little evidence that negative ads produce more positive attitudes toward or win more votes for the sponsoring candidates relative to positive ads. There is also little indication that negative ads produce more negative attitudes toward or take more votes from the opposing candidates relative to positive ads. And people do not necessarily dislike the negative ads. The study also uncovered little support for the popular belief that negative ads discourage voters from participating in the political processes.

The effects of attacking strategy on voters' candidate preference depend on political involvement and attention to political news, according to Faber, Tims, and Schmitt (1993), whose study was not included in Lau et al.'s (1999) meta-analysis. Faber et al. (1993) found that, as a result of being exposed to negative ads, those who are highly involved are more likely to change their candidate preference (in either direction) than are those who are less involved. Nevertheless, after being exposed to negative ads, those who read more newspaper news are less likely to change their candidate preference than are less frequent readers.

Humor in Print and Broadcast Ads. Summarizing 20 years of research on the effects of humor, Weinberger and Gulas (1992) concluded that humor attracts attention but does not harm comprehension despite the belief that humor confuses the audience. Humor enhances ad liking, while it has little effect on source credibility, brand attitude, purchase intention, or purchase behavior. Research conducted subsequent to the Weinberger and Gulas review has suggested that humor does have a positive impact on ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention (Zhang, 1996) and that people exposed to humorous television ads are more likely to consider the surrounding programs as entertaining (Perry, ]enzowsky, Hester, King, & Yi, 1997).

The effects of humor are moderated by many factors. Relevant humor is more effective than nonrelevant humor (Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). Humor is more effective when existing, feeling-oriented, low-involvement, and/or low-risk products are advertised (Weinberger & Gulas, 1992; Weinberger, Spotts, Campbell, & Parsons, 1995). The kind of audience also has an impact on humor's effectiveness (Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). In one study, participants with a positive prior attitude toward a brand were positively affected by humor in terms of ad attitude, brand attitude, purchase intention, and purchase behavior, while participants with a negative prior attitude were negatively affected (Chattopadhyay & Basu, 1990). In an experiment using print ads, participants lower in need for cognition were more likely to be affected by humor in terms of developing a more positive ad attitude and brand attitude as well as higher purchase intention (Zhang, 1996). Humor in event promotions increased attendance to social events but helped little in attracting attendees to business events (Scott, Klein, & Bryant, 1990). Furthermore, it has been found that the effect of humor on brand attitude is mediated by ad attitude (Zhang, 1996) and by cognitive responses (Chattopadhyay & Basu, 1990).

Copy Vividness of Print Ads. More vivid copies tend to generate a more favorable attitude toward an advertised brand and make the audience more likely to choose the brand when the ads are shown together with other ads for competing brands and when the audience is engaged in issue-relevant thinking. The advantages of the vivid copies tend to disappear when, with other conditions unchanged, the ads are not shown together with other ads for competing brands (Heath, McCarthy, & Mothersbaugh, 1994).

Spokesperson in Print Ads. A company may choose a corporate official, such as the chief executive officer, or an outside noncommercial authority as the spokesperson in its ad. Straughan, Bleske, and Zhao's (1996) experiment shows that the audience is more likely to be interested in a message from a chief executive officer than in the identical message from an outside authority. The higher interest leads to more of the desired attitude change, which in turn leads to more of the desired behavioral change.

Message Appeal or Argument Strength in Print Ads. Stronger argument has a positive effect on ad attitude, brand attitude, and purchase intention. But the individuals in more need for cognition are more likely affected by argument strength in terms of developing a more positive ad attitude and brand attitude as well as higher purchase intention (Zhang, 1996).

Celebrity Endorsement in Print Ads. While Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann (1983) showed that issue-relevant thinking can eliminate the positive effects of spokespersons' fame, competitive setting may also matter. In Heath et al.'s (1994) experiment, spokespersons' fame led to a more favorable attitude toward an advertised brand and made the audience more likely to choose the brand when the ads were shown together with other ads for competing brands, even when the audience was engaged in issue-relevant thinking. This positive celebrity effect disappeared when ads were not shown together with other ads for competing brands.

The audience's perception and attitude toward a celebrity and its attitude toward the ad become less and less favorable as the number of products endorsed by the celebrity increase (Tripp, Jensen, & Carlson, 1994). Furthermore, according to Till and Shimp (1998), the negative information about a celebrity resulted in a decline in attitude toward an endorsed brand, but only when the celebrity endorser was a fictitious figure. That general relationship was further moderated in varying degrees by three other variables: association set size, timing of the negative information, and strength of the link between brand and celebrity.

CONTEXTS

Attribute Versus Relation in Print Ads. An ad may focus on the attributes of a product or on the product's relation to people and its use. Malaviya, Kisielius, and Sternthal (1996) found that, when a commercial focused on attribute was placed together with ads for competing brands, the commercial tended to generate more favorable attitudes than did a commercial focused on relation. When the commercial was placed together with ads of noncompeting brands, however, the relation strategy produced more favorable attitudes than the attribute strategy.

Association Strategy in Print Ads. When an ad associates the advertised brand with another object, the result could be assimilation or contrast (Meyers-Levy & Sternthal, 1993). Assimilation refers to the phenomenon whereby consumers evaluate the advertised brand more like the associated object than they would if there had been no association between the brand and the object. An advertiser may take advantage of this phenomenon by associating its brand with an already positively evaluated object. Contrast refers to the opposite phenomenon whereby consumers evaluate the advertised brand more unlike the associated object than they would if there had been no association between the brand and the object. An advertiser may take advantage of this phenomenon by associating its brand with an already negatively evaluated object. Meyers-Levy and Sternthal's experiment shows that contrast occurs when (a) the consumers devote a substantial amount of cognitive resources to the processing of the ads and (b) there is little overlap between the advertised brand and the associated object. The absence of either of these two factors leads to assimilation.

Youth Appeal in Cigarette Print Ads. The youth appeal in Joe Camel ads appeared to encourage adolescents to pay more attention to the Camel ads than to other cigarette ads (Fox, Krugman, Fletcher, & Fischer, 1998).

Between-Information Interval Within Radio Ads. An ad often contains multiple pieces of information. Olsen (1997) investigated the effect of the between-information time interval together with two other factors: (a) whether the listeners' attention is focused on the ad or diverted and (b) whether there is background music or background silence. The results showed that as the between-information interval increased from 0 second to 1, 2, and 3 seconds, listeners' recall of the information also increased linearly in all but one situation. The only exception occurred when the listeners' attention was diverted and there was background silence and when the interval increased from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. In that situation, the recall decreased, and did so significantly, by about 500/0.

Length of Television Commercials. A number of studies (Fabian, 1986; Mord & Gilson, 1985; Patzer, 1991) have suggested that 15second ads are 50% to 90% as effective in creating learning and attitudinal change as are 30-second ads. Singh and Cole (1993) argued that the effect size of ad length depends on repetition and message content (i.e., emotional vs. informational). Indeed, their experiment showed that 30-second ads generated better brand memory and attitude than did IS-second ads when the appeal was emotional; when the appeal was informational, IS-second ads were generally as effective as 30-second ads. It was also found that the length effect on brand recall diminished as repetition increased. Pieters and Bijmolt (1997) analyzed data based on 2,677 television commercials of naturally varying lengths aired between 1975 and 1992 in The Netherlands, and they reported positive effects of duration (length) on recall. Furthermore, because few interaction (moderating) effects with other independent variables were found, the researchers argued that perhaps the main effect of length should be the focus of the attention after all.

Emotional Appeals in Television Ads. In Hitchon and Thorson's (1995) experiment, higher emotional appeals produced more positive ad attitude than did lower emotional appeals. The effect of emotional appeals on brand recall depended on the audience's product involvement; the emotional appeals produced higher recall when the involvement was high, but emotion had little effect on recall when the involvement was low.

Music and Sound in Television Ads. Olsen (1995) compared three strategies: background music throughout an ad, background silence throughout the ad, and background silence only when key information is presented. The results show that the audience's recall of the key information was the highest when silence appeared only with key information. The effect was even stronger, however, when the key information was the last item in a series.

The Size and Type of Web Banner Ads. Web users clicked an animated banner ad more quickly and were more likely to recall the ad than to recall a nonanimated ad (Li & Bukovac, 1999). Web users were more likely to click a larger banner ad and clicked it more quickly.

EFFECTS OF DIRECTLY MANIPULABLE EXTERNAL VARIABLES

To Ad or Not to Ad (various media). Public service announcement (PSA) campaigns have traditionally relied on donated rather than paid media. In part due to the limitations that often come with the donations, the recent trend has been to switch to the paid schedule at the risk of losing future donations from the media. A three-market field experiment (Murry, Stam, & Lastovicka, 1996) found that the donated schedule was as effective and cost-efficient as the paid schedule in persuading the youths to avoid drinking and driving, thereby reducing the counts of incapacitating and fatal highway accidents. Given this knowledge, the researchers suggested that the public service campaign managers not abandon the donated media for the paid media.

Despite this recommendation, in 2000, the u.s. decennial population census used paid advertising for the first time in history in hopes of increasing participation. A study conducted by two researchers from the U.s. Bureau of the Census and U.s. Treasury Department (Bates & Buckley, 2000) found that exposure was significantly related to being knowledgeable about the census but was not significantly and directly related to the likelihood of completing the census forms. Furthermore, this lack of relationship was across the board with regard to factors such as race/ethnicity.

When a company wants to spread a message, it may choose to buy advertising space or to work with media reporters to generate news coverage. The message in an ad, however, is less likely to be believed by the audience than the identical message appearing in a news story, according to Straughan et al.'s (1996) experiment. This lower credibility leads to less of the desired attitude change, which in turn leads to less of the desired behavioral change.

Ad Budget for All Media. Based on a metaanalysis of 389 real-world split cable-television experiments, Lodish et al. (1995) reported that increasing the advertising budget, in relation to those of competitors, do not increase sales in general. Increasing the advertising budget, however, did seem to help increase the sales of the products/brands newly introduced to a market but not the sales of the established products/brands. Furthermore, primetime gross rating points, which are nearly entirely dependent on budgets, have a highly significant and positive relation with sales (Lodish et al., 1995). Cobb-Walgren, Ruble, and Donthu (1995) reported that brands with higher advertising budgets yielded substantially higher levels of brand equity, which in turn led to significantly greater brand preferences and purchase intentions.

Clutter of Print Ads. Kent and Allen (1994) focused on a particular type of clutter (i.e., the other ads for directly competing brands). The study found that competitive clutter leads to less claim recall, but only when the advertised brands are unfamiliar.

Ha (1996) saw three dimensions in the concept of clutter in magazines-quantity, competitiveness, and intrusiveness-and manipulated each of them in her experiment. She also measured the participants' perceptions of the three dimensions as three mediating variables. In addition, she measured six dependent variables: the reading of, memory of, involvement in, and attitude toward the focal ad under test; the resistance toward competitive ads; and the attitude toward the focal brand. Of the several dozens of independentdependent, independent-mediating, and mediating-dependent relations, half a dozen turned out to be statistically significant, among which a couple were surprises in terms of the direction of the effects. A higher quantity of ads led participants to perceive a higher quantity, a higher perceived quantity or a higher perceived competitiveness led to more negative attitudes toward the magazine that carried the ads, and a higher perceived intrusiveness was associated with less memory of the ads. Nevertheless, a higher perceived competitiveness was associated with more readers of the focal ad and higher involvement in the ad message.

Frequency (repetition) for Television Ads.

Although the main effect of repetition was not Singh and Cole's (1993) central concern, their experimental results showed a general increase in brand recall and claim recall, as the frequency increased from 1 to 4 and then to 8. Singh, Mishra, Bendapudi, and Linville's (1994) experiment found that airing the same ad twice generated more recall than airing it once. In Hitchon and Thorson's (1995) experiment, the participants reported 17%, 21 %, 53%, and 81 % brand-name recall when commercial repetitions were 2, 4, 6, and 12, respectively. However, they also found that the attitudes toward the ad became more negative as the repetition increased.

An analysis of field data from three Super Bowl broadcasts found that every additional ad for a brand added 3.5 percentage points to brand recall, 6.5 percentage points to brand recognition, and one third of a percentage point to ad liking on a scale from 0 to 100 (Zhao, 1997).

Spacing of Television Ads. When multiple television ads are used for the same brand, how far apart should the ads be placed? The answer depends on whether the advertiser's objective requires immediate or delayed reaction from the audience. According to Singh et al.'s (1994) experiment, long lag (four other ads between the two focal ads) produced more day-after recall, while short lag (one ad in between) produced more short-delay recall.

Clutter of Television Ads. While an earlier experiment (Webb & Ray, 1979) reported a decreased brand recall as a result of the increased clutter of television ads, a later experiment (Brown & Rothschild, 1993) found no such effect on brand recall or recognition. Brown and Rothschild (1993) speculated that the negative clutter effect might have diminished since the Webb and Ray (1979) study, which seemed to be consistent with Johnson and Cobb-Walgren's (1994) experiment that also failed to find a statistically significant clutter effect on recall or recognition.

Sizable negative effects of clutter on brand recall and recognition, however, were found in two quasi-experiments published later. One (Pieters & Bijmolt, 1997) was based on 39,000 consumers' reactions to 2,677 television commercials aired between 1975 and 1992 in The Netherlands, and the other (Zhao, 1997) was based on postgame interviews with more than 1,000 viewers of three Super Bowl broadcasts between 1992 and 1994. Extending clutter effect to attitudes, the ads in more crowded "pods" (commerical breaks) were less likely to be liked (Zhao, 1997).

Johnson and Cobb-Walgren (1994) found that the viewers with slower cognitive processing speed were more negatively affected by clutter in terms of recognition and recall of the brand name and ad message. It was also argued that the concept of television clutter should be divided into two parts: the ads preceding an advertisement and the ads succeeding the advertisement (Zhao, 1997). Indeed, while both have negative effects, the effects of preceding ads were found to be much larger.

Serial Position (presentation order) of Television Ads. Thorson, Reeves, Schleuder, Lang, and Rothschild (1985) and Thorson and Reeves (1986) reported that the commercials' presentation order had more significant effects than did content variables such as arguments, executional style, brand, and product. Later studies continued to confirm the primacy effect, showing that the first positions in a pod generate better memories (Burke & Srull, 1988; Cameron, Schleuder, & Thorson, 1991; Pieters & Bijmolt, 1997; Stewart, Pechmann, Ratneswar, Stroud, & Bryant, 1985).

The situation with regard to the recency effect is more complicated. Controlled experiments continued to show the recency effectthat the last few positions generate better memories than do the middle positions-thereby further confirming the famous U-shaped curve that psychologists had demonstrated decades ago. Some researchers, however, argued that the recency effect might be a phenomenon limited to laboratory settings, where memory was tested immediately after the presentations of the ads, a setting that is quite different from most of the real-world advertising situations (Zhao, Shen, & Blake, 1995). They cited previous nonadvertising experiments (Craik, 1970; Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966) reporting that, when memory tests were delayed and distracting tasks were inserted in between, the advantage of the last positions disappeared and the U-shaped curve was replaced by a monotonically declining line. Indeed, in two advertising studies (Pieters & Bijmolt, 1997; Zhao, 1997) based on large-scale field data, itwas the monotonically declining linenot the recency effect or U-shaped curvethat showed up for serial effects on memory.

Furthermore, serial position was redefined as a one-for-one exchange between the stronger negative effects of preceding ads and the weaker negative effects of succeeding ads. And it was argued that the monotonically declining curve and the lack of recency effects should be expected in field studies. A linear negative effect of serial position on ad liking was also found (Zhao, 1997).

Context of Television Ads. Context can be defined in many different ways. Cameron et al.'s (1991) experiment looked at the context in terms of the presence or absence of news teasers. The participants paid more attention to commercials following news teasers. But the news teasers did not produce a detectable effect on visual or verbal recognition of the commercial contents. Perry, ]enzowsky, King, et al. (1997) looked at the context in terms of program content and found that humor in television programs had a negative effect on the recall of the advertised products.

Context of Web Ads. Stevenson, Bruner, and Kumar (2000) looked at Web page complexity in terms of number of items, colors, and animation, and they compared ads in a complex Web page to ads in a simpler page. The complexity had a negative impact on users' attitude toward the site, the ads in the site, and the advertised brand. It also reduced the users' intention to purchase the advertised brand. The complexity did not, however, seem to significantly reduce users' attention to the ad.

 

EFFECTS OF INDIRECTLY MANIPULABLE V ARlABLES

Media Use Behavior (all media). People who watch many television channels or listen to many radio stations are most likely to avoid commercials (Speck & Elliott, 1997). African Americans who watch more television tend to have a more positive attitude toward advertising than do those who watch less television. The same relation between television watching and attitude toward advertising does not exist among Caucasians, according to Bush, Smith, and Martin (1999).

Attitude Toward Advertising in General (print and broadcast media). Consumers' positive attitude toward advertising in general is positively associated with involvement with specific advertisements Games & Kover, 1992). Those people who think advertising in general as interesting, useful, or believable are less likely to avoid ads, while those who view advertising as excessive, annoying, or a waste of time are more likely to avoid ads (Speck & Elliott, 1997).

Ad Attitude for Print and Broadcast Ads. Based on interviews of nearly 15,000 consumers after five matched pairs of commercials were aired, the Advertising Research Foundation's Copy Research Validity Project (Haley & Baldinger, 1991) found that liking of ads predicts product sales far better than do any of the other indicators often measured in copy testing. Biel and Bridgwater's (1990) smaller scale study showed a similarly stronger effect of ad liking than of any other independent variables.

While it had been known that more positive ad attitude leads to more positive brand attitude, Brown and Stayman (1992) showed that this effect is both direct and indirect. Ad attitude exerts this effect both directly and indirectly through the mediating variable of brand cognition.

Brand Equity for Various Media. Brand equity is a complex concept with multiple dimensions (Aaker, 1991; Aaker & Biel, 1993). Cobb-Walgren et aI.'s (1995) definition of brand equity focuses on the consumer perception dimension, making it very close to brand attitude, hence something indirectly manipulable by advertisers. Their study found that higher brand equities generated significantly greater brand preferences and purchase intention.

Mood While Processing Television Advertising Messages. A positive mood assists an individual in remembering brand names better than does a neutral mood (Lee & Sternthal, 1999).

Within-Brand Versus Between-Brand Processing of Television Advertising Messages. A television ad viewer may focus on the characteristics of an advertised brand, a psychological phenomenon called within-brand processing. Or the viewer may be engaged in comparing the advertised brand to other competing brands, a process called between-brand processing. Kent and Machleit (1990) reported that between-brand processing leads to increased brand recall, while within-brand processing leads to better brand recognition.

Television Program-Related Psychological and Behavioral Variables. Individuals who pay more attention to television programs are more likely to watch television commercials (Krugman, Cameron, & White, 1995).

Murry, Lastovicka, and Singh (1992) reported that viewers' liking of programs positively influenced ad attitude and brand attitude, while program-induced affect (feelings or mood) had no effect on these same attitudes. Coulter (1998) also found a positive effect of program liking on ad attitude, but program liking was seen as a mediating variable that was directly affected by program cognition and program-induced affect, and program-induced affect was found to be directly affected by program cognition.

Furthermore, when the commercial is in the first position in a pod, higher liking of the program produced more positive ad attitude (Coulter, 1998) and more positive brand attitudes (Murry et aI., 1992) as compared to commercials in other pod positions. Also, according to Coulter (1998), the effect of program liking on ad attitude is stronger when the ad and the program have congruent emotional contents.

Attitude Toward Web Sites. Chen and Wells (1999) first proposed this concept. In Stevenson et al.'s (2000) experiment, users with more positive attitudes toward a Web site were more likely to have a positive attitude toward an ad in the site, a positive attitude toward the brand advertised, and a stronger purchase intention regarding the brand.

EFFECTS OF MEASURED VARIABLES

Race (all media). Mrican Americans watched more television and had more positive attitudes toward advertising than did their Caucasian counterparts (Bush et aI., 1999).

Age (print and broadcast). As people get older, their cognitive processing speed declines, and consequently their brand and ad message memory (recall and recognition) decline significantly (Johnson & Cobb-Walgren, 1994). Older people are also more likely to avoid newspaper ads but less likely to avoid radio ads than are younger people (Speck & Elliott, 1997).

Gender (various media). Women have a more positive attitude toward advertising in general than do men (Bush et aI., 1999). Men are more apt to change channels during television commercial breaks than are women (Krugman et aI., 1995).

Male homosexuals (gays) tend to have more negative attitudes toward advertising than do female homosexuals (lesbians), while lesbians are less concerned with appropriate homosexual portrayals in advertising than are gays (Burnett, 2000).

Sexual Orientation (all media). Compared to other consumers, homosexual consumers read different newspapers and magazines, watch different television shows, listen to different radio programs, and are more likely to use catalogs and online resources (Burnett, 2000). They also tend to have a more negative attitude toward advertising.

Income (print and broadcast media). Ac cording to Speck and Elliott's (1997) survey, people with higher income are more likely to avoid ads in magazines, in newspapers, and on television.

Product Involvement (television ads). While advertisers may indirectly manipulate ad involvement, situation involvement, or even brand involvement, they may have little room to manipulate product involvement. Hitchon and Thorson (1995) reported that higher involvement with a product produced a more positive attitude toward an advertised brand, while product involvement produced no discernible effect on brand recall.

Family Communication Pattern (television ads). Researchers have identified two types of communication between parents and their children (McLeod & Chaffee, 1972). In concept-oriented communication, parents foster open two-sided communication, encouraging their children to discuss their ideas and develop an independent perspective. In sociooriented communication, parents are concerned with maintaining control over their children's thoughts, behavior, and exposure to outside influences. A four-category typology was developed based on those two dimensions (Moschis, 1987): Laissez-faire parents are neither socio- nor concept oriented; protective parents have a high level of socio-oriented communication but a low level of concept-oriented communication; pluralistic parents are the opposite, having a high level of concept-oriented communication but a low level of socio-oriented communication; and consensual parents have high levels of communication of both types.

Rose, Bush, and Kahle's (1998) survey of mothers in the United States and Japan found that laissez-faire mothers had the most positive attitudes toward and the lowest mediation of their children's exposure to television advertising. Pluralistic and consensual mothers had the highest mediation of and most negative attitudes toward advertising. The responses of protective mothers were between those extremes.

Web User Mode. Web surfers are no more likely to click banner ads or remember the ads than are information seekers, according to Li and Bukovac's (1999) experiment.

MORE RELEVANT RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Most of the research questions in advertising research started with whether-whether negative strategy wins votes for the sponsoring candidate, whether a celebrity endorser helps to persuade consumers to buy the advertised brand, and so on. The expected answers are either yes or no. While those studies are all quantitative in terms of methodology, the questions are by nature qualitative or "dichotomous." More recent advertising studies were more likely to ask contingency questions involving moderating variables-whether the negative strategy is stronger when the voters are more involved, whether the celebrity effect is weaker when the product is more involving, and so on. Those questions probe in more details and require comparisons of magnitudes of the effects.

The next stage of development might be to ask more "quantitative" questions starting with how much-how much celebrity endorsers affect memory, attitude, or behavior; how much stronger or weaker the celebrity effects are than the effects of ad length, and so on. These would be entirely new types of questions that require entirely new types of answers, which may lead to entirely new types of theories. For practitioners and policy makers, "precision" answers to such "precision" questions should be more useful in the cost-benefit calculation of the daily decision making.

Two other recommendations might seem obvious due to the changes in the economic environment in general and in the advertising media in particular, but they merit mention nonetheless. First, there should be, and most likely will be, more studies on computerrelated advertising. The trend is already quite clear in the most recent conferences and journals in the field. Second, there should be, but might not be, more studies on advertising effects in countries other than the United States, especially in the emerging economies. The financial cost and the cultural and language barriers make it difficult for U.S.- or Western Europe-based researchers to conduct research in those developing countries. The differences in research traditions and orientation make it difficult for the researchers based in those countries to produce the large amount of empirical research needed to participate in dialogue with the Western research community.

THE CRISES OF RELEVANCE

The preceding review and comments are based on the assumption that the prevailing methodologies can validly inform the goals of the advertising community. Unfortunately, the apparent mismatch between the goals and the methods of the advertising research troubled some observers during the 1990s, as it did during previous decades. As discussed previously, the research community has dual goals. One goal is applied-to create immediately useful knowledge that may help industry practitioners, public policy makers, and others make better decisions in their professions.

The second goal is theoretical-to advance the basic understanding of advertising processes, especially advertising's persuasive processes and effects, even if the knowledge might not have an immediate, clear, or specific application. For this second goal, it is also implied that ultimately it is the real-world processes and effects that should concern us, not some peculiar phenomena that occur only in laboratory settings with nonrepresentative ads on nonrepresentative subjects.

Accordingly, Sheth (1972) argued for "testing of theories in naturalistic and realistic settings" as the appropriate methodology for the field. The advertising studies during the next few years failed to meet Sheth's standard. Jacoby (1976) complained that much of the consumer research, of which the advertising research is considered a subfield, "is not worth the paper it is printed on or the time it takes to read it" (p. 2). Preston (1985) reported a growing "detachment" of advertising research from the actual "marketing and advertising context" (p. 3) such that the selection of the major concepts and the manipulation of the major variables under study "digressed from actual advertising practice" (p. 5). Eight years after Preston's observations, Wells (1993, p. 489) saw the same thing, finding that the prevailing methodology in the field was moving "away from the real world," using students to represent consumers and laboratory to represent the environment (pp. 491-492). Resolution of this crisis of relevance requires that advertising researchers forsake traditional methodologies (Wells, 1993).

McQuarrie (1998) conducted a meta-analysis of more than 400 experimental studies of advertising published between 1965 and 1997. He measured those studies' methodological detachment from advertising goals in six respects: (a) forcing exposure rather than arranging for nonfocal attention to embedded advertisements, (b) failing to measure choices, (c) not incorporating competitive advertisements into the design to allow for interference, (d) taking immediate measurements instead of allowing for decay, (e) not arranging for repeated exposures, and (f) exclusively using fictitious or unfamiliar brands. McQuarrie's findings should be alarming. Advertising studies were relatively detached throughout the period between 1972 and 1998, and the detachment had grown even higher during the more recent years.

Most of the advertising researchers, however, did not appear to be alarmed by this finding or by the critiques offered by Jacoby (1976), Preston (1985), and Wells (1993). There has been no elaborated or systematic defense on behalf of the prevailing practice. The researchers did appear to be aware of the criticism, as some succinct statements scattered or buried in some articles' methodology or conclusion section might suggest. Those statements are usually along the lines that, because this is a theory testing or basic re search, external validity is not that important. Here is an example from a highly respected researcher (Kamins, 1990):

Although one could criticize the current research on the grounds of limited external validity (i.e., use of laboratory experiment and a student sample), the focus of the research was directed toward theory testing, therefore placing the value of internal validity as more important than external validity.

As discussed earlier, the advertising-related persuasion research is the child of a marriage between the advertising industry and experimental psychology, a marriage symbolized in the 1920 hiring of John B. Watson, then a leading experimental psychologist, by J. Walter Thompson, then America's largest advertising agency. From the very beginning, it appeared to be a marriage of convenience rather than of love. Watson ended up producing no research in advertising (Maloney, 1994). For a long time, consumer psychologists insisted on the traditions from experimental psychology in terms of both topic and methodology. In topic selection, they insisted on searching for universa~ theories. In methodology, they paid little attention to external validity, namely generalizability. Both mismatch the basic needs of the advertising industry (and public policy makers as another important patron), leading to a troubled marriage and an unhappy child.

As is the case with any troubled marriage, at least one party has to compromise or the marriage will not last. A divorce in this case would be easy. All it would take is for advertising practitioners and public policy makers to stop paying attention to advertising research. Many of them never paid attention to it anyway. Over the years, more and more advertising researchers are selecting their topics based on independent variables, a sign of compromise in one of the two major points in dispute. With regard to methodology, however, many of the researchers continue to ignore the criticism while doing what they always have done. Until more advertising researchers place more value on the generalizability and ultimate utility of the knowledge they create, the mismatches between the goals and the methods of the advertising research are likely to continue. So too are the crises of relevance and the troubles in the marriage.

 

41) THE ROLE OF EMOTION

John E. NEWHAGEN

Emotion plays a role in advertising, politics, health communication, and virtually any other form of persuasive communication. The Jeffersonian democratic tradition, with its foundations stretching back as far as Milton, elevates reason to be "good" in that logic drives decision, while persuasion is "bad" because it is driven by emotion. However, information processing theory challenges the value of the emotion-reason dichotomy on two grounds. First, information-evoking emotion can also be "good," especially if the cognitive system is under stress. Second, a growing body of research shows that electronic media users simultaneously process a complex stream of both rational and emotional information (Geiger & Newhagen, 1994). There is even evidence coming from neuropsychology that emotion may play a key role in integrating reason, acting as the bedrock on which consciousness itself is formed (Watt, 1998).

From the functionalist perspective on which information processing theory resides, emotion represents an internal alarm system to warn of problems that demand attention and immediate real-time resolutions. Emotion is, perhaps, the psychological heuristic key to human survival. Remember that information processing models place a limited resource organism in a potentially dangerous, complex, and volatile information ecology. To the degree that reason is a serial process and is resource demanding, it might not be able to generate adaptive behavioral decisions in time to face imminent threat. On the other hand, limited or fragmentary information is sufficient to activate emotional "action states" that provoke approach-avoidance behaviors appropriate to survival (Frijda, 1988). In this sense, emotion is as good as, or even better than, reason in solving some problems.

Of course, emotion evolved prior to the invention of mass media and was intended to guard against "real" threats such as the appearance of a predator. The astonishing thing, which most of us take for granted, is that television viewers respond to emotion-evoking images on the screen of a cathode ray tube just as they do to the same stimuli in real life (Reeves & Nass, 1996). Doubters of this proposition ought to pause and consider the impact of the images of commercial jetliners smashing into the sides of the World Trade Center buildings. For instance, viewer approach-avoidance ratings of images that elicit discrete negative emotion in television news mirror responses to the same stimuli in real life (Newhagen, 1998b). Newhagen's (1998b) study showed that images of anger elicit approach responses to the screen, while images of fear and disgust elicit avoidance responses. Work looking at emotion in terms of its intensity and valence has generated similar results (Lang, Newhagen, & Reeves, 1996; Lang, Pinkleton, & Newhagen, 1994).

Emotion-evoking stimuli on television have the potential to be "bad" to the degree that they evoke emotions in the viewer not appropriate to his or her real-life surroundings. Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, and Signorielli (1980) is perhaps the best-known example of such a theory, where excessive depictions of violence on television can "persuade" viewers that the world is a more dangerous place than it really is (Newhagen & Reeves, 1992).

While information processing tends to stress memory and attention as outcomes, more attention is being given to variables more commonly associated with persuasion. For instance, Bucy and Newhagen (1999) examined how television viewers assess how appropriate a public figure's emotional response is to a news event. Research participants first viewed a news story and then an image of President Clinton. Both the emotion of the images in the news story and of Clinton's response were varied for both their valence and their intensity. Viewers reported that they found Clinton's responses to be inappropriate if the emotional valence of his reaction did not match that of the news story. Furthermore, they generally found any highly intense response from Clinton to be inappropriate, regardless of the preceding news story. In concrete terms, this suggests that politicians will be the most persuasive when they project themselves as being moderately aroused. Newhagen (1994) integrated both memory and counterarguing as dependent variables into his study of the censorship disclaimers in Persian Gulf War news. Television networks included a short 5 -second disclaimer in the lower left-hand corner of the screen when a story was censored. The study first examined whether the disclaimers were even noticed by viewers and hypothesized that if the disclaimers were being processed as "noise" in the image rather than for their narrative content, they would negatively affect memory for the images in the story. Second, it was hypothesized that if the disclaimers were being processed for their verbal content, viewers would counterargue against the story's theme. Results show that viewers did indeed process the disclaimers, listing more negative thoughts about stories with disclaimers than for stories without disclaimers, even though they could not remember seeing the disclaimers. The inclusion of the information processing perspective in the study helped to demonstrate that the messages were being processed into memory below conscious awareness, a result that would not have been obvious if the study had been conducted using only counterarguing as a measure.

The information processing perspective did not bring the study of emotion to persuasion; affect has long been central to the topic. Looking inside the black box has, however, given considerable insight into our understanding of the role that emotion plays in persuasion. Information processing explicates the idea of emotion as a discrete state within the viewer rather than as a feature of the message. A political ad is only "negative" or "positive" in that it has certain qualities that elicit emotion in the viewer. Viewer emotion is then conceptualized as a psychological state that can have profound effects on the meaning of persuasive appeals.

 

42) Understanding the media and social reality; Designing advertising that conform to perception of social reality. If advertising is designed after the accepted messages from news and television shows, one can actually use these to the product advantage. For example, imagine if we could accurately know what message the tv show "Desperate House Wives" is trying to portray. Designing ads that conform to the same message should create an advantage. In other words running a 15 second ad on the same theme is not actually 15 seconds but in fact could be the entire time of that particular tv show.

Consider the fact:

There is evidence that change in the typical demographics of television is possible. A number of minority groups expressed outrage at the small number of minority characters being presented in major roles in primetime television during the Fall 1999 season. A "brownout," in which minorities would boycott network television to demonstrate their displeasure as well as their importance, was threatened. In response, producers promised to add more minority characters (Weinraub, 1999).

If a smart advertiser (perhaps for products targeted at minorities) had used this perception of social reality, the ad would have been very successful. The ad would actually confirm such beliefs.

I like to give another great example. In 1980s Ronald Reagan, media, tv and almost every newspaper created a mind set that Soviet Union (IBM in the relevant AD) as a Big Brother need to end. The relevant ad is the story of Apple Computer's famous 1984 Super Bowl Ad, a sixty­second mini movie for Apple Computer's Macintosh, showing a club-wielding symbol of freedom smashing the 1984 Orwellian nightmare. The ad was only 60 seconds, however, I believe the length of ad was actually a decade. Here it is :http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/1984.html. The scenario invokes the George Orwell novel, 1984; a Big Brother figure ceaselessly intones the slogans of Newspeak, while the public masses appear automatized by the rigidly controlled totalitarian society. Imagine if you saw the ad, for the very first time tomorrow, would it still have the same effect?

Power of Narrative:

Orwell's dystopic tale is the most directly quoted framework for the ad's narrative structure , but there are other important cultural symbols invoked along with it. Irony is that the opening shot of the marching workers is taken from Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis, a film which depicted the destructiveness of capitalism and the misery of the working class in a plea for compassion and equity.

That film begins with a series of shots of the bent and exploited workers, including one of them in a circular tunnel, directly quoted in the Macintosh ad, leading to their underground city and the machines they die maintaining. The hall in which the head on the screen addresses the mass of men is architecturally similar to the oppressive Master's building in Metropolis. There is an important difference between the two narratives, however. Orwell's narrative projected stasis and immutability in the totalitarian state of 1984, while Lang's story allowed for resistance and the redistribution of control, a theme central to the ad's industrial agenda as well as to its narrative.

 

Theory in detail:

Misperceptions Produced by Media Content

WILLIAM P. EVELAND, JR.

Spiral of Silence. The spiral of silence, introduced to American researchers during the early 1970s, is a cross-level model of opinion dynamics that has received considerable research attention, if not support, in the United States . My discussion of the spiral of silence hypothesis draws heavily from the Englishlanguage writings of Noelle-Neumann (1974, 1977,1979,1985,1989,1991,1993,1995).

The spiral of silence hypothesis consists of several different stages and includes several important variables. First, the theory assumes that (a) most people fear social isolation and believe that to express minority opinions on "moral" issues is to risk social isolation; (b) people have a "quasi-statistical sense" that allows them to determine, if not the actual distribution of public opinion, then at least the relative trends in public opinion (sometimes called "future trend"); and (c) these perceptions come from evidence in the environment, most importantly mass and interpersonal communication.

Thus, the public opinion process, according to the spiral of silence, works like this. To avoid the negative feelings of social isolation, people scan their environment in order to sense the climate of opinion. They make use of their perceptions of the climate of opinion to determine what opinions can be expressed in public and what opinions must be expressed in public. When their private opinions cannot be expressed in public due to a fear of isolation, they remain silent. As others go through this same process, there is a change in the climate of opinion; the interpersonal environment appears to be even more one-sided as members of the perceived minority fail to speak out in favor of their position. This produces changes in perceptions of the climate of opinion, which reinforces minority members' unwillingness to speak out. The process continues until one position becomes dominant. In addition to changes in the climate of opinion, this process can change private opinions for those who are undecided or weakly committed to their viewpoint.

The role of the mass media in the spiral of silence is to serve as an indicator of the climate of opinion. Noelle-Neumann has identified the New York Times, the Washington Post, and possibly the major television news networks in the United States as the "trend-setting" mass media because they tend to set the agenda for other news media outlets such as local newspapers. People sense public opinion via the trend-setting mass media, which NoelleNeumann has claimed are consonant (all the same), ubiquitous (omnipresent), and cumulative (effects accumulate with repetition) and therefore not susceptible to selective exposure, attention, or recall.

According to the spiral of silence, the mass media serve as agents of social control. They convey information-although not necessarily accurate information-about the norms of society and thus opinions that may be expressed without fear of isolation. These clues may be portrayed in several different ways, including but not limited to camera angles (Noelle-Neumann, 1993), general statements about public opinion by reporters, invocation of social norms as boundaries of mainstream public opinion, actions in relation to community laws, "man-on-the-street" interviews (McLeod & Hertog, 1992), and reports of opinion polls (Salmon & Kline, 1985).

The literature has provided some evidence for the role of news media use in perceptions of public opinion. Glynn (1987) found that those who were frequent users of mass media tended to perceive that they were dissimilar from their neighbors, whereas those who were high in interpersonal communication tended to perceive that they were similar to their neighbors

Social observers will infer that a given viewpoint is in the minority because few individuals are expressing this view publicly, but in fact this unexpressed view may be the privately held view of the majority. President Richard Nixon claimed just this when he spoke of a "silent majority" that supported the conservative cause.

Research on the influence of perceptions of being in the minority (whether or not this is a misperception) and willingness to speak out publicly from the spiral of silence perspective has produced mixed results in the United States (for a meta-analysis, see Glynn, Hayes, & Shanahan, 1997). Despite this, there has been enough positive evidence to suggest that something like the spiral of silence does indeed occur. In fact, one of the most vocal American critics of the spiral of silence, Chuck Salmon, acknowledged, "The essence of the model-that individuals' perceptions of their environment do have some bearing on their communication and behavior ... is incontestable" (Salmon & Moh, 1992, p. 159).

Institutional process analysis is the component of the cultural indicators approach that focuses on how the media messages that exist are chosen. Specifically, this component attempts to answer the question, "Why are the media messages we have the way they are1" Researchers have pointed to the roles of the profit motive in commercial television as well as the culture and ownership structure of the television industry as potential answers to this question.

Cultivation analysis seeks to connect the content of television to the public's perceptions of social reality. Because media message analysis indicates that the content of television is not an accurate portrayal of the real world, people who use the television world to shape their perceptions of the real world will come away with a serious misunderstanding. Cultivation analysis suggests that this is exactly what happens. Specifically, the most prominent claim of cultivation researchers is that the violent world of television has created a "mean world syndrome" in which heavy viewers believe that crime and violence are much more prevalent than they are in reality and that most people cannot be trusted.

In addition to perceptions of a mean and dangerous world, other misperceptions of social reality have been linked to television viewing. Cultivation researchers have examined the role of television in forming stereotypes of social groups and behaviors, including perceptions of social out-groups and minorities (Gandy & Baron, 1998; Kiecolt & Sayles, 1988), perceptions of professionals such as lawyers and doctors (Pfau, Mullen, Deidrich, & Garrow, 1995; Pfau, Mullen, & Garrow, 1995), and perceptions of sex roles and marriage among young people (Morgan & Rothschild, 1983; Rosenwasser, Lingenfelter, & Harrington, 1989; Signorielli, 1991; Signorielli & Lears, 1992). Generally speaking, television use tends to produce stereotypical perceptions of these groups and behaviors.

The resonance hypothesis also predicts an interaction between background characteristics and television viewing such that effects of television are greater when its content is consistent with the real-life situation of the viewer. Thus, unlike mainstreaming (which predicts a convergent interaction), resonance predicts a "contributory" interaction (McLeod & Reeves, 1980). That is, the impact of television viewing would be greater among groups of individuals for whom the television messages "resonate," thus leading perceptions of these groups to be even more different from other heavy viewers than light viewers are from other light viewers.

In a related vein, Mares (1996) argued that source confusions-the tendency for individuals to think that events from entertainment actually came from the news-were related to the cultivation effect. Specifically, she argued that those who tend to mistake entertainment sources to be news sources in recall tests will evidence stronger cultivation effects, while those who tend to mistake news sources as entertainment sources will demonstrate weaker cultivation effects.

Social reality perceptions play a significant role in a number of health-related concerns. For instance, a number of social scientists (e.g., Marks, Graham, & Hansen, 1992; Perkins & Wechsler, 1996; Prentice & Miller, 1993; Schroeder & Prentice, 1998) have demonstrated that perceptions of social reality in the form of perceived norms have important implications for the use of alcohol by adolescents and college students. Research has consistently demonstrated that "one of the most consistent predictors of an adolescent's alcohol use is perceived alcohol use by his or her peers" (Schroeder & Prentice, 1998, p. 2151). Importantly, longitudinal research (Marks et aI., 1992) has demonstrated that the social conformity effect (changing one's own behaviors to fit perceptions of others) is stronger than the social projection effect (changing one's perceptions of others to fit one's own behavior). The link between perceived norms and behavior has been replicated for other health-related behaviors, including sexual experiences and smoking among young adults (e.g., Botvin, Botvin, Baker, Dusenbury, & Goldberg, 1992; Cohen & Shotland, 1996). Any health campaign designed to reduce alcohol use, smoking, or risky sexual behaviors by adolescents and college students would be well-served by attempting to alter perceptions of the social norm regarding the behavior. As Montgomery (1989) detailed, there is a substantial history of groups attempting to influence American television content for public health purposes. For example, characters on entertainment television programs can regularly engage in safe sex as opposed to unprotected sex or can abstain from sexual activity altogether.

One example of how change might occur in public perceptions of social norms regarding health behaviors can be drawn from the 1990s teen soap opera Beverly Hills 90210. For several years of this series, the character "Donna" abstained from sexual intercourse while her high school and college peers were sexually active. For a truly significant impact, more than a single character would probably be necessary to influence perceptions of the number of individuals who remain virgins through late high school or early college.

Another context in which television content could be influenced would be in automotive safety. For example, based on outside pressures, characters on several popular television series during the 1980s, including The A Team, began to visibly buckle their seat belts each time they entered their cars (Geller, 1989). This change in behavior could have led viewers to perceive a change in public norms regarding the use of safety belts and to adjust their own behaviors accordingly. Similarly, if instances of drinking and driving are followed by accidents and other negative consequences, such as the drunk driving accident of the character "Bailey" on Party of Five, regular viewers may become likely to associate these events occurring together frequently. A related approach would be to portray more occurrences of the use of designated drivers in situations where a lead character is drinking before driving.

In Third World countries, development messages have been included in soap operas to introduce or change social norms about a number of issues (e.g., Kottak, 1990; Singhal & Rogers, 1989). For example, if campaigners hope to reduce the infant mortality rate in a developing country, they might develop a drama or soap opera focusing on people with whom the target audience could easily identify. Characters in the soap opera would explicitly and frequently engage in the appropriate behaviors (e.g., use the proper medicine when babies had diarrhea) and be positively rewarded for doing so. Those who did not do so would receive negative social feedback or experience negative consequences. Over time, these portrayals could cultivate the perception that the health behaviors are normative and thus should be followed as standard practice because they must be appropriate and effective. If nothing else, individuals may simply engage in these behaviors to avoid social isolation. This same logic could be applied to the use of new agricultural methods or other innovative practices.

 

43) What to do when the consumer is inoculated against the product?

Nuances in Inoculation Theory and Applications

ERIN ALISON SZABO MICHAEL PFAU

Necessity was the impetus for applying the inoculation approach to attitude resistance in commercial advertising. During the late 1980s, comparative advertising, which explicitly compares a target brand to one or more competing brands, was rising in popularity. Recent research has demonstrated impressive persuasiveness of comparative advertisements for certain items in certain conditions. Therefore, it is important to ask whether a company can do anything to preclude efficacy of a competitor's comparative ad.

Five studies provided the foundation for the application of inoculation to commercial advertising. Two of these early studies dealt with social marketing and were the first to attempt to apply inoculation to a marketing context. Bither, Dolich, and Nell (1971) concluded that "two-sided immunization appeals" were effective in reinforcing belief levels against messages that advocated movie censorship. Szybillo and Heslin (1973), in addressing the question as to whether air bags should be mandated in new automobiles, found that refutational messages were more effective than supportive messages in producing attitude resistance.

Two other commercial advertising studies explored the efficacy of refutational versus supportive messages in producing resistance to Federal Trade Commission attacks. Findings here were mixed. Hunt (1973) found that refutational messages were superior to supportive messages, while Gardner, Mitchell, and Staelin (1977) found no differences between the two approaches. Another study by Sawyer (1973) looked at the relative efficacy of refutational and supportive print ads for five different products. He found that refutational ads outperformed the supportive ads, effects that were more pronounced for nonusers of products and when following a series of ads.

These initial studies suggest that the refutational two-sided approach is superior to the one-sided supportive approach in producing attitude resistance. This claim is backed further by recent commercial advertising and persuasion research. A meta-analysis of message sidedness research Qackson & Allen, 987) and three replications of the metaanalysis (Allen et al., 1990) suggest that two-sided messages are preferred over one-sided messages because mentioning the competing position "subsequently builds up the psychological defenses of the message recipient and makes the refutation effective" (Allen et al., 1990, p. 286). In fact, Swinyard (1981) and Kamins and Asseal (1987) provided evidence from the context of commercial advertising that two-sided messages actually suppress a receiver's counterarguments, which results in greater resistance to persuasion.

pfau's (1992) study of inoculation in a comparative advertising context indicated that the effectiveness of inoculation as a resistance strategy depends largely on other variables at work in the environment. pfau manipulated two variables: receiver product involvement and message format. Receiver product involvement concerned the "relevance or salience of the product class for receivers" (Pfau, 1997, p. 144), and comparative message format involved the "style and directionality of the comparative" (p. 144).

pfau found that both inoculation-same and -different messages were effective in conferring resistance to a competitor's claims. The most intriguing finding, however, is that inoculation was more effective in producing resistance to a competitor's comparative advertisements, mainly for high-involving products (Pfau, 1992). pfau reasoned that inoculation pretreatments may produce higher threat in high-involved receivers and, therefore, prove to be more effective.

Jamieson (1992) argued that in contexts where challenges to existing attitudes can be foreseen, the challenge can be preempted by way of inoculation. Contemporary research alludes to inoculation's efficacy in protecting attitudes in a variety of applied settings. Existing research on inoculation demonstrates irrefutably that it is an effective technique in promoting resistance to persuasion.

However, while researchers know how to construct inoculation messages and how to measure resistance outcomes, they do not yet fully understand the process triggered by inoculative messages. McGuire's original formulation of the inoculation construct "relied on a biological analogy to explain how pretreatment messages might confer resistance" (Pfau, 1997, p. 135). The guiding idea of inoculation theory is taken from the health practice of administering a weakened form of a virus to activate the body's immune system against the virus. Based on this analogy, McGuire (1964) reasoned that people can be stimulated to build up resistance to attacks on attitudes by being exposed to weakened attitude-threatening messages.

McGuire posited that people have many "overprotected" attitudes. The selective exposure argument was based on two assumptions: that people are attracted to information that supports existing attitudes and that people purposely avoid information that disagrees with their attitudes.

The inoculation approach is based on the assumption that refutational pretreatments, which consist of counterarguments challenging a person's attitude and responses to those counterarguments, threaten people. Due to the production of threat, refutational pretreatments motivate people to protect their attitudes, which elicits resistance (Papageorgis & McGuire, 1961). Refutational pretreatments consist of threat and refutational preemption, which are the two indispensable components of inoculation.

"The threat component is the most distinguishing feature of inoculation" (Pfau, 1997, p. 137). Threat motivates receivers to recognize the vulnerability of their attitudes to conceivable challenges and unleashes an "internal process". Threat is operationalized as a warning of possible future attacks on attitudes and the recognition of attitude vulnerability to change (pfau, Tusing, Koerner, et aI., 1997). Threat elicits the motivation to protect attitudes and, thus, cultivates resistance to counterpersuasion (pfau & Kenski, 1990).

Threat and refutational preemption are the essential elements of inoculation. The process induced by these two components is "part motivational and part cognitive, but more needs to be learned about it". However, we maintain that threat is the most integral of the two.

If receiver involvement levels are too low or too high, the threat component of an inoculation treatment might not be capable of eliciting the additional motivation required to further protect attitudes. Therefore, he maintained that involvement dictates boundary conditions for inoculation theory. Involvement, as it is conceptualized in inoculation research, is the perceived importance of an attitude object to a receiver, or what Eagly and Chaiken (1993) characterized as "outcome-relevant involvement." Pfau and colleagues reasoned that the effect of need for cognition on a high-involving issue makes theoretical sense because both issue involvement and need for cognition enhance message processing and, therefore, should increase the effectiveness of inoculation for high-involving issues. However, they lamented the lack of theoretical explanation for the findings of the low-involvement condition.

With moderate- and high-involving topics, this prediction was supported. They reasoned that the more ego-involved a receiver is, "the more likely he! she can access relevant attitudes (Fazio, 1989), thereby facilitating threat, which requires that receivers perceive the potential vulnerability of attitudes" (Pfau, Tusing, Lee, et aI., 1997, p. 475). In addition, the results supported the prediction that the efficacy of inoculation is greater with more ego-involved receivers. The results indicated that greater ego involvement increases resistance, "independent of the other processes in social judgment theory, namely assimilation and contrast" (p. 465). Finally, Pfau, Tusing, Lee, and colleagues (1997) posited that the cognitive process triggered by threat was assimilation and contrast. However, the results revealed no evidence of an assimilation effect, prompting the conclusion that a "suitable rationale for the cognitive process triggered via inoculation must lie elsewhere".

Involvement, on the other hand, both directly and indirectly contributed to resistance to influence through a variety of paths. The pattern of results revealed that involvement was positively related to resistance and to number of responses to counterarguments, but only with moderate- and high-involving topics. Inoculation was the least effective for the low-involving condition, suggesting again that there is a floor for involvement and threat. Furthermore, the researchers (Pfau, Tusing, Koerner, et a!., 1997) found consistent main effect findings for involvement on most indicators of resistance for both the moderate- and high-involving topics.

Involvement seemed to play two main roles in the process of resistance. First, it directly made final attitudes more resistant to attacks for all topics. Second, it was positively related to Phase 2 attitudes and negatively related to Phase 3 attitudes. Pfau and colleagues explained this outcome by positing that delay is needed to provide time for receivers to generate counterarguments and, subsequently, "bolster attitudes against change" (p.210). Past research supports the position that delay is needed to allow time for resistance to set in (McGuire, 1970).

Until recently, all research on inoculation had assumed that the process of resistance is cognitive. However, recent studies have introduced affect to inoculation in an effort to further understand the process of resistance. In the first of these investigations, Lee and pfau (1997) compared the effectiveness of cognitive, affective-positive, and affective-negative inoculation messages in conferring resistance to cognitive and affective attacks. Cognitive messages were designed so that they were rational, objective, and factual, whereas affective messages were written to be more suggestive and consisted of metaphors, anecdotes, and stereotyping designed to elicit either positive or negative feelings.

The latter focus was motivated by the fact that threat acts as the motivational catalyst in inoculation (Pfau, 1997; pfau, Tusing, Koerner, et ai., 1997) and that motivation intrinsically is more affective than cognitive (Izard, 1993). This study examined comparative efficacy of cognitive, affective-anger, and affective happiness inoculation messages at low, moderate, and high levels of self-efficacy while taking into account receiver involvement and prior attitude. In short, this investigation explored the role of affect in inoculation, both as a message strategy and in terms of how affect functions in the psychological processes producing resistance.

Because appraisal theory alone cannot explain why some people respond to threat with anger while others respond to the same threat with happiness, appraisal theorists have tried to uncover situational and personal factors affecting appraisals. Whether anger is produced from threat appraisal depends largely on an individual's perceived power over the stimulus (Dillard, Plotnick, Godbold, Freimuth, & Edgar, 1996). Self-efficacy is a measure of one's perceived power over, or confidence in, dealing with an environmental obstacle, and it is a likely predictor of how a person will perceive a threat message (Bandura, 1983). Bandura (1983) argued that anger experiences are a function of the strength of perceived self-efficacy in coping with different threats (p. 465). Therefore, pfau and colleagues (2001) predicted that with inoculation, anger should stem from high self-efficacy.

Once again conferring the robustness of inoculation, the results of the pfau et al. (2001) study revealed that all inoculation message approaches conferred resistance and that, contrary to prediction, all messages stimulated equal amounts of counterarguing.

This study produced other interesting findings about the nuances of inoculation as well. Receiver involvement once again contributed to resistance through its positive association with counterarguing.

Results of structural equation analyses indicated that inoculation treatments both directly and indirectly enhance resistance. Inoculation treatments produced a direct impact on attitude resistance, independent of psychological processes.

In addition, with both cognitive and affective-anger treatments, inoculation elicited threat, which, along with involvement, enhanced counterarguing and also triggered anger, indirectly promoting resistance.

In fact, anger messages elicited the most threat. This study was the second one to suggest both a direct and an indirect path through threat and counterarguing as "dual routes" to resistance (Pfau et al., 2001, p.243). This finding suggests that threat and counter arguing are necessary, but not sufficient, to fully account for inoculation's impact.

As a result of these findings, pfau and colleagues (2001) argued that the direct path from inoculation to resistance suggests two possibilities: one, that the refutational component directly contributes to resistance; or two, that there are still untested variables in the inoculation process that help to explain resistance. Insko (1967) may have been right when he claimed, "Inoculation theory may prove to be part of a larger and more complex picture" (p. 319). Nonetheless, the most important results of this study concern the role of emotion in inoculation. The researchers proposed that anger would play an integral role in the inoculation process, and these hypotheses were confirmed and were consistent with the logic of appraisal theory. Mainly, it was found that threat is positively related to anger and that anger is positively related to counterarguing and resistance.

Pfau, Holbert, and colleagues (2000) posited that the nature of inoculation implies that print treatments should be superior to video due to the unique nature of the two message forms. In contrast to print, video is an inherently passive medium (Chesebro, 1984; Graber, 1987), and therefore, video should be less effective in promoting careful message elaboration. However, as McGuire (1962) reasoned, inoculation triggers an intrinsically active process of counterarguing. Therefore, inoculation messages employed in research are typically cognitive in nature.

Because print is more likely to elicit active message processing (Chaiken & Eagly, 1976, 1983; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), Pfau, Holbert, and colleagues (2000) predicted that, compared to video, print inoculation messages would elicit more counterarguing and be more effective in conferring resistance to influence. In addition, they hypothesized that video treatments confer resistance uniquely because video enhances "the primacy of the visual over the audio channel" (Paletz & Guthrie, 1987, p. 20) and because it is assumed to be less involving (Chesebro, 1984). Therefore, video should be more likely to result in reliance on source cues. Finally, pfau, Holbert, and colleagues (2000) questioned whether the conferral of resistance occurs at different points in time for print and video inoculation treatments.

The results once again revealed the robustness of inoculation. Mainly, print and video messages did not significantly vary in their ability to confer resistance. However, as predicted, print and video messages did differ in how they produced resistance. The video messages produced resistance based more on source considerations. Videos immediately generated positive relational perceptions about the source of the inoculation messages in terms of perceptions of similarity and depth, causing receivers to immediately bolster their attitudes. These positive relational thoughts about the source were then associated with more negative perceptions of the source of the attack and, as a result, with resistance to the attacks. The video messages elicited much more negative perceptions about the competence and character of the source of the attacks than did print messages.

These findings also point to a difference in the timing of resistance. Immediately following the inoculation message, the video treatments fostered more resistance than did the print messages. However, following exposure to the persuasive attacks, this difference disappeared, with both the print and video messages being equally effective in producing resistance. Overall, this study indicates that video inoculation messages confer resistance to influence uniquely through a process that relies heavily on source factors. These results suggest, as was proposed, that print emphasizes message content, while video emphasizes source factors. Furthermore, it was found that video treatments conferred immediate resistance, whereas print treatments required time to induce resistance.

The previously reviewed contemporary studies suggest much nuance in the process of resistance, pointing especially to the strong robustness of inoculation. The pattern of results of existing research reveals that, whether inoculation treatments are constructed as the same or different central or peripheral as content or source oriented or as cognitive or affective or whether treatments are administered by video or print they enhance resistance to persuasion.

Inoculation theory may provide an alternative preemptive response for dealing with an opponent's attacks. Inoculation theory suggests that one can design messages that make voters resistant to the influence of attack ads. Therefore, an important question to address is the following: What can be done to produce resistance in adolescents' anti-smoking attitudes? .

Lin's (2000) study indicated that inoculation was able to enhance attitude strength. People receiving an inoculation treatment became increasingly confident in their attitudes, expressed greater willingness to verbalize their attitudes, and showed increased likelihood of resisting counterattitudinal attacks, in comparison to control group participants. Lin concluded that inoculation can shatter the spiral of silence and potentially foster public deliberation of important social issues.

If inoculation can mitigate the fear of isolation, it should produce a different climate of opinion in which competing views are more likely to be expressed. The results of Lin's study carry important ramifications for participatory democracy.

Unanswered questions about inoculation stem largely from its core theoretical elements. We are closer to knowing about the processes of threat, yet little is known about the workings of refutational preemption. For example, does refutational preemption prime attitudes, thereby making them more accessible for an individual when faced with a challenge? We cannot yet explain unaccounted for direct impacts of inoculation in resistance. Possibly, the concept of priming holds the key. Also, are refutational pretreatments using source derogations superior to those employing content-specific counterarguments? Stone (1969) found that source derogation was inferior to message inoculation, yet his is the only study to address this issue.

CONCLUSION

Inoculation theory has been, and promises to be, a viable and serviceable approach to attitude resistance. Experimental research, coupled with more recent field experiments, demonstrates that inoculation provides resistance to attitude change in situations where challenges to attitudes are often inevitable. This chapter has explained the inoculation approach of resistance, reviewed early inoculation research, explored explanations of the processes triggered via inoculation, described contemporary applications of inoculation in a variety of contexts, provided a glimpse of as yet unresolved issues in inoculation research, and suggested further applications of inoculation.

 

44) Affect. Persuasion cannot occur in the absence of passion. In other words persuasive messages must evoke passion if they are to succeed. Professionally produced advertisements often include eye-catching images and memorable melodies in addition to some propositional content. A clear conceptual line can be drawn between the affect stimulated by verbal content and that which arises from ancillary stylistic material.

Persuasion and the Structure of Affect

JAMES PRICE DILLARD ANNELOES MEIJNDERS

The fact that affect is kind of missing in websites advertising is important and perhaps it could be innovated. However, many persuasive appeals attempt to elicit affect through means other than propositional content. What we call discrete emotion models are the most complex of the lot. From this perspective, affect is viewed as a set of distinct states such as anger, fear, and happiness, each of which may vary in intensity.

As its name so plainly suggests, the bipolar valence model assumes that the affect is best conceived as a single continuum described by antonymic pairs such as positive-negative, good-bad, and happy-sad.

Much of the current interest in mood and persuasion can be traced to a study by Worth and Mackie (1987). That project is valuable not only for its place in the history of this area but also because its design is so typical of subsequent investigations. In Worth and Mackie's study, positive mood participants won $1.00 in an allegedly random lottery, while neutral mood participants were simply asked whether or not they had participated in a lottery. All participants then read a message about acid rain containing either strong or weak arguments that was attributed to either an expert or nonexpert source. The results indicated that, relative to the neutral mood participants, those in the positive mood condition recalled fewer arguments, were less sensitive to the argument strength manipulation, and were more sensitive to the source cue manipulation. Overall, the evidence suggested that positive mood dampened systematic processing. From these and other findings (Mackie & Worth, 1989), the researchers concluded that positive moods consume cognitive capacity, thereby constraining participants' ability to engage in systematic message processing.

This finding is very important in the case of HerbaLabs visitors since most of them are in pain, they are in bad mood. This indicates that most Herbalabs visitors are more cognitive.

The notion that positive mood participants might have suffered motivational deficits provides the cornerstone to an alternative explanation. The mood-as-information hypothesis suggests that affective states may function as heuristics conveying to individuals whether there is a need to process the message carefully (Bless, Bohner, Schwarz, & Strack, 1990; for a revision of this position, see Bless & Schwarz, 1999). A positive mood signals that all is well, and by implication so is the advocacy of the suasory appeal. By contrast, a negative mood gives notice that something is amiss. The individual should, therefore, devote cognitive resources to an analysis of the environment, including the persuasive message.

In this view, message recipients make careful decisions regarding message processing with an eye toward maintaining or improving their affective state. Persons in a positive mood are expected to be quite discriminating about the messages they choose to engage because there are so many ways in which their state of elation might be disrupted. They are likely to avoid (i.e., superficially process) depressing topics, loss-framed messages, and counterattitudinal claims. However, a positive mood might encourage systematic processing if the message recipient believes that close analysis would make him or her feel better. By contrast, a very sad mood should encourage systematic processing more generally. Affectively speaking, there is nothing left to lose and much to be gained.

 

 

 

 

 

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