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Psychology of Communication: persuasion
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Psychology of Communication: persuasion
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There is no very clear evidence as to which medium is likely to be the most effective. Lenin and Goebbels both considered film to be the most powerful propaganda medium. TV today has much the same reputation and radio was considered in its early days to be particularly powerful. Television and radio are perhaps considered so effective because they are in our own homes, but there's not much evidence to show that that makes much difference, even though it's one important factor in the BBFC's decisions on how to censor videos. TV and film may be considered especially powerful because they incorporate both sound and vision, but there is some evidence that that may in fact reduce effectiveness. TV is often also considered especially powerful because it is a mass medium, delivering the same message to around 20 million people at a time for the major soaps. However, that may work to its disadvantage when compared with, say, newspapers and periodicals which have highly differentiated markets, allowing much more precise targeting.
Research tends to show relatively little effect of any of the mass media - the so-called 'limited effects' paradigm, which emerges quite strongly from the empirical research tradition in the USA. However, it is possible that that is a deficiency of the research rather than of the media. It is often argued that since the American researchers were looking for clearly measurable effects they tended to concentrate on the short-term and thus may have missed the longer term and more diffuse effects.
A very important piece of research was conducted by Katz and Lazarsfeld into the effects of radio propaganda in the 1940s. Their research led them to formulate their Two-Step Flow Model of mass media communication, which still underlies much communication practice today.
In essence, it emphasises the importance of the influence of our social contacts in influencing our interpretation of media messages. Sophisticated political 'spin doctors' continue to recognise today that the best form of advertising is word-of-mouth advertising. They don't only need to persuade us as individuals of the validity of what they have to say. They must also persuade the people we come into contact with, especially the 'opinion leaders' in our lives.
The Labour Party spin doctors know that Conservative Party voters will switch off when the Labour election broadcast is on and vice-versa. We will tend actively to seek out those messages which support the view we already have and avoid those which may challenge it. This applies not only to the mass media, but also to interpersonal communication. For example, it is well known that those with a positive self-image will tend to remember positive comments made about them, and those with a negative self-image will tend to remember the negative ones. (See also the sections on Selective Attention and Cognitive Consistency).
We maybe can't avoid being exposed to messages we don't like, but there is plenty of evidence that in such a case we won't pay much attention to them.
Even if we are exposed and do attend to messages which conflict with our views, the chances are that we will interpret them in such a way that they do fit what we already believe. However good the Labour Party's arguments might be, the chances are that the Conservative voter will dismiss them as a load of nonsense.
An excellent example of this is provided by Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to anti-racist cartoons. The cartoons featured Mr Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were intended to discredit bigotry. In fact 31% failed to recognise that Mr Biggott was racially prejudiced or that the cartoons were intended to be anti-racist (Kendall & Wolff (1949) in Curran (1990)).
Another study referred to by Curran was conducted by Hastorf and Cantril in 1954. Subjects were showed film of a particularly dirty football match between Princeton and Dartmouth and asked to log the number of infractions of the rules by ether side. The Princeton students concluded that the Dartmouth players committed over twice as many fouls as their team. The Dartmouth students concluded that both sides were about equally at fault. The authors concluded that it is not accurate to say that different people have different attitudes to the same thing, as in fact, 'the thing is not the same for different people, whether the thing is a football game, a presidential candidate, communism or spinach.' As Curran suggests, it might be more accurate to say 'believing is seeing' rather than 'seeing is believing'.
Physical attractiveness of the Communicator is certainly important and there are other factors we can be fairly certain of.
The following seem to undermine the persuasiveness of a message:
In public speaking, we expect rather higher levels of eye contact than in ordinary interpersonal interaction, where we expect the speaker's eye contact to be intermittent and the listener's to be high. In public speaking, we expect the speaker to keep looking at the audience. Our impression of the speaker's expertise is increased if we see them able to speak without constantly referring to their notes. It may also have some impact on their apparent sincerity, since we know that many public speakers' speeches are written for them. Thus, it is not at all uncommon nowadays to see public speakers using the 'truth machine', also known as the 'idiot box', perhaps because President Reagan was the first to use it extensively. The speaker has in front of her an autocue, whose image is projected on the two screens to left and right, thus allowing the speaker to read the speech off the screens while at the same time appearing to look straight through them at the audience.
In the auditory channel, a high pitch, lots of hesitations, erm's, like's, sort of's and tag question like 'won't he?', 'didn't he?' etc. will tend to reduce credibility.
Hovland: introduction
Hovland: the Communicator
Hovland: the Message
Hovland: the Receiver
Consistency theory
Attitudes
Cognitive dissonance
The hypodermic needle model
Empiricist tradition
Cultural effects
Recent developments
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