A Dynamic View
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The Role of Behavior, Attitudes, and Norms as Inputs to and Outcomes of Persuasion
One of the aspects of persuasion we would like to emphasize in this chapter is the recursive nature of the persuasive process. In many lab experiments, persuasion is represented as a one-shot, self-limited event in which a participant is exposed to a message, reacts to it, and then goes away. That is, they are representing the persuasion process as input à process à output. Starting with Roskos-Ewoldsen’s (1997) transactive model, we think of persuasion as a far more dynamic process that occurs over time. As persuasive information on a topic is encountered in the environment, the thoughts generated in response, the accessibility of the attitude, norms, and associated constructs, and any resulting behavior all feed back into the system and are then part of the inputs the next time the topic is encountered (Nowak & Vallacher, 1998). Thus, in our view, even titling this chapter “Outcomes of Persuasion” is a misnomer, in the sense that anything that results from a single persuasive attempt can become a subsequent input on later attempts. It is in this way that beliefs, attitudes, norms, and habits are made more accessible and strengthened over time (Arpan et al., 2007).
Take, for example, the case of a new political candidate on the national scene. We hypothesize a dynamic process such that an individual might begin to hear people talking about the candidate at work. This talk among coworkers may begin to affect the person’s judgment of the descriptive norm—that is, the person may begin to perceive that others in the social environment are in favor of this candidate. Thinking about the normative support for this candidate makes that norm more accessible and easier to activate in the future. Having an accessible norm is likely to attract this person’s attention to future communication about this candidate, and the person may engage in behaviors such as turning the sound up on the TV when this candidate is featured on the news. Through self-perception processes (Bem, 1972), the behavior of turning up the TV further cues the individual that this is important, and that information becomes encoded along with the content of the arguments the candidate is making (Roese & Olson, 1994).
Perhaps this person attends a local rally for the candidate with a coworker. The individual may still not feel committed to the candidate, but goes to the rally because of the social benefits of accompanying a valued other to an event. Later, when trying to decide which candidate to vote for, all of these ancillary inputs (the social norm and behaviors) then are evaluated in addition to any policy statements or persuasive arguments the candidate has made. We see this as an ongoing process in which each time the individual thinks about, talks about, or engages in activity related to the candidate, it becomes a reinforcement to the developing attitude that this is a good candidate. In addition, as the social norms and attitudes develop across time, they also become more accessible from memory. Critically, as the norms and attitudes become more accessible, they will influence what messages a person is likely to attend to (Goodall & Ewoldsen, 2011; Roskos-Ewoldsen & Fazio, 1992), how those messages are likely to be processed (Fabrigar et al., 1998; Rhodes et al., 2008; Roskos-Ewoldsen et al., 2002), and whether that processing will be relatively objective or biased (Fazio et al., 1994; Rhodes et al., 2008). Once developed, attitudes and norms influence information processing such that subsequent message process is likely to reinforce and strengthen the attitudes and norms.
Future Directions
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It is our view that future study in the outcomes of persuasion needs to look more broadly at these dynamic processes. Some of this work is already in progress; more needs to be done. Already, as we have mentioned, the work in implicitly measured attitudes and attitude accessibility is examining increases in accessibility as a function of persuasive communication (Brinol et al., 2009; Eno & Ewoldsen, 2010; Maio et al., 2009; Roskos-Ewoldsen et al., 2004). We believe this line of research is critically important: being able to increase the extent to which attitudes or norms are operating at an automatic level makes it more likely that they will have an impact on subsequent behavior. Accessible attitudes and norms have stronger effects on behavior than those that are less accessible.
Our work on the accessibility of injunctive norms and descriptive norms is important in this stream of research as well. Research aimed at increasing the accessibility of injunctive norms (for example, “my mom will ground me if I smoke a cigarette” or “my friends will laugh at me”) and decreasing the accessibility of prorisk descriptive norms (“everyone does it”) can lead to beneficial interventions in teen risk behavior, for example. Some of the work that needs to be done in this area is to better understand when and how injunctive and descriptive norms affect behavior. Recent work has begun to reduce some of the conceptual ambiguity that has been plaguing the work in norms (Jacobson, Mortensen, & Cialdini, 2010; Rimal & Real, 2003; Schultz et al., 2007). Although the early promise of social norm approaches to reducing heavy drinking by college students, for example, has proved to be overblown (Wechsler et al., 2002), we are less pessimistic about the future of social norms approaches because we feel that more fully understanding how norms function will lead to more effective interventions.
Finally, we think it is important for future research to consider the distinction between spontaneous and deliberative decision processes and behavior. Hopefully, this chapter has demonstrated that the measures that are used to ascertain the effectiveness of a persuasive message need to match the type of process that is hypothesized to occur. If the goal of a persuasive message is to change people’s everyday behavior, and the available research suggests that this behavior is likely to be spontaneous rather than deliberative, then it is important that researchers use implicit or reaction time measures of attitudes (Arpan et al., 2007; Petty, Fazio, & Brinol, 2009; Wittenbrink & Schwarz, 2007) because these measures are more predictive of spontaneous behaviors.
Conclusion
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This chapter has summarized some of the research findings related to the outcomes of persuasion. Behavior, as the ultimate goal of many persuasive attempts, may be difficult to observe directly, and we discussed proxies to the measurement of behavior. By far, the most popular proxy has been attitudes. We summarized work on both spontaneous and deliberative attitudes as outcomes, and we touched on the newly emerging research and theory on norms as outcomes of persuasion. Across this research, we have highlighted the important differences between spontaneous and deliberative outcomes. Persuasion will continue to be one of the most important areas of study within the social sciences. But this research is informative only to the extent that we adequately understand the likely outcomes of these processes, and the dynamic nature of these processes.
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