RESEARCH

Persuasion, Attitudes, & Social Cognition

Our work explores the psychological and communicative processes that underlie people’s attitudes and behaviors.

How do we form our own likes and dislikes? How does our own behavior influence our attitudes? What makes persuasive communications impact our future decisions?

Our research investigates the sequence of cognitive and motivational events that mediate the impact of persuasive communication on attitudes and behavior. It also considers how to use one’s behavior to persuade oneself of a particular point of view, the structure of general attitudes, the behavioral impact of persuasive messages and their communicators, and the processes underlying the selection of information relevant to one’s attitudes.

Selected Findings:

The affective feelings of the recipients of a persuasive message influence attitudes directly, but can ultimately affect beliefs as well.

The psychology of persuasion has often been concerned with the impact of feelings such as a sad mood. We have shown that people first form beliefs based on the arguments contained in a message. When they form attitudes toward the behavior advocated in a message, feeling happy or angry can also matter. However, these feelings are then rationalized into beliefs. So, our emotions can be rationalized even if they are initially content-free.

People’s diffuse affective feelings (e.g., mood) are more influential when they are moderately distracted.

Our mood is separate from many of the new situations and objects we encounter, because it was not created by those situations or objects. When people consider their mood in relation to these objectively irrelevant events, they realize the two are not related, and thus their feelings do not shape their attitude toward the events. When they give no thought at all to their feelings, they similarly have no influence in shaping attitudes. When mood does affect someone’s attitudes to an object is when they are moderately distracted – the person realizes their feelings but does not realize they are irrelevant.

Selective exposure is affected by our motivation to defend yourself, but also by our motivation to be accurate.

Being committed to your ideological attitudes, seeing your attitudes under attack, or being closed-minded make you choose information with which you agree. This influence is quite overwhelming. However, through meta-analysis, we learned that when dissonant information is useful, people reduce their bias and approach information that conflicts with their attitudes.

People are lovers or haters.

Even though people form attitudes toward specific issues, they also form general attitudes. Our lab developed a psychological measure of general or dispositional attitudes and showed that once you measure about ten attitudes, you can predict all other attitudes. People with more positive general attitudes also are more likely to do more things than people with more negative general attitudes.

People with high defensive confidence often encounter new views, ultimately leading them to change.

Our lab discovered a personality trait we call “defensive confidence,” which varies in degree from person to person. The more a person enjoys debating information and feels confident they can defend their attitudes when under attack, the more they seek out debate with and make themselves vulnerable to people with opposing views. Ironically, this vigorous debate often leads them to change the attitudes they previously held so firmly. Those who are less confident protect themselves by blocking out disagreeable information, which, although biased, can be effective as a self-defense mechanism.

Sleeper effects happen more when we are knowledgeable.

Our lab discovered a personality trait we call “defensive confidence,” which varies in degree from person to person. The more a person enjoys debating information and feels confident they can defend their attitudes when under attack, the more they seek out debate with and make themselves vulnerable to people with opposing views. Ironically, this vigorous debate often leads them to change the attitudes they previously held so firmly. Those who are less confident protect themselves by blocking out disagreeable information, which, although biased, can be effective as a self-defense mechanism.

Our impressions of a speaker can enhance their persuasiveness but more so after a delay.

The classic sleeper effect occurs when someone recalls good arguments, but the speaker is quickly forgotten. People forget about the source and the under the radar arguments increase their influence. However, in political communication, for example, the audience’s main goal is to form an impression of the communicator or communication source. So, in such cases, the source is remembered while the arguments are forgotten. The audience remembers the charisma or expertise of the source and forgets about the weak arguments advanced in the communication. The outcome is once again an increase in persuasion over time.