Change management paper

Process Models of Persuasion

I. Reinforcement Approach/Message Learning Approach.

A. Persuasion occurs through a chain of responses.

1. People must first pay attention to the message.

2. People must then comprehend its content.

3. People must accept the message.

B. To be effective, a persuader must stimulate the target to mentally rehearse the message content and then provide an incentive to adopt.

C. Problem, research indicates that the degree to which people recall the content of a message is uncorrelated or weakly correlated with acceptance of the message.

II. McGuire’s Process Model

A. Persuasion goes through a series of stages.

1. Probability that a message will be sent.

2. Probability that a message will be received.

3. Probability that a message will be attended to.

4. Probability that a message will be understood.

5. Probability that a message will be accepted.

6. Probability that a message will be remembered.

7. Probability that a message will be turned into behavior.

B. Even though the probability of each step may be high, the odds of successful persuasion are low. Multiply rather than add the odds.

C. Anything that increases the odds of steps 1-4, decreases the odds of steps 5-7 and vice versa. So, educated intelligent people are more likely to receive and understand messages but are more critical of what they receive and less likely to accept/act on it. Implication is that people who are moderately smart and intelligent are most likely to be persuaded.

III. Cognitive Response Model

A. Individuals are active participants in the persuasion process who attempt to relate message elements to their existing repertories of information. In doing so, the individuals may consider materials that are not actually contained in the persuasive message.

B. These self-generated cognitions may agree with the position advocated by the source, or they disagree with it.

1. Proarguments

2. Counterarguments

3. Neutral thoughts

4. Irrelevant thoughts

C. Acceptance of a message is a function of the balance of pro to counter arguments.

D. Persistence of attitude change depends on the ability of people to recall their thoughts rather than content of the message.

E. Key variables.

1. forewarning

2. distraction

3. self-referencing.

4. repetition.

5. source magnification effect

IV. Mindlessness.

A. Thinking is effortful.

B. People are lazy organisms and hence, avoid anything that is effortful.

C. When people repeatedly encounter situations, they devise cognitive scripts that guide their behavior.

D. These scripts allow people to remain mindless in many situations.

1. One form of mindlessness is a cognitive shutdown.

2. Another form of mindlessness involves thinking more about other factors rather than what is currently happening.

E. People can become mindful under certain conditions.

1. Novel situation.

2. Changes in a current situation. (violation of expectations)

3. Boredom.

F. In the long term, mindfulness is bad for the individual.

V. Elaboration Likelihood Model.

A. People are motivated to hold correct attitudes.

B. Although people want to hold correct attitudes, the amount of and nature of issue-relevant elaboration ion which people are willing or able to engage to evaluate a mess vary with individuals and situational factors.

1. Elaboration means the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message.

2. Elaboration can range from none to detailed consideration of every argument.

3. The likelihood of elaboration varies with person’s ability and motivation to evaluate the message.

4. There are two routes to persuasion.

a. The central route occurs when motivation and ability to scrutinize issue-relevant arguments is high.

b. The peripheral route occurs when motivation and/or ability are low and persuasion is determined by positive or negative cues in the situation.

c. Factors producing type of processing include:

1). Involvement-Central

2). Need for Cognition-Central

3). Mood-Good is Peripheral, Bad is Central

4). Distraction-Peripheral

5). Social loafing-Peripheral

6). Rhetorical questions-Central

7). Processing Time-Short is Peripheral.

C. Variables can affect he amount of and direction of attitude change by (a) serving as a persuasive arguments (b) serving as peripheral cues or (c) affecting the extent or direction of elaboration.

D. The key to persuasion is to choose the appropriate path and enhancing or decreasing elaboration.

E. As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, the importance of peripheral cues becomes more important and the greater the motivation/ability, the greater the importance of the strength of arguments.

1. Strength of arguments depends on relevancy, plausibility and novelty.

F. Variables affecting message processing in a relatively biased manner can produce either positive or negative effect on elaboration.

G. Attitude change that result mostly from processing issue-relevant arguments (central routes) will show greater temporal persistence, greater prediction of behavior, and greater resistance to counterpersuasion than attitude changes that result mostly from peripheral cues.

H. Weakness, the two routes are not strictly mutually exclusive. People can shift between the two during a persuasive encounter and can respond to both argument strength and peripheral cues.

VI. Heuristic-Systematic Model.

A. A person’s tendency to respond to persuasive messages depends on their motivation.

1. Validity motivation-hold attitudes that square with the facts.

2. Defensive motivation-form or defend particular attitudes.

3. Impression motivation-desire to hold socially acceptable attitudes.

4. Most research has focused on validity motivation although the general principles should apply to all motivations.

B. Systematic processing involves a comprehensive, analytic orientation to information processing in which perceivers access and scrutinize a great deal of information for its relevant to judgment. Judging the validity of a message’s advocated position by scrutinizing persuasive arguments and by think about this information as it relates to other information.

C. Heuristic processing is a limited form of information processing that requires less cognitive effort and fewer cognitive resources. They focus on a subset of information that enable them to used simple decision rule or cognitive heuristics to formulate their attitudes. Learned from past experiences.

1. Heuristics.

a. Expert

b. Liking

c. Length of message.

d. Crowd response

e. Trusting

f. Speed of speech

2. The influence of heuristics depends on (a) their reliability and

(b) accessibility.

D. Processing is determined by ability and motivation.

1. Heuristic requires less energy from individuals and is often occurs simply because people lack the ability to process (e.g., time pressure).

2. Motivation is concerned with the desire to process information. Two key principles: least effort and sufficiency. Least effort means people prefer processing that requires very little effort and sufficiency means that people only processing information until they have sufficient confidence to make a decision.