PERSUASION

the process by which a person's attitudes or behaviour are, without duress, influenced by communications from other people. One's attitudes and behaviour are affected by other factors (for example, verbal threats, physical coercion, one's physiological states). Not all communication is intended to be persuasive; some of it has such purposes as informing or entertaining. Persuasion often involves manipulating other people, and for this reason many find the exercise distasteful. Others might argue that without some degree of social control and mutual accommodation, the human community becomes disordered and that persuasion indeed gains moral acceptability when the alternatives are considered. To paraphrase Winston Churchill's evaluation of democracy as a form of government, persuasion is the worst method of social control except for all the others. In European universities of the Middle Ages, persuasion was one of the basic liberal arts to be mastered by any educated man; and, from the days of imperial Rome through the Reformation, it was raised to a fine art by preachers who used the spoken word to move men to virtue and the Holy Land. In the modern era, persuasion, in the form of advertising, supports a major industry; only education and the military command a greater share of the gross national product. The process of persuasion can be conveniently analyzed in a preliminary way by distinguishing verbal communication (as cause, or stimulus) from the associated changes in attitudes (as effect, or response). Analysis has led to the delineation of a series of successive steps that a person undergoes in being persuaded. The communication first is presented; the person pays attention to it, and he comprehends its contents (including the basic conclusion being urged and perhaps also the evidence offered in its support). For persuasion to be effected, the individual must yield to, or agree with, the point being urged; and, unless only the most immediate impact is of interest, he must retain this new position until opportunity arises to act on it. Finally, if the fruits of the persuasive process are to be reaped, he must carry out the behaviour implied by his new attitudinal position; e.g., he enlists in the army or becomes a Buddhist monk or begins to eat cornflakes for breakfast. Some, but by no means all, theorists emphasize a similarity between education and persuasion. They hold that persuasion closely resembles the learning of new information through informative communication. Thus, since repetition in communication will modify learning, they infer that it will have persuasive impact as well; that, for example, principles of verbal learning and conditioning are widely and profitably applied by persuaders (as in the judicious repetition of television advertisements). The learning approach tends to emphasize attention, comprehension, and retention of the message. One's reaction to persuasive communication depends in part on the message and to a considerable extent on the way in which the receiver perceives or interprets it. Words in a newspaper advertisement may take on different persuasive qualities if they are printed in red instead of in black. Perceptual theorists regard persuasion as altering the person's perception of any object of his attitudes. Perceptual approaches also rest on evidence that the receiver's preconceptions are at least as important as the message content in determining what will be understood. The approach stresses attention and comprehension. While learning and perceptual theorists may stress objective intellectual steps involved in the process of being persuaded, another, functional, approach emphasizes more subjective motivational aspects. It views humans as essentially ego-defensive-that is, as organisms with beliefs that function to satisfy conscious and unconscious personal needs and that may have little to do with the objects toward which those attitudes and actions are directed. Functional theorists say, for example, that ethnic prejudice and other forms of social hostility derive more from individual personality structure than from information about the nature of these groups. Other theories view the person confronted with persuasive communication as being in the harassed role of trying to find some reasonable compromise among many conflicting forces acting on him-e.g., his own desires, his information, and the social pressures put upon him, including this new communication. Those (frequently called congruity, balance, consistency, or dissonance theorists) who stress this conflict-resolution model focus on how people weigh these forces in adjusting their attitudes. Some theorists who take this point of departure stress the intellectual aspects of persuasion, while others emphasize emotional considerations. Each of the approaches considered above tends to neglect one or more steps in the process of being persuaded and thus serves to supplement rather than supplant the others. Another, more eclectic and inclusive approach, growing out of information-processing theory, is oriented to a consideration of all of the options implied by the communication aspects of source, message, channel (or medium), receiver, and destination (behaviour to be influenced); and each option is appraised for its persuasive efficacy in terms of presentation, attention, comprehension, yielding, retention, and overt behaviour.