Process Models of Persuasion

Reinforcement Approach/Message Learning Approach

Persuasion occurs through a chain of responses.

People must first pay attention to the message.
- Primacy/Recency: People pay attention to first and last statements.
- Gender differences: Men are influenced more by primacy and women are influenced more by recency.
People must then comprehend its content.
People must accept the message.

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

Fear responses only works if a course of avoiding pain is obvious.
Easiest way to avoid fear is to ignore a message.
Disgust is a stronger response, but more strongly ignored.
Threats to loved ones is much more effective than threats to self.

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.

People remember the gist of the message without remembering the content.

McGuire’s Process Model

Persuasion goes through a series of stages.

Probability that a message will be sent.
Probability that a message will be received.
Probability that a message will be attended to.
Probability that a message will be understood.
Probability that a message will be accepted.
Probability that a message will be remembered.
Probability that a message will be turned into behavior.

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

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.

Cognitive Response Model

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.

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

Proarguments – Examples that fit the argument.
Counterarguments – Examples that don't fit the argument.
Neutral thoughts
Irrelevant thoughts – Nothing to do with anything. Is the largest number of thoughts.

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

- Negative reasons matter far more than positive reasons.

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

- Ownness Bias: thoughts of the self are better than the thoughts of others.

Key variables.

Forewarning: If people are forewarned about a conflicting argument, they will form counter arguments beforehand
Distraction: Distraction prevents people from forming counter-arguments. Hot People, food, strobe lights.
Self-referencing: think about how the message applies to them. Promotes the argument
Repetition: Promotes the argument to a point. Must vary content or else attitude will swing against it
Source magnification effect

Mindlessness

Thinking is effortful.

Thinking is behavior and takes away energy from other behaviors.
After doing cognitive tasks, future tasks are more difficult
Caffeine and sugar can bring back energy.

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

If you get tired, you stop thinking about the task at hand to save energy.

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

These scripts allow people to remain mindless in many situations.

One form of mindlessness is a cognitive shutdown.
Another form of mindlessness involves thinking more about other factors rather than what is currently happening.

People can become mindful under certain conditions.

Novel situation.
Changes in a current situation. (violation of expectations)
Boredom.

In the long term, mindlessness is bad for the individual.

How this affects persuasion

If a message looks conventional, they do not process it. People respond as they normally do.
This can include rejection scripts if the person generally rejects the message.

Elaboration Likelihood Model

People are motivated to hold correct attitudes.

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.

Elaboration means the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message.
Elaboration can range from none to detailed consideration of every argument.
The likelihood of elaboration varies with person’s ability and motivation to evaluate the message.
There are two routes to persuasion.
1. The central route occurs when motivation and ability to scrutinize issue-relevant arguments is high.
2. The peripheral route occurs when motivation and/or ability are low and persuasion is determined by positive or negative cues in the situation.
Factors producing type of processing include:
1. Involvement (whether or not it involves you personally): Central
2. Need for Cognition (some people like to think more than others): 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.

Variables can affect he amount of and direction of attitude change by

serving as a persuasive arguments
serving as peripheral cues, or
affecting the extent or direction of elaboration.

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

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.

Strength of arguments depends on relevancy, plausibility and novelty.

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

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.

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.

Heuristic-Systematic Model

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

Validity motivation: hold attitudes that square with the facts.
Defensive motivation: form or defend particular attitudes.
Impression motivation: desire to hold socially acceptable attitudes.
Most research has focused on validity motivation although the general principles should apply to all motivations.

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.

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.

Heuristics

Expert: Person is an expert, so what they say is probably true.
Liking: I like that person, so what they're asking me to do, I'm going to do it.
Length of message: People tend to believe that longer messages are more likely to be true.
Crowd response: Social Proof.
Trusting: Do you trust them? If you do, you will probably believe them.
Speed of speech: The faster you talk, the more persuasive you are. However, if you talk too fast, it moves people into central processing.
- Also culturally based. Southern versus Northern US. City versus Rural.

The influence of heuristics depends on their reliability and accessibility.

Processing is determined by ability and motivation.

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

Changing behavior

Theory of Reasoned Action

Predicting specific behaviors

Beliefs
- Consequences: What do you think will happen if argument is accepted?
- Normative beliefs: what each significant other thinks we should do.
Attitude toward the behavior-is the behavior good/bad?
- Attitudes result from the probability that good consequences will result from the behavior and bad consequences will not.
Subjective norm: what we think most people think we should do.
- Subjective norm results from each significant other expectations (normative belief) and our motivation to comply with the significant other.
Behavioral Intention: how likely we will perform the action
- Behavior Intention results from the subjective norm and our attitude toward the behavior. Depends on security.
- Some behavior intentions flow from attitudes and some from subjective norms.
  - Self-monitoring
  - Self-consciousness
  - Gender by topic
Under certain conditions, behavior intentions predict behaviors, but not always.
- If behavior intention accurately portrays the behavior
- If behavior is under volitional control
- If behavior is close in time to the intention
Implications
- The key to changing behavior is to change behavioral intention.
- One’s attitude toward an object is often unrelated to the behavior toward the object but one’s attitude toward the behavior is often a good predictor of a specific behavior.
- Attitudes only indirectly influence a specific behavior.

Predicting a pattern of behavior

Attitude toward an object is a function of the good traits that one thinks the object has.
One’s attitude toward an object is correlated with the set of intentions toward the object.
However, attitude toward an object is not strongly related to any given intention.

Theory of Planned Action.

Similar to the theory of reasoned action but adds the notion of self-efficacy. Is one confident that the behavior can be carried out?

Hence, a person’s behavior is a result of intentions and self-efficacy.

Distributive Approaches to Negotiation

Negotiation

Process by which two or more parties interact in an attempt to reach an agreement that will guide and regulate their future interactions. (Guetzkow & Sawyer)

If we look at negotiation as a process, than it changes during different phases. It is an evolving process.
Two or more parties: most research is on dyads, the interactions between them
- Could mean two individuals, parties, nations, etc.
- It becomes more complex if we try to go beyond two parties so most research is not done on multiparty negotiation. In most of these negotiations, they reduce the numbers down to two anyway.
Interaction: indirect and direct means
- At the very least, they need to be able to exchange offers.
good faith: genuinely trying to reach an agreement
- not necessarily ethical or through ethical means
- In other words, good faith does not mean that there is no deception
- There is a rule in negotiation that says that if I put an offer on the table and you accept it, I am honor bound to follow through with it.
- Sometimes people engage in bad faith negotiation
  - Sometimes it is done deceitfully which is where there is a problem.
- Minimum requirement for success in a negotiation is reaching an agreement
  - Gives a minimum feeling of success, but not necessarily a tremendous one.

Planning

Set Goals

Utility Schedule: range of possible settlement points

It is utility because there is a use for the resources you get…money, status, etc.
minimum amount <====> maximum amount
Status quo point: the value that you put in…what is it currently worth
- So…if you settle for the status quo, you break even, but don’t profit
Resistance Point: The least you are willing to take over walking away
- It is an anchor, very stable, protects you
- If you’re desperate the status quo point = resistance point
- Protects you from the settlement bias
Level of Aspiration (Target Point): amount you are really going to try to get
- Tends to change because it is more of a guess
- Changes during the negotiation
Initial Offer: Generally thought to yield more than your actual level of aspiration so you have room to dicker. Status Quo--------Resistance Point-----------Level of Aspiration------------Initial Offer

Identify Obstacles

Understanding Opponent

Opponent’s motives: what do he want versus what is given to you
- competitive: want to win and want other to lose
  - absolute competitive: wants to beat you regardless of how much they beat you by (victory by 1 point is the same as by 100 points)
  - proportional competitive: want to beat you bad (the size of the victory matters to them) $300/$200 vs. $10/1$ … proportional comp people will choose the second
  - what makes someone competitive?
    - Face saving situation
      - Publish outcomes
    - Personality: believe everyone is as competitive as they
      - Cooperative people become competitive when against a competitor <= self defense
- Aggressive: want you to do bad regardless of what happens to them
  - When you really hate the other side
  - When you’ve been embarrassed or humiliated
- Individualistic: want what’s best for them and don’t care what happens to opponent
  - Flexible
  - Demonstrate to them that they will do best if they cooperate with you
  - If they cooperate once it doesn’t mean they will again
  - <= scarce resources
- Altruists: want to maximize other’s outcomes regardless of what happens to them
  - Outcomes mean more to opponent than to you
  - Probably also like the opponent
- Cooperative: want both sides to do well
  - occurs in teamlike settings

Own Biases

Framing
- Gain Frame: focused on rewards…what you get out of this negotiation
  - Risk averse: you don’t want to run the risk of not reaching an agreement
  - Premature commitment
  - Are likely to reach an agreement
  - May give up too much
- Loss Frame: focused on sacrifice…what you have to lose
  - Risk taker: willing to say they will look elsewhere before accepting this offer
  - Might sacrifice agreements: let them go when you shouldn’t
- => role can cause you to do this
  - buyer (loss) vs. seller (gain): both sides are focused on resource of money
  - criminal lawyers: prosecutors are focused on gain and d.a.s are looking at it as a loss because
    - therefore, prosecutors like pre-trial settlements and DAs like to take their chance in court
  - civil lawyers: plaintiffs (gain) vs. defendant (loss) because plaintiffs are thinking about money
Fixed Pie Bias: the pie itself is limited, therefore, the only way to get a bigger piece is to be nasty
- Individualistic countries see pies as more fixed than the collectivistic countries
Overconfidence: In the process of preparing for negotiation, we become overconfident of our ability to achieve it.
- Final Offer Arbitration: arbitrator chooses one party’s final offer => odds of success are 50/50
  - However, people think their odds of success are 80/20
Perspective Taking Bias
- Too Little: You think what you are doing is unique…I am the only one making this move, therefore, my chances of success are good
  - Dollar Auction: as long as they think they have a unique strategy, they will play
- Too Much: I am so oriented toward other people it lulls me into doing bad things
  - Want to know opponents utility schedule?
    - research indicates that this might be to your disadvantage.
      - They come to control the negotiation: put your offers in terms of what they want
      - If you are altruistic, you will be prone to give up too much
Escalation (psychological trap/sunk cost): people have a tendency to continue to invest in a losing course of action
- Don’t want to admit we made a bad decision
- Role models: if we are aware that someone who invested in a losing course and eventually won, then we are likely to do the same thing.
  - American Dream
  - Gambler’s bias
  - Lionel Ritchie wrote to this lady who wanted to be an entertainer
- We don’t do a very good job of keeping track of what we’ve invested.

Best way to Prepare Experts vs. Novices

No differences
- Time spent planning
- Took a short term or long term impact (impact on the future)
Experts are more likely to:
- look for common ground
  - it’s good to set the tone by pointing to commonalities
  - therapists have couples focus on commonalities
- develop a range of goals
  - set a resistance point and level of aspiration
- consider a greater number of proposals
  - including those opponent would make or desire
- use arguments they think the other side will find convincing…engage in perspective taking
- engage in issue planning: think of all of the issues that will be discussed and develop a set of arguments for each issue
Novices are more likely to:
- look at one fixed point (usually the level of aspiration)
- use arguments they themselves think are convincing
- engage in sequence planning: develop a script with the issues and the order in which they will be discussed
  - rehearsed the thing until they’re stuck in it…interrupt them and they are confused.

Strategies

Bargaining Strategy: exchange of offer and counter-offer

Tough Bargaining

Aspiration Theory: Your goal is to force your opponent to lower their level of aspiration
- Make an extreme opening offer
  - If you set it too high, there are people who won’t even negotiate with you
- make few concessions
- make small concessions
- make a last clear chance offer: “Take it or leave it.”
- maintain your own level of aspiration: stay confident that you can get it.
  - general assumption is that the other person is also engaging in tough negotiation
  - chicken games: those who do best have to convince the other side that they are a little unstable
Does it work?
- If you only care about the short term
  - You don’t care if this person hates you or deals with you again
- opponent has no alternative way to get the resources…you have the monopoly
- opponent is a soft bargainer…they are a nice person
- Tendency to dead lock…neither side will give in so they both walk away.
- If you reach an agreement, the person who is toughest does the best.
  - If you are tough, there is a greater probability you won’t reach the agreement at all

Moderately Tough Bargaining Strategies

Fair Bargaining Strategy: find out what the market value is…make one and only one offer and don’t budge
- fair and efficient
- doesn’t involve game playing
- often results in dead lock
  - people were more likely to accept the offer when concessions had been made
  - the enjoyment of dickering is gone
  - the deal looks better after someone makes concessions
    - consumer satisfaction results the most from how good of a deal we got
  - don’t trust someone who says it is fair
Reinforcement Approach
- You want to reward your opponent for making a concession
- every time your opponent makes a concession, you make a slightly bigger concession
- Danger: you are moving faster toward them than they are toward you.
  - => You have to make a more extreme opening offer than they do.
- Does work! :)
Reciprocity Approach: you do what the opponent does.
- If they start with an extreme offer, you do to, if they make concessions, you do to.
- Dangers
  - Doesn’t work with highly competitive people (tough bargainers) => deadlock
  - Concessions
    - frequency: make them as often
    - magnitude: make them of equal value.
    - people do match frequency, but not always magnitude
  - Assumes that they will see what you are doing
Commitment Approach
- two stages of negotiation (not equal in time)
  - Sham Bargaining: pretend…not trying to reach an agreement
    - trying to get an assessment of their resistance point
    - find out when they need to reach an agreement (deadline)
  - Real Bargaining: usually right before the deadline
    - At some point make a take it or leave it offer, that is only slightly above the resistance point
- It works because it is better than nothing and if they don’t accept they get nothing
- You have to be able to
  - Make a strong commitment: make them believe this is your offer and you are walking out
    - Make it in public
    - Make the commitment in writing
    - Commitments that you can’t control are believed more than others
  - Know how to respond if the opponent commits first
    - Poke fun at it
    - Ignore it and immediately make a counter offer
  - Know how to respond if you make a premature commitment (less than their resistance point)
    - new info has come to light that changes everything
    - the relationship is important
    - make initial commitment sufficiently vague that they could back off the specifics and not lose face

Soft Bargaining

Pacifist Strategy
- Studied because of historically nonviolent groups that have successfully negotiated
- What does it involve
  - Engage in risky trusting behavior
    - willing to make unilateral concessions: give something up without expecting anything in return
  - display their ideology
  - noncoercive
- ex. the message sending game
  - people zapped the pacifist
  - because are skeptical and think the pacifist is manipulative
    - willing to cooperate when they witnessed the pacifist behavior first…except high macs.
  - Pacifists were successful when subjects believed they were friends with experimenter and experimenter stayed in the room

Argumentation (Reason Giving): what justification are you giving for your position?

Donahue

goal: to gain relative advantage over opponent.
Views negotiation as a debate or adversarial process where each side is trying to out do the other by making arguments the other side can’t refute
Relative advantage is not fixed, but shifts throughout the negotiation
- At the end of the negotiation try to have the most arguments standing.
  - Other side should refute them…don’t have to attack logically, can just say you don’t agree. => this equalizes relative advantage
- How do you get relative advantage?
  - attack: when they make an argument, refute it.
  - Make an argument of your own
  - If you reach an agreement, the most argumentative people did the best
So, don’t give up any ground…just keep arguing
problems in data
- Deadlocks do occur when both sides are very argumentative
- doesn’t take power into consideration…assumes arguments during the negotiation are all that give you relative advantage

Experts vs. novice negotiators

Experts avoid the use of irritators which overdescribes the benefits of your offer
- i.e. saying things like, “I am making a generous offer.”
Experts avoid making immediate counter-offer
- immediate counter-offers make it seem as though they didn’t consider your option
Experts avoid attack/defend cycles.
- if you become defensive simply because you are attacked you might deadlock
Experts avoid the dilution effect => present fewer arguments
- novice negotiators feel that they have to make all of their arguments no matter what => “argument dump”
  - some arguments are good and some are not so good => the savvy opponent will attack the weakest arguments and the strong arguments will be forgotten.
  - weak arguments make the strong ones weaker
Experts use more behavioral labeling: signaling what you are going to do before you do it.
- The only exception is when they disagree => start with reason before the rejection
Experts engage in more summaries and paraphrasing
- Get feedback
- Shows that you are listening to them and respect what they have to say
Experts ask more questions
- Ratio of questions to statements can predict the likelihood to find an integrative solution
Experts are more likely to make feeling statements
- When you make an offer they are likely to tell you how it feels… “That feels really good to me.” “That just doesn’t feel right.”

Coercion Strategies: force them to give you what you want

Effects orientation: Bacharach and Lawler

Conflict Spiral Model
- coercive potential: how much you could hurt the other side.
  - Military might: weapons, armies, etc.
  - In labor disputes coercive potential for labor is their union strike fund and for management, it is products and non-union labor (scabs)
  - Theory is that if one size builds coercive potential, the other side will too…Arms Race
  - This becomes very dangerous
    - As B increases coercive potential, A fears attack and likewise
    - As B increases coercive potential, A becomes tempted to attack  preemptive attack
Deterrence Theory:
- both sides try to equalize coercive potential
  - as B hbuilds coercive potential, A becomes fearful of retaliation, the more reluctant you will be to attack me. Plus, as B builds coercive potential B becomes more confident that they won’t be attacked
  - Arms Race is good because it prevents attack
    - as long as coercive potential is equal, no one will attack
    - Also have to believe that an attack would destroy both sides
Deterrence Theory was the better predictor of human behavior

Tedeschi: How do people react to threats?

What are reactions to threats
- Look at probability that the threat will be carried out.
  - credibility: whether the person has carried out their threats in the past.
  - believability: whether the person could (has the capacity to) carry out this threat.
- Look at how much it will hurt.
  - How do you make people think it will hurt?
    - Put people under time pressure so they don’t have time to think about the actual outcome.
    - for most threats (except death and torture) the imagined harm is worse than the real harm
    - most harmful the first time
- Added Later: It is a measure of last resort when all else fails because it doesn’t always work
  - face loss: when someone threatens you, they are implying that they are stronger and better than you.
  - so, you have to find a way to make people to lessen the face loss if they comply
How to make a believable, credible, hurtful, yet face-saving threat.
- use a promise instead of a threat because that is more face saving for the person being threatened.
  - Sort of a veiled threat
  - “An employee who shows up on time a lot gets a good raise”
  - So focused on the good component, you don’t feel humiliated
- people react better to contingent threats than non-contingent threats
  - say if some conditions are met, they won’t be punished as opposed to telling them that they will be punished no matter what.
- make an implicit threat…construct the situation so that people feel threatened without actually making the threat.
- deterrent threats vs. compellent threats
  - deterrent is telling people not to do something where as compellent threats are telling people they have to do something
  - people resist compellent threats more
- use a warning instead of a threat
  - if you do this, something bad will happen to you…you never say that you will make something bad happen
- express regret when making the threat
- say there is no self interest…you don’t gain anything from the threat
- say the treat is normative (other people would do/ have done the same thing)
- review the history of things you’ve done
  - demonstrate that this is a method of last resort.
Where does bargaining power come from? (Bacharach and Lawler)
- All power in a negotiation flows from alternatives
- The party with the best alternatives wins
- If both sides have great alternatives, the greater the likelihood of a deadlock
- The greater the power in the system, the greater the likelihood of a deadlock

Files

10-12-2013.md

Latest commit

History