Timothy C. Brock

The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives.

Transportation was proposed as a mechanism whereby narratives can affect beliefs. Defined as absorption into a story, transportation entails imagery, affect, and attentional focus. A transportation scale was developed and validated. Experiment 1 (N = 97) demonstrated that extent of transportation augmented story-consistent beliefs and favorable evaluations of protagonists. Experiment 2 (N = 69) showed that highly transported readers found fewer false notes in a story than less-transported readers. Experiments 3 (N = 274) and 4 (N = 258) again replicated the effects of transportation on beliefs and evaluations; in the latter study, transportation was directly manipulated by using processing instructions. Reduced transportation led to reduced story-consistent beliefs and evaluations. The studies also showed that transportation and corresponding beliefs were generally unaffected by labeling a story as fact or as fiction.

Distraction Can Enhance or Reduce Yielding to Propaganda: Thought Disruption Versus Effort Justification

Two experiments were conducted to test competing accounts of the distractionpersuasion relationship, thought disruption and effort justification, and also to show that the relationship is not limited to counterattitudinal communication. Experiment 1 varied distraction and employed two discrepant messages differing in how easy they were to counterargue. In accord with the thought disruption account, increasing distraction enhanced persuasion for a message that was readily counterarguable, but reduced persuasion for a message that was difficult to counterargue. The effort notion implied no interaction with message counterarguability. Experiment 2 again varied distraction but the two messages took a nondiscrepant position. One message elicited primarily favorable thoughts and the effect of distraction was to reduce the number of favorable thoughts generated; the other, less convincing message elicited primarily counterarguments, and the effect of distraction was to reduce counterarguments. A Message X Distraction interaction indicated that distraction tended to enhance persuasion for the counterarguable message but reduce persuasion for the message that elicited primarily favorable thoughts. The experiments together provided support for a principle having greater generality than the Festinger-Maccoby formulation: Distraction works by inhibiting the dominant cognitive response to persuasive communication and, therefore, it can result in either enhanced or reduced acceptance.

10 – Implications of Commodity Theory for Value Change1

In the wide gamut of… problems of every society, there is then, a common dominant element throughout–one pervasive, inescapable, inevitable fact: scarcity . That is the starting point of our analysis, and behavioral consequences stemming directly or indirectly from it is our subject matter.

Use of first person pronouns as a function of increased objective self-awareness and performance feedback

Abstract A recent integrating formalation in social psychology, the Duval-Wicklund theory of “objective self-awareness,” has the core assumption that attention focused on the self is always aversive and, hence, avoided. While faced with either a TV camera or a mirror, and after they had received false feedback concerning their creativity, 98 undergraduates guessed at the meaning of foreign language pronouns, the unobtrusive dependent measure of the direction of the focus of attention. The standard Duval-Wicklund effect was replicated—more attention to self, that is, more first-person pronouns—in the “camera” or “mirror” than in the “no camera” or “no mirror” conditions. However, within the camera or mirror conditions, avoidance of self-focused attention occurred only after negative feedback.

Persuasion : psychological insights and perspectives

Preface About the Editors 1. Domains of Persuasion: An Introduction - Timothy C. Brock and Melanie C. Green 2. Attitude Measurement: Techniques for Measuring the Unobservable - Leandre R. Fabrigar, Jon A. Krosnick, and Bonnie L. MacDougall 3. Acting as We Feel: When and How Attitudes Guide Behavior - Russell H. Fazio and David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen 4. Actions and Attitudes: The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance - Joel Cooper, Robert Mirabile, and Steven J. Scher 5. To Think or Not to Think: Exploring Two Routes to Persuasion - Richard E. Petty, John T. Cacioppo, Alan J. Strathman, and Joseph R. Priester 6. Persuasiveness of Narratives - Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock 7. Principles of Interpersonal Influence - Robert B. Cialdini and Brad J. Sagarin 8. Influence and Persuasion in Small Groups - Charlan Jeanne Nemeth and Jack A. Goncalo 9. Do Messages From Your Body, Your Friends, Your Doctor, or the Media Shape Your Health Behaviors? - Howard Leventhal, Linda Cameron, Elaine A. Leventhal, and Gozde Ozakinci 10. Mass Media and Political Persuasion - Shanto Iyengar and Jennifer McGrady 11. Changing Prejudice: The Effects of Persuasion on Implicit and Explicit Forms of Race Bias - David M. Amodio and Patricia G. Devine 12. The Psychology of Advertising - Frank R. Kardes Glossary - Katherine Walker-Smith and Melanie C. Green Name Index Subject Index

“Debriefing” and susceptibility to subsequent experimental manipulations☆

Abstract “Debriefing” refers to the postexperimental explanation of purposes and deceptions. How useful are data collected from persons who have previously been deceived and debriefed by an experimenter? In the test experiment, employing 110 undergraduates, the dependent variable was the number of subjects who signed the experimenters petition, advocating doubling the tuition, following their damage, slight or large, of the experimenters apparatus. The test experiment was preceded by deception and debriefing: subjects were assigned to no debriefing, partial debriefing, or complete debriefing. For half the subjects, the test experiment included an element from the debriefing experience; for the other half, the common element was omitted. It was concluded that a sufficiently powerful independent variable can offset the desensitizing effects of debriefing, unless complete prior debriefing is coupled with explicit similarity between the debriefing situation and the test experiment.

FICTIONAL NARRATIVES CHANGE BELIEFS : REPLICATIONS OF PRENTICE, GERRIG, AND BAILIS (1997) WITH MIXED CORROBORATION

We report three exact replications of experiments aimed at illuminating how fictional narratives influence beliefs (Prentice, Gerrig, & Bailis, 1997). Students read fictional stories that contained weak, unsupported assertions and which took place either at their home school or at an away school. Prentice et al. found that students were influenced to accept the assertions, even those blatantly false, but that this effect on beliefs was limited to the away-school setting. We questioned the limiting of the narrative effect to remote settings. Our studies consistently reproduced the first finding, heightened acceptance of statements occurring in the conversations of narrative protagonists, but we failed to reproduce the moderating effect of school location. In an attempt to understand these discrepancies, we measured likely moderating factors such as readers’ need for cognition and their extent of scrutiny of the narratives.

Seven studies of performance expectancy as a determinant of actual performance

Seven experiments were performed to explore the effects of expectancy-performance inconsistency on the undoing of correct responses (Aronson and Carlsmith, 1962). Experiments 1 and 2 reproduced the Expectancy × Performance interaction; the dissonant effect of High Performance on Low Expectancy was significantly reduced from 1 to 2 by reducing the number of trials used to induce Expectancy in 2. Experiments 3 to 7 failed to yield an Expectancy × Performance interaction. Experiments 3 to 6 examined the effects of trial-by-trial feedback on expectancy strength and hypothesis invention. Experiment 7, which included conditions requiring recall of previous judgments, suggested that the repeated finding of greater response change by Low-Performance Ss may be explained by differences in memory as well as by differences in motivation to do well.

Acceptance of persuasion and the inhibition of counterargumentation under various distraction tasks

Abstract A discrepant communication was presented to subjects who monitored light flashes by visual, vocal, manual, or vocal-manual means. Higher rates of flashes increased acceptance of the communication and decreased counterargument production. Vocal and manual tasks were equally effective in inhibiting counterarguments and increasing acceptance, while the vocal-manual task was most effective in increasing acceptance of the counterattitudinal communication. The results suggest that the level and complexity of activity elicited by a distraction task is as important a determinant of persuasion-yielding and counterargument inhibition, as is the direct inhibition of the subvocal formation of counterarguments by distraction requiring vocal responding.

The Effects of Recipient Posture on Persuasion A Cognitive Response Analysis

Two experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between the body posture of a message recipient and susceptibility to persuasive influence. In Experiment 1, recipients who were reclining comfortably during exposure to a counterattitudinal message showed more agreement with the message than recipients who were standing during exposure. In Experiment 2, posture (standing or reclining) and the quality of the arguments employed in the counterattitudinal message (cogent or specious) were varied in an effort to assess competing theoretical accounts of the posture effect. An interaction between posture and message quality emerged on the measure of postmessage agreement. Reclining subjects were differentially persuaded by the strong and weak arguments, but standing subjects were not. This pattern of results is consistent with the view that reclining recipients engage in more message-relevant thinking than standing recipients.