The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion
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However, attitude change is only part of persuasion. To see the difference, consider that one common challenge persuaders face is the task of getting people to act consistently with their current attitudes. For example, people often have positive attitudes about regular exercise, recycling, energy conservation, and so forth—but nevertheless fail to act consistently with those attitudes. In such cases, persuaders don’t need to convince people of the desirability of the action (“Recycling is really a good thing to do”); that is, persuaders don’t need to focus on changing attitudes. Instead, the advocate’s task is to somehow get people to act on existing attitudes.
A variety of research findings bear on identifying and addressing such persuasive challenges. For example, sometimes the problem may be that normative considerations override personal attitudes (“Nobody else in my neighborhood recycles”), or that people don’t know how to perform the behavior (“I’m confused by the different categories of trash”). [Some readers will detect here echoes of the theory of planned behavior and its variants (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010).] Or perhaps people can be induced to feel hypocritical about their failure to act consistently with their attitudes, with these feelings then motivating subsequent attitude-consistent behavior (e.g., Stone & Fernandez, 2008). Or the problem might be that people haven’t thought about exactly how they will perform the behavior, and so encouraging explicit behavioral planning could address the problem (e.g., Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). That is, the larger literature on persuasion offers many resources for addressing the circumstance in which the desired attitudes are in place but the corresponding behavior is not occurring.
To be sure, the ELM is not entirely silent on how persuaders might proceed in such situations. For example, as discussed earlier, some evidence suggests that attitudes shaped through central-route processes are more likely to be expressed in subsequent behavior than are those arising from peripheral-route processes. Correspondingly, one might encourage persuaders to pursue central-route persuasion so as to maximize the chances of subsequent attitude-consistent behavior.
But inducing attitude-consistent behavior is not necessarily always a matter only of strengthening attitudes. Sometimes, even when people have (what appear to be) perfectly strong attitudes, they nevertheless fail to act on them—for example, when they believe themselves incapable of performing the desired action. In such situations, persuaders need guidance not readily supplied by the ELM.
Conclusion
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The ELM has proven a remarkably fertile theoretical framework. Its central contribution is the recognition of the variable character of issue-relevant thinking—and from that has flowed a stream of research findings and conceptual insights that has permanently enriched the understanding of persuasion. The model does not offer a comprehensive account of all persuasion-related phenomena, and open questions certainly remain. But the ELM unquestionably represents a significant advance in the study of persuasion.
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CHAPTER 10
Affect and Persuasion
James Price Dillard and Kiwon Seo
Cognitive approaches to understanding human thought and action have embraced a model of mind-as-computer (Miller, 2003). Indeed, in areas such as artificial intelligence, one of the primary tools of the trade is computer simulation. The mind-as-computer metaphor pointed the way to understanding persuasive processes in terms of input processes, comprehension, associative memory, decision making, depth of processing, and recall: All of which led to improved understanding of how messages create change in individuals. But, as data accrued and theoretical boundaries were tested, it became apparent that something crucial was missing: Computers didn’t feel. In sharp contrast, humans are often, perhaps always, experiencing some kind of affect. Some research has shown that pre-existing moods caused research participants to respond to persuasive messages in very different ways. Other lines of inquiry established that the feelings produced by persuasive messages undergird purchasing behaviors, voting, and health decisions.
What is meant by affect? The first section of this chapter reviews how that term has been used. The theoretical perspectives that correspond with different usage are also considered. The second segment explores questions of message design and message effects as they pertain to affect. It aims to illustrate the issues that are most central to research on emotion and persuasion. The third and final portion considers what future research might look like by focusing attention on practices and ideas that have retarded research as well as those that are likely to yield the greatest benefit as we move forward.
Conceptions of Affect
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Affect is an umbrella term that is meant to encompass feelings of all sorts. Beneath that umbrella lie some important distinctions that implicitly and explicitly guide the questions that researchers ask about affect as well as their corresponding answers. Gaining an appreciation of the research requires a closer examination of the various ways in which affect has been conceptualized.
Bipolar Valence
One approach to thinking about affect is in terms of valence, where valence means a contrast between good and bad or pleasant and unpleasant. The strongest version of the valence perspective is bipolar model. On this view, affect is invariably located at some point on a continuum that ranges from positive at one end of the scale and negative at the other. Here, the underlying theoretical concept of affect is hydraulic: For every unit of good feeling that accrues to an individual, one unit of bad feeling is displaced.
Categorical Valence
A less stringent assumption can be seen in studies in which good and bad feelings are considered separately, as when research participants are asked how good they feel and, in a separate question, how bad they feel (e.g., Watson & Clark, 1994). In these cases, the conceptual relationship between valenced categories is one of conceptual independence. Studying the effects of emotion on persuasion typically means using positive and nega
tive feelings as predictors.
Valence Plus Arousal
Another tradition of affect research expands on the valence-only models by adding an arousal dimension. These pleasure-arousal (PA) models view valence as the hedonic tone of the experience and arousal as the subjective experience of energy versus lassitude. Together, pleasure and arousal are thought to define “core” or elemental aspects of all affective experience (Russell & Feldman Barrett, 1999). Some theorists see value in asserting the existence of an affective circumplex. Pragmatically, this means that pleasure and arousal are orthogonal to one another. Any and all affects are arrayed in a circle defined by terms that are roughly equidistant from the point at which the two dimensions cross. Thus, all affects can be understood in terms of their location. In this view, depression is defined in terms of unpleasantness and low arousal. Joy is both pleasant and energetic. One inarguable problem for the PA models lie in the placement of anger and fear, both of which occupy the same space in the unpleasant–high arousal quadrant of the circumplex. They have also been justly criticized as atheoretical in that they are inductive findings derived entirely from the application of dimension reduction algorithms to judgments of the frequency or similarity of affect words. Despite these shortcomings, the PA models have maintained a place in the research literature for 40 or more years.
Discrete Emotions and Appraisal Theories
In simple terms, the discrete emotions approach casts affect as a set of qualitatively distinct states that vary in intensity. Individuals may experience more or less happiness, sadness, or jealousy, but each emotion is categorically different from every other emotion. One way in which they are distinct is their causes.