Persuasion, Politics, and Communication

1
Persuasion, Politics, and Communication

• John A. Cagle

2
Fotheringhams Functions of Persuasion

• Energizing and initiating the persuasive process
• Selecting goals
• Deciding what instrumental effects to seek in
  achieving goals
• Selecting, securing, analyzing audiences
• Acquiring and originating message content
• Selecting messages

• Selecting and creating conditions to facilitate
  message effect
• Structuring message elements into a single
  campaign
• Selecting media and forms of persuasion
• Encoding messages
• Transmitting messages
• Securing and interpreting feedback
• Making ethical decisions

3
Relationships among the interdependent functions
of persuasion
Initiation of process
Selecting goals
Problem solving
Message Content
Organizingcampaign
Events/Instrumental effects
Messages Selected
Audiencesselected
Media Selected
Ethics
Creatingconditions
Messages Encoded/Style
ActionTransmitting messages
Feedback
4
Scotts Components of Attitude

• Scott argues that three basic principles have
  been used in defining attitude in theory and
  research  convention within the discipline, the
  users own theoretical purposes, and the outcome
  of empirical investigations designed to establish
  the distinctions and similarities.
• Scott identified several components of attitudes
  as revealed in a survey of research direction,
  magnitude, intensity, ambivalence, salience,
  affective salience, cognitive complexity,
  overtness, embeddedness, flexibility and
  consciousness.
• Scott observed that most attitude studies only
  measure direction, magnitude, and intensity.

5
Components

• Direction is among the most widely accepted and
  one of the more complex properties.  Direction
  basically depicts the course taken by the
  attitude.  Two major components compose this
  property, positive feelings and negative
  feelings.
• Magnitude is the degree of favorableness or
  unfavorableness.  Similar to direction, magnitude
  applies a measurement to the emotions defining
  the attitude.
• Intensity is the strength of feeling associated
  with the direction and magnitude.

6

• The concept of ambivalence relates to the
  property of direction in that a person may have
  bipolar feelings simultaneously (e.g., giving
  blood to the Red Cross). 
• The property salience is broken down into two
  subdivisions, the prominence of the attitude and
  centrality of the attitude.
• Affective salience determines the degree to which
  the focal point was influenced by an evaluative
  content.
• The cognitive complexity property relates to the
  two previous properties in that it concentrates
  on the formation of the focal point.  The essence
  of cognitive complexity is the abundance of the
  ideational content.

7

• The prominence of the conative component is
  clearly identified as the degree of overtness of
  an attitude.  The overt enactment of an
  attitude is caused by the personal
  characteristics of each individual.
• An attitude is considered embedded if the concept
  is either highly isolated in a persons mind or
  highly connected with other terms.
• Flexibility indicates the ease with which
  modifications alter an attitude.

8

• Consciousness, as a property of attitude,
  specifies the components available.  For example,
  unconscious attitudes are in reference to
  behavior tendencies that lack cognitive and
  affective components.  Conscious attitudes
  include all the components needed in an attitude.
  

9
Grabers Condensation Symbols

• A verbal condensation symbol is name, word, or
  phrase that arouses emotional, mental, or
  physical action involving the listeners most
  basic values. 
• Political speech communities are made up of many
  condensation symbols Democrats, Republicans, and
  capitalism, to name a few.  When audiences react
  to condensation symbols, they focus their
  attention to the symbols rather than the facts of
  the communication.
• Condensation symbols supply the listener with
  instant categorizations and evaluations. 
  Therefore, when we hear a phrase, word, or maxim
  we identify with, we have a way of grouping
  events that can be positive or negative.  In
  addition, we can also pass judgments about events
  in which we have minimal experience.

10
Theodore Newcomb (1953)
Communication among humans performs the essential
function of enabling two or more individuals to
maintain simultaneous orientation toward one
another as communicators and toward objects of
communication. The term orientation is used as
equivalent to attitude in its more inclusive
sense of referring to both cathectic and
cognitive tendencies.
11
X
A
B
12
TunaCasserole
I have cooked adelicious casserolefor our
dinner.
CrapI hatetuna casserole.
-
anger

I love you, Eve

Eve
John

I love you, John
13
Osgoods Cognitive Dynamics (1960)

• Insight into the dynamics of human thinking has
  been available in the writings of brilliant mean
  of all periods. Certainly Aristotle was aware of
  these dynamics when he dealt with the principles
  of rhetoric. . . .
• But the intuitive grasp and common
  senseessential though they may be to discovery
  in scienceare not the same thing as explicit and
  testable principles of human behavior.

14
Some theory of cognitive interaction

1. Cognitive modification results from the
   psychological stress produced by the cognitive
   inconsistencies.
2. If cognitive elements are to interact, they must
   be brought into some relation with one another.
3. Magnitude of stress toward modification increases
   with the degree of cognitive inconsistency.

15

• The dynamics of cognitive interaction are such
  that modifications under stress always reduce
  total cognitive inconsistency.
• The sign, or even the existence, of a
  relationship may be changed.
• The sign, or even the existence, of a cognitive
  element may be changed.
• Other cognitive elements that are in balanced
  relation with one or the other of the dissonant
  elements may be adduced (bolstering).

16

1. Other cognitive elements that are in a relation
   of imbalance with one or the other of the
   dissonant elements may be adduced (undermining).
2. One or the other of the dissonant cognitive
   elements may be split into two parts, these parts
   being of opposed valence and dissociatively
   related (differentiation).
3. Dissonant cognitive elements may be combined into
   a larger unit which, as a whole, is in balance
   with other cognitive elements (transcendence).