Читать книгу THE MAGIC OF PERSUASION - Dr. Azim Ostowar Ghafuri - Страница 7

We are constantly engaged in trying to transmit ideas to other people and also are continually expose on the receiving ideas from those around us and from that mass media. We all gradually learn what kind of effects our words are likely to have on our friends and associates and at the same time we learn methods of distinguishing among the persuasive information we receive, for example the important from the unimportant, the reliable from the unreliable and so on. For most of us, the range of knowledge about persuasion is limited to the situations we encounter in everyday life, but this is ordinarily sufficient.

There are, however, a number of professional groups that require a broader knowledge of the uses and effects of persuasion and sub-spheres. Those engaged in the practice of advertising, public relations, propaganda, education, marketing and religion must have broader knowledge because they make use of a wider range of media for the transmission of ideas and they also find it necessary to reach large number of widely different people in the cause of their professional activities. Yet professionals in the fields of persuasion spheres, like non-professionals ordinarily accumulate the specialized information that they need through practical experience. The seasoned politician or the expert in one of the persuasion spheres rarely looks too formal psychological or sociological theory when deciding what to do or what to say. On the basis of his past observations, he/she usually has a fairly good idea what kinds of information about his audience he will need and what his general course of action should be.

This is entirely appropriate, because at their prevent stage of development the social sciences cannot provide precise guidance for professional specialists in these fields. Much of the persuasion process remains an art; experience and creation imagination are often the most accurate guides to successful action.

The social sciences can, however, be useful as a supplement to experience. They can help to suggest new questions. That the practitioner should ask about situations confronting him; they can provide categories for codifying experience so that it will be more easily accessible; and they can assist in relating one body of experience to another.

EXAMPLES OF PERSUASION EFFECT AND NON-EFFECT

The files of advertisers, public relations practitioner, propagandists, broadcasters and opinion researchers are full of examples of the massive effects that mass media or gossip can have. Numerous experimental studies have found sweeping changes in attitudes following ex-pure to persuasions for example:

A women's magazine surveyed its readers to find how many of them were paying attention to a column on beauty tips and household matters. It was found that two million women followed the suggestion, recently given in this column, that they put their feet up for a few minutes at intervals throughout the day.

An experiment at the University of Iowa found newspaper editorials extremely effective in influencing student’s attitudes toward a former prime minister of Australia. Almost 100 percent of students who read „planted“editorials in the campus newspaper favouring Mr. Hughes and shifted their attitudes in a positive direction.

Nearly three-quarters of the wartime audience that saw a film about conditions in Naples changed their opinions about the advisability of sending food to Italy.

(Hovland I.C., Janis L.I., Kelley H.H., Communication and Persuasion; New Haven 1959)

By way of contrast, a great many instances can be found of occasions on which extensive advertising or propaganda campaigns seem to have had very little effect or no effect at all. For example: An all-out effort was made by a group of organizations in Cincinnati, Ohio, to acquaint the citizens of that city with facts about the United Nations. In spite of the full cooperation of mass media, advertisers and civic organizations during six months period of the campaign the survey showed that the campaign failed to raise the level of information of the people about the United Nations appreciably. Before the campaign 30 percent of the Cincinnati population had to be classified as knowing nothing about the United Nations and after the campaign the figure was only 28 percent.

A similar experiment on a smaller scale was conducted by a German opinion research institute in cooperation with the Stuttgart radio station. During a period of two years the station took every opportunity to familiarize its listeners with the name and compositions of the upper house of the German Federal Legislature (the Bundesrat), which previous research had shown could be identified correctly by only 10 percent of the audience. After one year and again after the second year, further surveys showed that there was no change in the proportion of the listeners who would correctly identify the Bundesrat.

A publisher who was favourably impressed with the sales of new book shortly after publication decided that with vigorous promotion it might be lifted to the ranks of bestsellers. He therefore greatly increased his advertising budget for the book, only to see sales drop precipitously during the following weeks.

As these examples suggest, there is no clear correlation between ex pure to an idea and its impact on knowledge, attitude or behaviour. No matter how intensive persuasion seems to be from the point of view of the persuader, there is no guarantee that it will have desired effect or indeed that it will have any effect at all.

Many professional and non-professional persuaders recognize this and therefore try to gauge the probable effect of the ideas they want to transmit by putting themselves in the place of the audience and asking such questions as: „How would I react to this message it I were on the receiving end?“

The process of getting inside someone else's skin and using someone else's head is a very difficult one and is rarely completely successful. It can, however, be somewhat facilitated if the persuader tries to understand the motivation of his audience and the ways in which the ideas he is transmitting will be useful to them. To this end he may ask: „If I were a member of the audience, how could I use this message? How would it help me do things I want to do“?

In short, he should know as much as possible about the needs of the people he is addressing and how they are trying to satisfy these needs. It may therefore be helpful to explain shortly in this stage, the basic needs human beings experience and how they shape their behaviour in an effort to achieve their goals.

THE SATISFACTION OF NEEDS

Nearly all actions a person takes can ultimately be traced to an effort to satisfy some basic want or need. There is imperfect agreement as to what these basic needs are, but in general human beings seek physical and mental well-being, affection, respect, skill, knowledge, security and power. The importance attached to each of these values varies from individual to individual and from society to society, but most people seem to want all of them to a greater or lesser degree.

To satisfy his basic needs, a person must manipulate his environment or must adjust to it in some appropriate way. Some needs can be satisfied by the physical environment, which can provide many of the things needed for well-being and security, but others depend largely on the social environment – that is on other people. The degree to which anyone achieves affection, respect and most form of power depends on those around him. Anyone sets certain intermediate goals and prescribes actions that are likely to help him reaches these goals. For reaching these goals, an individual must behave in certain ways with respect to both his physical and his social environment.

Already – formed attitudes govern much of what we say to peoples and how we respond to the varied situations with which we are confronted. Much of our past experience is thus stored in the form of attitudes and habits and they provide a convenient guidance mechanism.

An important characteristic of the habits and attitudes of any single individual is that they must be reasonably harmonious. If a person has to attitudes toward two different types of actions he finds himself in a comfortable position. The man who cannot decide whether to fight or to run away is likely to achieve neither honour nor safety. People therefore try to avoid learning incompatible habits and attitudes.

INFORMATION AND ENVIRONMENT

If our physical and social environments were completely stable, it is theoretically possible that we could learn all that was necessary during our early years and then require very little in the way of new information. That is, once having acquired appropriate habits, attitudes and facts and having shaped these into a harmonious whole, we could then act in such a way as to satisfy our needs without further learning. This, however, is impossible because the environment never is completely stable.

In our complex society, a prodigious amount of new information about both people and things has to be learned every day if we are to guide our actions appropriately. Much of this information we gain from direct observation and more from person-to-person conversation. But most people rely on the mass media, directly or indirectly, to inform themselves many aspects of the social and physical environment that are important to them. Businessmen keep in touch with political and economic developments through the press, radio and TV in order to guide their day-to-day decision; others may inform themselves about the world of sports and use this information in conservation with their friends. And so that the mass media cater to so many needs and serve so many functions that is difficult to disentangle the various uses that different people make of them.

To maintain satisfactory relationship with other people we require a great many fact about the environment, some of which are received through the mass media. We need not only information about other people but information that may be useful in conservation, even though the subject matter itself has little relevance to our actions. Experiments have indicated that a reader will remember more of the content of a report if he knows or thinks he knows the author. Information can thus affect behaviour in social relationship even if it deals with a subject-matter that is quite extraneous.

Providing reassurance as to the correctness of stabilized attitudes and action patterns is also an important function of information and here again the mass media play a role. In a constantly changing environment people require assurance that they are actually doing the things that will help to satisfy their needs. Consequently, they welcome persuasion that tend to agree with their own attitudes or indicate the correctness of their actions. In many cases a person who has just bought a car will read the advertising for that make of car more closely than before, apparently to reassure himself that he made a good choice. In such cases persuasions do not change the direction of attitudes and behaviour but are likely to intensify and confirm them.

As a result of cultural and individual selective mechanism, each person gives his attention to different portions of the stream of information. He pays close attention to information about aspects of environment what are important to him and learn that certain sources are more likely to provide this information than others. If, for example, a group made up of people with varying interests and from a number of countries is given 15 minutes to read a newspaper and each individual is than asked to write down headlines of the stories he remembers, it is usually found that every person recalls a different list. Each will be likely to remember items dealing with his own country and most will recall items dealing with their own professional or non-professional interests. All may remember those stories that concern matters which have previously been prominent in the news and about which everybody is talking. (Stevens A., The Persuasion Explosion; Washington 1985)

Experiments indicate, each person develops certain habits perception, based on his needs and the way has undertaken so satisfy these needs.

People are far from passive audiences for persuasions. Instead, they are highly selective users, their choices depending in part on their individual characteristics and in part on the society in which they live. From the stream of information they select those, which are going to satisfy their needs adequately. INFLUENCING BEHAVIOR OF OTHER PERSONS

Since most individuals exercise a high degree of control over the information they receive, through such mechanisms as selective attention, distortion, interpretation and so on, it is sometimes concluded that efforts of persuaders to affect behaviour are doomed to failure. According to this way of thinking, persuasive information can only confirm a person in his existing patterns of action or will be used by him in doing something he wants to do anyway. If that were the case it would be futile to try to bring about changes in behaviour through propaganda, advertising or education. On the other hand there is a different view is supported by historians that persuasive information can bring about very substantial behavioural effects and changes in knowledge and attitudes. There seem to be several good reasons why, in spite of the powerful tendency to maintain stable behaviour patterns, a persuader can influence people’s actions and attitudes under certain conditions.

The most important of these reasons, which overlap somewhat with each other, are the following: Most people are on the look-out for changes in those aspects of their environment that are relevant to them. If they are informed of such a change they may adjust their behaviour or attitude patterns. In spite of their efforts to keep informed about things that are important to them, people are not always able to acquire the information they want. The stream of information may be inadequate. They may wish to do something and not know how. In very few cases is there complete harmony within the body of habits, attitudes and information that a person has acquired through his previous experience. People are often predisposed in two or more directions at the same time. Persuasion can sometimes reinforce one tendency so that it prevails over the others. Many people have a large number of interests and cannot keep track of them all equally. Persuasion can focus attention on particular subjects, sometimes at the expense of others.

Similarly, some attitudes are latest. A predisposition exists but doesn't result in action unless it is triggering function. People are faced constantly with the necessity of acquiring information and developing attitudes on new subjects. Persuasion can provide the desired information and can finish a basis for the new attitudes. Even deeply rooted behaviour patterns sometimes prove unable to satisfy basic needs. When this happens, due to a radical change in environment or other reasons, people are faced with the necessity of developing new behaviour patterns if they wish to avoid serious maladjustment, persuasion can then exert a powerful effect by suggesting new patterns of adjustment.

Persuaders who wish to influence behaviour make use of above mentioned situations. And also they can bring about behavioural or attitudinal effects if they make use of the fact that the existing stream of persuasion is frequently not adequate. A person may wish to buy a product and not know how to do it. If an advertiser can tell him about an easy-payment plan, this may be enough to bring about a purchase. Similarly warfare propagandists found it was much more important to tell men in the opposing forces how to surrender without being injured than to exhort them to surrender. In this case the propaganda material was directed to those who already had decided to give up but didn't know how to do it. Studies of the effect of persuasion an attitude and behaviour have emphasized the degree to which existing attitudes tend to be reinforced by information. Reinforcement, a form of reassurance, confirms existing behaviour patterns and doesn't ordinarily cause a change. But there are notable exceptions to this rule. Since most people engage in a wide variety of activities and associate with several different groups, they sometime develop two or more set of attitudes that guide them in various relationships. Election studies have found, for example, that some people are predisposed toward one political party because this is the choice of their family and friends, while they also predisposed toward the other because it more nearly reflect their economic interests. When election time comes political propaganda often helps them to decide which way to vote.

DEFINITION OF PERSUASION

Persuasion is the process by which a persons or people’s attitudes or behaviours are, without duress, influenced by communications from people. Not all communication is directly persuasive; some of it has such effects as informing, entertaining or deceiving. But persuasion, in which communication and belief intersect, is a particularly pervasive and poignant manifestation of humanity, shown perhaps not at its best but at its most human.

Some say persuasion involves manipulating other people and for this reason they think persuasion sometimes may be distasteful. With respect to this opinion we argue that without some degree of social control and mutual accommodations the human community may become disordered and the persuasion indeed gains moral acceptability when the alternatives such as coercion, threats, duress etc. are considered. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 122)

So important and multifarious subject such as persuasion inevitably attracts study from many quarters. Persuasion and its different spheres like advertising, public relations, propaganda, marketing, which are the focus of study of this thesis, have been treated as an art, a craft and a science by the great cultures that have left substantial historical record. Thinkers from the time of and of the stature of Aristotle and Cicero devoted whole treaties to the topic. In European universities of the Middle Ages, persuasion was one of the basic liberal arts to be mastered by any educated person; and from the days imperial Rome through the reformation persuasion was raised to a fine art by preachers who used the spoken word to move men to virtue and the Holy Land. In modern era, persuasion, in the form of advertising, public relations and propaganda supports major industries; and spends a great share of the gross national product in advanced countries.

PRINCIPLES OF PERSUASION

Experimental research in the social sciences has brought some tentative principles

of persuasion:

1. To accomplish attitude change, a suggestion for change must first be received

and accepted. Acceptance of the massage is a critical factor in persuasion

communication.

2. The suggestion is more likely to be accepted if it meets existing personality

need and drives.

3. The suggestion is more likely to be accepted if it is in harmony with groups

norms and loyalties.

4. The suggestion is more likely to be accepted if the source is perceived as

trustworthy or expert.

5. A suggestion in the mass media, coupled with face to face reinforcement, is

more likely to be accepted than a suggestion carried alone if, other things being

equal.

6. Change in attitude is more likely to occur if the suggestions is accomplished by

other factors underlying belief and attitude. This refers to a changed environment,

which makes acceptance easier.

7. There will be more opinion change in the desired direction if conclusions are

explicitly stated than if the audience is left to draw its own conclusion.

8. When the audience is friendly or when only one position will be presented or when

immediate but temporary opinion change is wanted, it is more effective to give

only one side of the argument.

9. When the audience disagrees or when it is probable that it will hear the other side

from another, it is more effective to present both sides of the argument.

10.When equally attractive opposing views are presented one after another, the one

presented last will probably be more effective.

11.Sometimes emotional appeals are more influential and sometimes factual ones. It

depends on the kind of message and kind of audience.

12.A strong threat is generally less effective than mild threat in inducing desired

opinion change.

13.The desired opinion change may be more measurable some time after exposure to

the communication than right after exposure.

14.The people we want most in our audience are least likely to be there. This goes

back to the censorship of attention that the individual invokes.

15.There is a „sleeper effect“ in communications received from sources that the

listener regards as having low credibility. In some tests, time has tended to wash

out the distrusted source and leaves information behind.

If we sum up all above mentioned principles together, we can present four guiding principles:

Identification Principle

Most people will ignore an idea, an opinion or a point of view unless they see clearly that it effects their personal fears or desires hopes or aspirations.

Action Principle

People seldom buy ideas separated from action – either action taken or about to be taken by sponsor of the idea or action that the people themselves can conveniently take to prove the merit idea.

Familiarity and Trust Principle

People buy ideas only from those they trust, they are influenced by or adopt, only those opinions or points of view put forward by individuals or corporations or institutions that they regard as credible.

Clarity Principle

The situation must be clear to the people, not confusing. The thing they observe, read, see or hear, the thing that produces their impressions, must be clear not subject to several interpretations. This means, when we communicate, we must employ words, symbols or stereotypes that the receiver comprehends and responds to.

PERSUASION TECHNIQUES

With the consideration of these main principles of persuasion, the persuasion activist must define his audience by great precision and he must use different strategies and techniques to accomplish his different goals of persuading others. The persuasion communicator must vary his communications strategy in accordance with the intensity of concern with an issue felt by his audience.

For example the following techniques may reduce the discrepancy between the communicator's position and the audience's attitudes:

Using most closely identified message with the audience's position.

Using communications source that enjoys high credibility for the audience.

Playing down the differences between the persuader and the audience's attitudes.

Seeking identification in vocabulary and anecdote with the audience.

Establishing the communicator's position as being the majority opinion – defining the majority from the audience itself.

Bringing the audience's group identifications into play – when those identifications will help the development a positive response.

Modifying the message to fit the organizations needs.

REQUIREMENTS FOR A SUCCESSFUL PERSUASION

Getting people to adopt ideas requires more than a bare presentation of facts. It requires interpretation of the facts in terms of the self-interest of those people. Successful persuasion mostly depends on several ingredients. Some of these ingredients are:

Source: Credibility of source is a necessity. To attain credibility, there must be

complete and absolute honesty. Recipients of a message is biased in its

own interest.

Idea: The idea must be related to the hopes, fears, problems, values and

attitudes of the receivers. In other words, it must appeal to their self

interest.

Meaning: The meaning of the message must be clear there must be no possibility

of misunderstanding. This requires careful checking of every phrase to

be sure that it will be understood by the receiver. This necessitates a

thorough understanding of the language used by the receivers.

Penetration: The message must get through. It must be repeated often enough to

guarantee a solid impression. The more pervasive the idea, the better

chance it has of reception. The person who receives the same basic

message time after time – possibly in slightly different terms but always

bearing the same idea – is more likely to get the idea than if he hears

the message only once.

Proposed Action: There must be a recommendation for action and the action must be

possible. Generalities will not work.

Growth in the importance and power of public opinions has resulted in a commensurate growth of efforts to influence it, mainly through the arts of persuasion spheres. Basically, there are four means of getting people to do what we want them to do: Purchase, patronage, pressure and persuasion. If a lady wants a hairstyling, she pays for the service. That is purchased. If a prime minister needs a legislator's vote on a crucial bill, he agrees to appoint the legislator friend to a state post. That is patronage. If a taxpayer fails to file his income tax return, the taxpayer is penalized. That is pressure. If Toyota company mounts a nationwide advertising campaign to encourage the public to buy more Toyota cars and thus increase the sale of Toyota car. That is persuasion.

Persuasion, primarily as a communication process, is an effort to convey information in such a way as to get people to revise old pictures in their heads or form new ones and thus change their behaviour. The basic objective of most programs is either to change or neutralize hostile opinions, to crystallize unformed or latent opinions or to conserve favourable opinions by making reinforcing them. (Ross R. Understanding Persuasion; Englewood Cliffs 1990)

Persuasion has been a major research topic in the social and behavioural sciences during recent years. This research has been directed toward testing old insights accumulated over many centuries of theorizing about the persuasion process and also has revealed new relationships. The number of investigations show no sign of diminishing and it is likely that coming decades will show similar progress. Since manipulation of attitudes and behaviour is obviously the autonomy of the individual it is fortunate that study continues to be devoted to ways of producing resistance as well as compliance to persuasive communication.

We have briefly described persuasion, its definition and evolution, its principles and techniques.

In the next chapters of part I we discuss and describe the main spheres of persuasion such as advertising, public relations and propaganda.

In next chapter we will take the most important and the most expensive and the most controversial sphere of persuasion advertising