Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [74]
Samuel Goldwyn, movie producer, 1940s
I had long thought that advertising was employed primarily to help people do what they already wanted to do. However, there has been growing research on how advertising can bring about change when the message runs contrary to existing attitudes and behavior.
There are two main sources for resistance to persuasion. First, a person might already have a strong belief on an issue and thus be unwilling to consider other viewpoints. And second, a person might be averse to rational arguments about a particular topic. I discuss each of these here.
Resistance based on prior beliefs
People often come to their beliefs after much consideration. New arguments represent a threat if the arguments challenge those beliefs. The arguments imply that a person with a different view has made a mistake. Naturally, then, they would want to defend their current position.
If people have strong attitudes on a topic (such as smoking, gun control, taxes, birth control, political parties, drugs, or war), the rational approach to changing these attitudes is likely to be unsuccessful, especially in the short term. Moreover, it would likely cause resistance and counter-arguments, and lead people to become even more rooted in existing beliefs. This phenomenon is strong; you can see it easily— just provide conflicting evidence to someone about a cherished belief. People tend to avoid challenges to their beliefs and instead seek confirmation of them.
Tolstoy expressed it well:
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
Resistance begins as soon as a person adopts an expectation. A series of lab experiments used a problem that was free of emotional content. Subjects were given a set of three numbers, 2–4–6, and asked to identify the rule used to generate these numbers. They could obtain information about the rule by experimenting; that is, they would generate their own sets of three numbers (e.g., 8–10–12), and then ask whether or not each new set conformed to the rule. Logic would tell us that to test a hypothesis, you must generate some experiments that could disprove the hypothesis. So a person who thought that the rule was to “add 2 to each number,” could violate that rule (e.g., “add 1 to each number”) to test this belief. However, most subjects selected numbers to try to confirm hypotheses, not to try to disprove them (Wason 1960, 1968). A further study of the 2–4–6 problem found that most subjects believed feedback when it supported their hypotheses, but disregarded it when it didn’t (Mahoney and DeMonbreun 1977).
When people, even those trained in the scientific method, encounter evidence that contradicts their beliefs, they are likely to challenge the evidence. In a field experiment, 75 researchers were asked to review a paper for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Some received a paper with results that confirmed the dominant hypothesis held by scientists in that field. Other referees received the identical paper, but with the results reversed such that they disconfirmed the dominant hypothesis. The findings? Referees were much more likely to reject the study with disconfirming evidence and to rate it much poorer on “relevance” and “methodology,” although both versions of the study were identical in these respects (Mahoney 1977).
Leon Festinger devoted much of his career to research on cognitive dissonance and how it leads to resistance. Here are his conclusions:
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. We have all experienced the futility of trying to change