Lecture 8: Resistance to persuasion Flashcards
Gullibility
Accept too much, too easily persuaded.
Ethical concerns
Manipulation, misinformation, microtargeting, intrusiveness.
Potential issues
Failure to communicate novel, important information.
Problems by marketing and advertising
intrusive, disruptive TV, radio, online ads, deceptive advertising, targeting specific groups.
Problems by politics
Propaganda, mass media, polarization and disinformation.
Problems by health and safety
Disinformation, failure to communicate important information.
Conservatism
Reject too much information, fail to update
How easily are people persuaded?
People are gullible even when its bad for them but are evolved to resist being taken advantage of.
people evolved to resist being taken advantage of.
Especially hard to persuade for costly behavior, counter-intuitive arguments. People accept content that fits with prior views more than the reliability source.
Psychological mechanisms
plausibility checking –> trust calibration –> reasoning
Plausibility checking
Use prior beliefs to interpret new information or messages, only believing if plausible.
Different models of plausibility checking
- Inconsistency between new experienced info and prior beliefs
–> update. - Inconsistency between message from another person and prior beliefs –> evaluate source trustworthiness and reason –> updating
- More extreme / new information –> more thorough checking.
- When too conservativism –> fail too update for non-intuitive information –> harder too spread (wappies die geen vaccine willen)
Trust calibration
Evaluate trustworthiness via cues of competence and benevolence of source and commitment tracking.
Competence
Do you trust the messenger? Are they competent?
Benevolence
Do they care about you? Or just wanna sell something?
Commitment tracking
Calibrate trust according to source confidence and reliability.
Reasoning
Evaluate argument strenght (if high involvement).
Examples of problematic persuasion
Propaganda: May use or adjust messages to popular opinion. May employ rewards or punishments for true changes in belief.
Political campaigns or mass media: Confirmation bias, echo chambers, some cases of people adapating position to party affiliation and trust in media leads to more accurate political and economic knowledge.
Advertising: relatively small effects. More scrutiny of important or relevant information.
Medical misinformation: effective treatments may be counterintuitive. Ineffective or harmful treatments may be intuitive.
Examples for gullibility
People do buy things they don’t need/want/etc.
Some people do enter misinformation rabbit holes or join cults
Costliness to self matters, but costliness to others may not trigger strong reaction
Why resist persuasion?
Accuracy motives, defense motives, freedom motives and social motives
Accuracy motives
Desire to have correct information and avoid deception. Maintain own beliefs as correct and truthful –> confirmation bias.
What can trigger skepticism? (accuracy motives)
1) Previous negative experiences with persuasion.
2) Knowledge of persuasion strategies.
3) Use of tactics as:
Attention-getting tactics, delayed sponsor identification, negative/incomplete comparisons or promotion of option/ attitudes that clearly benefits the source.
Defensive motives
Self-consistency, reduce conflict and reluctance to change. Desire to maintain important and self-relevant beliefs. Perceive more risks than benefits and satisfied with current situation.
Freedom motives
Reactance to threat to freedom. People behave or shift attitude to contradict persuasive message (boomerang).