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Processing of Persuasive In-Group Messages
Abstract
Two studies investigated the processes mediating the persuasive impact of messages representing in-group opinions. In the 1st study, subjects read either a strong or a weak message attributed to either an in-group member or to another group. Subjects were more persuaded by a strong message from the in-group than a weak one, suggesting content-focused processing of the in-group message. Subjects were equally unpersuaded by either a strong or a weak message from the other group, and showed little sign of message processing. In the 2nd study, Ss listened to in-group or other-group messages about issues that varied in their relevance to in-group membership. When the issue was relevant to the in-group, subjects were persuaded by a strong message from the in-group, unpersuaded by a weak message from the in-group, and equally unimpressed by strong and weak messages from the other group. When the issue was irrelevant to the in-group, subjects accepted the position advocated by the in-group regardless of message quality, and again ignored messages from the other group. These results suggest that increased message processing, and not merely the impact of source persuasion cues, can underlie in-group-mediated attitude change.
... Thus, low LP is associated with "out-group" status among employees (Hogg, 2001). Considering group status is important because scholars have established that information coming from ingroup members tends to be accepted as more credible and persuasive than information coming from out-group members (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). Further, the metacognition literature suggests that evaluation certainty is increased when the information underlying an evaluation is believed to be credible and persuasive (Clarkson, Tormala, & Rucker, 2008). ...
... Theoretically, the extent to which a leader's information sharing will translate into greater evaluation certainty should depend on the extent to which the information is viewed as credible and persuasive. Given that employees tend to accept information obtained from "in-group" members as credible and persuasive (Mackie et al., 1990), high perceived LP should strengthen the positive effects of relational transparency on evaluation certainty. On the other hand, because information gleaned from "out-group" members is often viewed with suspicion or doubt (Mackie et al., 1990), relational transparency should have less influence on metacognitive certainty when perceived LP is low. ...
... Given that employees tend to accept information obtained from "in-group" members as credible and persuasive (Mackie et al., 1990), high perceived LP should strengthen the positive effects of relational transparency on evaluation certainty. On the other hand, because information gleaned from "out-group" members is often viewed with suspicion or doubt (Mackie et al., 1990), relational transparency should have less influence on metacognitive certainty when perceived LP is low. Taken together, we expect that LP will moderate the effect of relational transparency on evaluation certainty. ...
This research helps to integrate the metacognitive concept of evaluation certainty into the trust literature by demonstrating that certainty can amplify the effects of trustworthiness evaluations and stabilize trustworthiness evaluations over time. Across an experimental study (Study 1) and a multi‐wave survey of employees (Study 2), we show that trustworthiness evaluations exert a stronger influence on individuals’ trust at higher levels of certainty and that trust transmits the multiplicative effects of trustworthiness evaluations and certainty on key indicators of employee risk‐taking including reliance and disclosure behavior. Further, in Study 2, we show that certainty can help predict change in trustworthiness evaluations over time. Finally, in a two‐wave field survey (Study 3), we examine factors that influence evaluation certainty and show that relational transparency and leader prototypicality (LP) have interactive effects on employees’ certainty such that the influence of relational transparency on certainty will be more positive at higher levels of LP. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
... Health behaviours are influenced by messages from fellow group members (Cruwys et al., 2012;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). Previous studies have suggested that this occurs, in part, due to the effect of such messages on perceptions of group norms, or the regularity in beliefs and actions that characterize a social group Robinson, Harris, Thomas, Aveyard, & Higgs, 2013). ...
... First, health messages from an in-group member were more persuasive when presented in the context of a dissenting voice from an out-group member (consistent with H1). This in turn, is consistent with previous work which found that the persuasiveness of health messages can be enhanced if the message comes from an in-group members (Cruwys et al., 2012;Mackie et al., 1990), and that comparisons to out-group members can change normative beliefs about health behaviours (Tarrant & Butler, 2011). However, this is the first study to seek to change unhealthy norms regarding perfectionism within groups by contrasting a healthy message against an unhealthy message from an out-group member. ...
... By demonstrating the power of frame of reference on normative change (which underlie the power of messages in modern society), this thesis argues that the social identity approach provides a clear method to shift beliefs. In the burgeoning field of social norms marketing (Miller & Prentice, 2016;Wechsler et al., 2003) it is accepted that messages should come from in-group members to have power to change beliefs (Mackie et al., 1990), but this thesis argues that such messages must be context-aware (i.e., understanding the frame of reference) to ensure that they deliver normative change in the desired direction. ...
This research addressed how perfectionism relates to disordered eating by using a social identity approach. It found that the norms within valued identities dictated perfectionism content, including disordered eating tendencies, and that changing these norms could reduce perfectionism. Addressing perfectionism in this way may lead to improved disordered eating interventions.
... Early research by Mackie and colleagues (Mackie et al. 1992;Mackie et al. 1990) demonstrates the greater persuasive influence of ingroup members. In their research on University of California students, arguments from other University of California students were persuasive, whereas the same arguments from a rival university were not. ...
... In their research on University of California students, arguments from other University of California students were persuasive, whereas the same arguments from a rival university were not. Although some studies showed that the strength of ingroup members' arguments affected the persuasiveness of their messages (Mackie et al. 1990), other research showed that knowing the ingroup position on the issue negated any effects of argument strength (Esposo et al. 2013;Mackie et al. 1992). In other words, group members' attitudes shifted toward the ingroup position regardless of whether ingroup members presented strong or weak arguments in favor of the issue. ...
... Experiment 1 shows that Republican and Democrat participants were more influenced by messages from their ingroup than the outgroup, a finding that is consistent with past research (Cohen 2003;Mackie et al. 1990Mackie et al. , 1992Wyer 2010). Specifically, Democrat participants were more positive about a climate change policy when it was proposed by the Democrat party than when the very same policy was proposed by the Republican party. ...
Responses to climate change are strongly linked to political identity and therefore any efforts to promote climate change policy need to take political identity into account. In the current research, we developed communication strategies, informed by the social identity approach, that promoted climate change policies to Republicans and Democrats. In experiment 1 (N = 879), we presented messages to Republican and Democrat participants about a carbon tax policy that differed in terms of whether the policy was endorsed by members of the Republican or Democrat party, and whether the policy was promoted on the basis of Republican or Democrat values. Experiment 2 (N = 1008) adopted the same design but the focus was on a nuclear energy policy. Across both studies, participants had more positive responses—more favorable attitudes, greater support, and stronger intentions to engage in policy-supportive behavior—when the climate change policy was endorsed by members of their ingroup than the outgroup. In experiment 1, Democrat participants (but not Republican participants) also had more positive attitudes to the carbon tax policy when it was framed in a way that aligned with the values of their ingroup. In experiment 2, Democrat participants again had more positive responses to the nuclear energy policy when it was promoted on the basis of ingroup values, whereas values did not influence Republican participants. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering social identity motivations when communicating about climate change policies.
... Health behaviours are influenced by messages from fellow group members (Cruwys et al., 2012;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). Previous studies have suggested that this occurs, in part, due to the effect of such messages on perceptions of group norms, or the regularity in beliefs and actions that characterize a social group Robinson, Harris, Thomas, Aveyard, & Higgs, 2013). ...
... First, health messages from an in-group member were more persuasive when presented in the context of a dissenting voice from an out-group member (consistent with H1). This in turn, is consistent with previous work which found that the persuasiveness of health messages can be enhanced if the message comes from an in-group members (Cruwys et al., 2012;Mackie et al., 1990), and that comparisons to out-group members can change normative beliefs about health behaviours (Tarrant & Butler, 2011). However, this is the first study to seek to change unhealthy norms regarding perfectionism within groups by contrasting a healthy message against an unhealthy message from an out-group member. ...
... By demonstrating the power of frame of reference on normative change (which underlie the power of messages in modern society), this thesis argues that the social identity approach provides a clear method to shift beliefs. In the burgeoning field of social norms marketing (Miller & Prentice, 2016;Wechsler et al., 2003) it is accepted that messages should come from in-group members to have power to change beliefs (Mackie et al., 1990), but this thesis argues that such messages must be context-aware (i.e., understanding the frame of reference) to ensure that they deliver normative change in the desired direction. ...
All over Australia, disordered eating rates are increasing. Decades of research have indicated that perfectionism is a key risk factor for disordered eating behaviour. While there remains some debate about the specific facets of perfectionism, there is general agreement that perfectionism can be delineated based on the perceived source: self-oriented perfectionism (i.e., “I must be perfect”) and socially prescribed perfectionism (i.e., “They require me to be perfect”). Conceptually, this overlaps with social psychology. Specifically, this mirrors traditional social identity approaches of how individuals integrate personal identity content with social identity content. However, to date no research has used a social psychological approach to understand how perfectionism comes about, how it may lead to disordered eating behaviour, and thereby imply how social psychology could aid in therapeutic approaches to reduce perfectionism. In this thesis, I argue that self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism are analogous to personal identity content and social identity content. Across five papers, I present evidence for this social identity approach to perfectionism in disordered eating. Firstly, I present the Consolidated Perfectionism Model to explain how self-oriented perfectionism and socially prescribed perfectionism can be considered from a social identity perspective, integrating cross cultural, clinical, and sociocultural perspectives on perfectionism in disordered eating. Secondly, I present qualitative evidence suggesting that self-oriented perfectionism is absorbed through intrapersonal factors, and socially prescribed perfectionism is in fact a self-control norm transmitted through “fat talk.” Third, through two correlational studies, we find that perfectionism pressure does appear to relate to thin ideal beliefs, but in another study, low self-control was related to disordered eating above body dissatisfaction. Fourthly, I present data that suggests socially prescribed perfectionism relates to disordered eating through negative urgency (a facet of self-control), indicating that disordered eating behaviour is driven by a negative reaction to socially prescribed perfectionism norms present within the immediate social environment. Fifth and finally, I present evidence that we can reduce socially prescribed perfectionism by manipulating the context of health messages to counter perfectionism. We conclude by discussing how this new perspective can add to therapies designed to reduce perfectionism. This thesis adds to social psychological theory by further presenting evidence that the social identity approach has utility in changing toxic group-based beliefs. However, it also has implications for clinical psychology, by presenting evidence that the use of explicit social psychological frameworks may add to traditional clinicalapproaches. Overall, this thesis presents strong evidence for the use of social psychology approaches to clinical disorders, especially in disordered eating.
... The main focus of the literature on persuasion and opinion formation has been to deepen our understanding of how, when and which source characteristics positively impact persuasion attempts. As such, conditions of dissimilarity primarily served as a benchmark against which conclusions about the impact of similarity have been drawn (e.g., Brock, 1965;Ma, Krishnan, & Montgomery, 2015;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990;McGarty, Haslam, Hutchinson, & Turner, 1994;Naylor et al., 2011). Importantly though, while comparing the impact of similarity vis-à-vis dissimilarity can provide insights in the relative impact of both, this comparison does not allow definite conclusions about the precise effects of dissimilarity on opinion formation. ...
... We propose two different conditions that will allow us to distinguish between both. As argued above, the typical approach to examine the influence of similar versus dissimilar others only allows researchers to draw conclusions about the relative impact of (dis)similarity (point A and B, Fig. 1A and 1B; cf., Mackie et al., 1990;McGarty et al., 1994;Naylor et al., 2011). We propose that more precise insights about the effect of dissimilarity can be obtained by comparing responses to different types of opinions provided by a dissimilar other (points B and B′ in Fig. 1A and B). ...
... We consider it an important extension of the current findings to show the emergence of a contrast effect based on opinions that differ in valence. For example, previous work examining the impact of similarity on preferences often only focused on positive opinions (Mackie et al., 1990;McGarty et al., 1994). We aim to show that the addition of a negative opinion to the research design is essential to gain a complete understanding of how (dis)similarity impacts preferences (see Fig. 1A and 1B). ...
Source characteristics are a key determinant of preferences and choice in the interpersonal influence process. Extant literature documents the positive impact of similarity between oneself and an opinion provider on advice taking, but much less is known about how dissimilarity affects choice. While earlier research assumed that people ignore or discount the opinions of dissimilar others, we argue that dissimilarity can lead to preference and choice contrast. We posit that perceptions of dissimilarity trigger a more general hypothesis of dissimilarity. As a result, a preference contrast is observed, driven by people's tendency to interpret the provided opinion in a way that confirms their dissimilarity hypothesis. Five studies confirm the emergence of preference and choice contrast due to dissimilarity, and support the proposed mechanism. We discuss the relevance of proper baseline conditions for (dis)similarity research, as well as implications for research within the domain of interpersonal influence.
... People trust human information sources more if they perceive the source as attractive, powerful and similar to themselves 54 . These source judgements are naturally imperfect -people believe in-group members more than out-group members 55 , tend to weigh opinions equally regardless of the 0123456789();: competence of those expressing them 56 and overestimate how much their beliefs overlap with other people's, which can lead to the perception of a false consensus 57 . Experts and political elites are trusted by many and have the power to shape public perceptions 58,59 ; therefore, it can be especially damaging when leaders make false claims. ...
... In extreme cases, people with strong conspiratorial ideation tendencies might mistrust any official source (for example, health authorities) 19,26 . More commonly, people tend to trust sources that are perceived to share their values and worldviews 54,55 . ...
Critical thinking for sustainable development therefore focuses on the soft skills of positive values and attitudes while at the same time embracing social, economic, political, and environmental transformation for the good of everyone irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or status in society.
Green marketing is developing and selling environmentally friendly goods or services. It helps improve credibility, enter a new audience segment, and stand out among competitors as more and more people become environmentally conscious.
Using eco-friendly paper and inks for print marketing materials. Skipping the printed materials altogether and option for electronic marketing. Having a recycling program and responsible waste disposal practices. Using eco-friendly product packaging.
Critical thinking helps people better understand themselves, their motivations and goals. When you can deduce information to find the most important parts and apply those to your life, you can change your situation and promote personal growth and overall happiness.
The reason why innovation benefits from critical thinking is simple; critical thinking is used when judgment is needed to produce a desired set of valued outcomes. That is why the majority of innovation outcomes reflect incremental improvements built on a foundation of critically thought-out solutions.
The results indicate that there are four factors that effectively influence fulfillment of green marketing, specifically, green labeling, compatibility, product value and green advertising.
A green mission statement becomes the foundation of a company's sustainability efforts. It provides the organization and its stakeholders with an understanding of what's most important and what your company can do to protect the natural world and be more socially responsible.
... Prior research suggests that individuals are apt to resist information that runs counter to their views about another group (for a recent review, see ref. 48 ), especially when the source of the information is the outgroup itself [49][50][51] . We therefore reasoned that our intervention might be especially persuasive if the ingroup (that is, non-FARC Colombians) validated perspectives expressed by the FARC outgroup. ...
... We found that the enduring and replicable peace-promoting effects of the FARC-Integration video were directionally the most pronounced for the primary version of the video, which was edited to first include responses by FARC members and then corroborating responses by non-FARC Colombians affirming FARC members' willingness and ability to change. We thought this version might be the most effective because corroborating information from the ingroup would help resolve any scepticism after exposure to the FARC members' responses [49][50][51] . Still, differences between alternative edits of the FARC-Integration video were slight and non-significant (encouragingly, this was because of the strong performance of several of the alternative edits, not the weak performance of the focal edit; Supplementary Tables 6 and 11). ...
Whereas politicians broker peace deals, it falls to the public to embrace peace and help sustain it. The legacy of conflicts can make it difficult for people to support reconciling and reintegrating with former enemies. Here we create a five-minute media intervention from interviews we conducted with Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) ex-combatants in a Colombian demobilization camp and non-FARC Colombians in neighbouring communities. We show that exposure to the media intervention humanizes FARC ex-combatants and increases support for peace and reintegration. These effects persisted at least three months post-exposure, were replicated in an independent sample of non-FARC Colombians and affected both attitudes (for example, support for reintegration policies) and behaviour (for example, donations to organizations supporting ex-combatants). As predicted, the intervention’s effects were mediated by changing conflict-associated cognitions—reducing the belief that ex-combatants are unwilling and unable to change—beyond affective pathways (for example, increased empathy or reduced prejudice). Bruneau et al. show that a five-minute video intervention is able to effectively promote support for the reintegration of former Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces combatants into Colombian society.
... People trust human information sources more if they perceive the source as attractive, powerful and similar to themselves 54 . These source judgements are naturally imperfect -people believe in-group members more than out-group members 55 , tend to weigh opinions equally regardless of the 0123456789();: competence of those expressing them 56 and overestimate how much their beliefs overlap with other people's, which can lead to the perception of a false consensus 57 . Experts and political elites are trusted by many and have the power to shape public perceptions 58,59 ; therefore, it can be especially damaging when leaders make false claims. ...
... In extreme cases, people with strong conspiratorial ideation tendencies might mistrust any official source (for example, health authorities) 19,26 . More commonly, people tend to trust sources that are perceived to share their values and worldviews 54,55 . ...
Misinformation has been identified as a major contributor to various contentious contemporary events ranging from elections and referenda to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only can belief in misinformation lead to poor judgements and decision-making, it also exerts a lingering influence on people’s reasoning after it has been corrected — an effect known as the continued influence effect. In this Review, we describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that lead people to form or endorse misinformed views, and the psychological barriers to knowledge revision after misinformation has been corrected, including theories of continued influence. We discuss the effectiveness of both pre-emptive (‘prebunking’) and reactive (‘debunking’) interventions to reduce the effects of misinformation, as well as implications for information consumers and practitioners in various areas including journalism, public health, policymaking and education.
... These preexisting perceptions of who is more likely to cooperate could also yield homophilous clusters, but they are due to shared perceptions of who is more cooperative and thus preferred as a partner in general rather than preferences for associating with similar others. To conduct a more carefully controlled test of the role that preferential associations with similar others plays in promoting cooperation, we follow past work that uses shared university affiliation as the basis for group categorization (Mackie, Worth, and Asuncion 1990;Foddy and Yamagishi 2009;Steffens, Haslam, and Reicher 2014). ...
... There were two between-subjects conditions: whether identity information was available and whether reputation information was available. We manipulated the presence of identity information by either revealing participants' university affiliations or not (Mackie et al. 1990;Steffens et al. 2014). Specifically, as noted above, all networks included students from two universities (here, called university 1 and university 2; in the actual experiment, the universities were referred to by their names and initials). ...
Social networks affect individuals’ ability to solve conflicts between individual and collective interests. Indeed, the ability to seek out cooperative others is a key explanation for the high levels of cooperation observed in social life. In contrast to existing research on cooperation and networks, sorting in the real world is typically driven by homophily, or similarity on socially significant attributes like ethnicity or religion. Here the authors develop and test an argument about how homophily alters network dynamics and cooperation using a large web-based experiment and an agent-based model. They find that homophily promotes cooperation, net of key determinants of cooperation. Further, homophily drives the selection of new ties, increasing clustering in dynamic networks. The authors also demonstrate the consequences of in-group preferences for between-group segregation. Their results therefore shed light on how cooperation can evolve in networks and how this process contributes to network-level segregation.
... Though it influenced participants' responses in these studies, source alone was not strong enough to show an independent effect on message responses, as has been shown in previous studies (e.g., Cohen, 2003;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). We believe this discrepancy from previous research can partially be explained by the moral framing of the message content. ...
... K. Hurst and M.J. Stern Journal of Environmental Psychology 68 (2020) 101394 Another potential explanation for why our findings were different from previous research in this regard could be related to our use of an unnamed (i.e., generic) non-profit organization as the source manipulation. This differs from some studies that named a more specific outgroup source, such as the name of a rival university (e.g., Mackie et al., 1990), or others that used an ingroup/outgroup source generally regarded by the public to be untrustworthy, such as politicians (Cohen, 2003;Weingart & Guenther, 2016). Naming a specific rival as the information source may conjure up stronger feelings or a stronger urge to compete than a vague outgroup reference. ...
Divisions between political Liberals and Conservatives on environmental issues seem to be widening, with Liberals generally more pro-environmental than Conservatives. We propose that common framing of environmental messages tends to perpetuate these gaps. We designed two experiments to examine this assumption and explore the prospects of narrowing these divisions using communication based on moral foundations theory. Moral foundations theory posits that there are at least five universal moral concerns that people intuitively use to form judgments. Research has found that political Liberals in the United States tend to base their judgments and communication on only two of these foundations, while Conservatives stress all five. We crafted two pro-environmental messages, one framed using liberal moral language (based on the two liberal moral foundations), the other using conservative moral language (based on all five moral foundations). Through survey research using two separate samples, we compared how political partisans responded to the messages when they were communicated from a liberal, conservative or nonpartisan message source. We found that the conservatively framed message resonated more with Conservatives than the liberally framed message, especially when combined with a conservative message source. Further, the conservatively framed message did not alienate liberal participants, even when combined with a conservative source. Thus, combining conservative framing (based on all five moral foundations) and conservative message sources in environmental messaging is likely to be more persuasive than relying on traditional liberal messaging or liberal sources.
... First, a message positioning perspective suggests that trying to convert targets from one valence to another could limit persuaders' success in many cases. Generally speaking, people are more receptive to proattitudinal (i.e., attitude-congruent, same-valence) messages than to counterattitudinal (i.e., attitude-incongruent, opposing-valence) messages, as well as to messages from similar rather than dissimilar others (e.g., Clark & Wegener, 2013;Hart et al., 2009;Mackie, Gastardo-Conaco, & Skelly, 1992;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). One explanation is that proattitudinal messages tend to elicit reduced counterarguing relative to counterattitudinal messages, which enhances the persuasive impact of the former relative to the latter (e.g., . ...
... With information about only a single target (i.e., in our between-participants paradigm), people might select persuasion targets based on their perceived receptiveness, which could lead them to advocate to proattitudinal targets-targets leaning their way already who could be shifted to more extreme support. Indeed, as reviewed earlier, people have been found to be more receptive to proattitudinal than counterattitudinal messages (e.g., Clark & Wegener, 2013;Hart et al., 2009; and to messages from similar rather than dissimilar others (e.g., Mackie et al., 1990;Mackie et al., 1992). Perhaps persuaders have this intuition (the atypicality results from Experiment 2 suggest that they might) and view proattitudinal targets as likely to be receptive. ...
Advocacy is a topic of increasing import in the attitudes literature, but researchers know little to nothing about how people (i.e., persuaders) choose their targets (i.e., the recipients of their advocacy). Four main experiments and six supplemental studies (total N = 3684) demonstrate that people prefer to direct persuasion efforts toward individuals who seem poised to shift their attitudes qualitatively (e.g., from negative to positive) rather than non-qualitatively (e.g., from positive to more positive). This preference stems from the fact that qualitative attitude change is perceived as greater in magnitude and expected to have a larger impact on behavior. These findings provide initial insight into the factors that drive persuasion target selection, and are inconsistent with what past persuasion research, conventional marketing wisdom, and our empirical evidence suggests persuaders should do. People tend to select persuasion targets they believe they can change qualitatively, but at least sometimes can have greater persuasive impact by targeting individuals who are already leaning in their direction.
... In social identity terms, trust is a function of the perceived identity of the source in relation to that of the recipient. People are more persuaded by messages from fellow ingroup members than outgroup members (165)(166)(167), and especially by those seen as prototypical of their ingroup (168,169). Therefore, those responsible for emergency preparedness need to prioritize relationships-and specifically shared social identity-with the community as part of their work of communicating-whether in relation to flood plans, what to do in a chemical incident, or general advice about a terrorist attack. ...
... By conveying care around shared public health aims, communication legitimized the decontamination process in the eyes of the public, leading to shared social identification between crowd and responders. In short, while effective communication requires trust (165)(166)(167), communication strategies can also build trust by building shared identity. ...
Accumulated evidence demonstrates the centrality of social psychology to the behavior of members of the public as immediate responders in emergencies. Such public behavior is a function of social psychological processes—in particular identities and norms. In addition, what the authorities and relevant professional groups assume about the social psychology of people in emergencies shapes policy and practice in preparedness, response, and recovery. These assumptions therefore have consequences for the public's ability to act as immediate responders. In this Policy and Practice Review, we will do three things. First, we will overview research on the behavior of survivors of emergencies and disasters, drawing out key factors known to explain the extent to which survivors cooperate in these events and contribute to safe collective outcomes. We will demonstrate the utility of the social identity approach as an overarching framework for explaining the major mechanisms of collective supportive behavior among survivors in emergencies. Second, we will critically review recent and current UK government agency guidance on emergency response, focusing particularly on what is stated about the role of survivors in emergencies and disasters. This review will suggest that the “community resilience” agenda has only been partly realized in practice, but that the social identity approach is progressing this. Third, we will derive from the research literature and from dialogue with groups involved in emergencies a set of 12 recommendations for both emergency managers and members of the public affected by emergencies and disasters. These focus on the crucial need to build shared identity and to communicate, and the connection between these two aims. Including our recommendations within emergency guidance and training will facilitate collective psychosocial resilience, which refers to the way a shared identity allows groups of survivors to express and expect solidarity and cohesion, and thereby to coordinate and draw upon collective sources of support. In sum, this evidence-base and the recommendations we derive from it will help professionals involved in emergency management to support public resilient behaviors and will help the public to develop and maintain their own capacity for such resilience.
... First, a message positioning perspective suggests that trying to convert targets from one valence to another could limit persuaders' success in many cases. Generally speaking, people are more receptive to proattitudinal (i.e., attitude-congruent, same-valence) messages than to counterattitudinal (i.e., attitude-incongruent, opposing-valence) messages, as well as to messages from similar rather than dissimilar others (e.g., Clark & Wegener, 2013;Hart et al., 2009;Mackie, Gastardo- Conaco, & Skelly, 1992;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). One explanation is that proattitudinal messages tend to elicit reduced counterarguing relative to counterattitudinal messages, which enhances the persuasive impact of the former relative to the latter (e.g., . ...
... With information about only a single target (i.e., in our between-participants paradigm), people might select persuasion targets based on their perceived receptiveness, which could lead them to advocate to proattitudinal targets-targets leaning their way already who could be shifted to more extreme support. Indeed, as reviewed earlier, people have been found to be more receptive to proattitudinal than counterattitudinal messages (e.g., Clark & Wegener, 2013;Hart et al., 2009; and to messages from similar rather than dissimilar others (e.g., Mackie et al., 1990;Mackie et al., 1992). Perhaps persuaders have this intuition (the atypicality results from Experiment 2 suggest that they might) and view proattitudinal targets as likely to be receptive. ...
Attitude change and persuasion are among the most studied topics in social psychology. Surprisingly, though, as a field we have virtually zero insight into perceived attitude change—that is, how people assess the magnitude of a shift in someone's attitude or opinion. The current research provides an initial investigation of this issue. Across 6 primary experiments and a series of supplemental studies (total N = 2880), we find consistent support for a qualitative change hypothesis, whereby qualitative attitude change (change of valence; e.g., from negative to positive) is perceived as greater than otherwise equivalent non-qualitative attitude change (change within valence; e.g., from negative to less negative or from positive to more positive). This effect is mediated by ease of processing: Qualitative attitude change is easier for people to detect and understand than non-qualitative attitude change, and this ease amplifies the degree of perceived change. We examine downstream consequences of this effect and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.
... In the first two experiments, we employed prepared group information, allowing us to independently manipulate information about others' positions as well as persuasive argumentation of an ingroup (Blascovich & Ginsburg, 1974;Burnstein et al., 1973;Hinsz & Davis, 1984;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). More specifically, similar to Blascovich and Ginsburg (1974), we manipulated the group norm by presenting participants with either an average group attitude highly in favor of the dominant position or with an average group attitude only slightly in favor of the dominant position. ...
... Participants received the information that they would partake in two independent studies (cf. Mackie et al., 1990). The alleged first study served to measure prediscussion attitudes. ...
Research has shown that processes of social comparison as well as persuasive argumentation are involved in group polarization. We propose a processing effort account according to which the role of these processes in determining group polarization is contingent on ability and motivation. The impact of information regarding others’ positions on group polarization should be higher given low (vs. high) ability or motivation. In contrast, the impact of persuasive argumentation should be higher given high (vs. low) ability and motivation. Results in line with these assumptions were obtained in two experiments in which individuals’ ability (Experiment 1) or motivation (Experiment 2), information regarding group average position, and argument persuasiveness were manipulated. Furthermore, consistent findings were also obtained in a third experiment testing the role of motivation in real group discussions. A processing effort account provides a novel perspective for investigating the development of group extremity. © 2019 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
... According to Petty and Cacioppo (1986), source characteristics may also motivate processing, even under low involvement (e.g., Heesacker, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1983;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). It has been suggested by modern theories of prejudice (e.g., Devine, 1989;Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986;Katz 2 The attitude measure was computed as before. ...
In a series of experiments, we investigated the effect of race of source on persuasive communications in the Elaboration Likelihood Model (R. E. Petty & J. T. Cacioppo, 1981, 1986). In Experiment 1, we found no evidence that White participants responded to a Black source as a simple negative cue. Experiment 2 suggested the possibility that exposure to a Black source led to low-involvement message processing. In Experiments 3 and 4, a distraction paradigm was used to test this possibility, and it was found that participants under low involvement were highly motivated to process a message presented by a Black source. In Experiment 5, we found that attitudes toward the source's ethnic group, rather than violations of expectancies, accounted for this processing effect. Taken together, the results of these experiments are consistent with S. L. Gaertner and J. F. Dovidio's (1986) theory of aversive racism, which suggests that Whites, because of a combination of egalitarian values and underlying negative racial attitudes, are very concerned about not appearing unfavorable toward Blacks, leading them to be highly motivated to process messages presented by a source from this group.
... (Dixon et al., 2020) A 2022 experimental study from the same research team found that correcting misperceptions about gun owner support for firearm violence prevention policies "leads to greater perceptions of identity overlap between gun and non-gun owners, greater willingness to work with each other to promote gun safety policies, and less negative affect towards each other." (Susmann et al., 2022) There is also a body of conceptual theory from the political science literature suggesting that correcting misperceptions regarding public support for a policy may increase policy support and make people more likely to express their views publicly (Chambers et al., 2006;Mendoza et al., 2014;White et al., 2009;Mackie et al., 1990;Geiger and Swim, 2016;Schroeder and Prentice, 1998). These studies demonstrate that pluralistic ignorance-inaccurate perceptions of the opinions of others-has a chilling effect on people's willingness to speak out publicly on issues and may adversely affect both individual opinions and behavior (Geiger and Swim, 2016;Schroeder and Prentice, 1998). ...
Gun violence prevention is often viewed as polarizing, although gun owners actually support many gun safety policies. The aim of this paper was to investigate the relationship between gun owners' perceptions of other gun owners' support for gun policies and their own individual support for such policies. NORC at the University of Chicago, which uses a panel of adults recruited through probability sampling, conducted an online/phone survey of 1,078 adult gun owners. Respondents were asked about their individual support for seven gun safety policies and their perceptions of other gun owners' support for those policies. We used two-sample t-tests and multivariate logistic regression analyses to explore the relationship between perceived and individual support. We found that gun owners underestimated fellow gun owners' support for gun violence prevention policy, especially if they personally opposed that policy. Gun owners' perception of fellow gun owners' support for a policy was significantly associated with the likelihood of individual support for that policy for all laws examined. These findings have important implications for correcting misperceptions of the level of gun owner support for gun safety policies as well as conducting and targeting educational campaigns to respond to and correct media misinformation.
... It is known that opinions from sources similar to oneself have a higher influence than opinions from dissimilar sources [50,35]. To capture this phenomenon, we let w ix take on one of two values, contingent on the relationship between i and x. ...
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting rules, there is limited work that explicitly looks at the interplay of the deliberative process and voting. In this paper, we build a deliberation model using established models from the opinion-dynamics literature and study the effect of different deliberation mechanisms on voting outcomes achieved when using well-studied voting rules. Our results show that deliberation generally improves welfare and representation guarantees, but the results are sensitive to how the deliberation process is organized. We also show, experimentally, that simple voting rules, such as approval voting, perform as well as more sophisticated rules such as proportional approval voting or method of equal shares if deliberation is properly supported. This has ramifications on the practical use of such voting rules in citizen-focused democratic processes.
... " Building on decades of psychology research on belief formation, a burgeoning literature on misinformation has sought to identify the circumstances in which people buy into and share inaccurate information. Recent reviews cover this work in depth [12][13][14][15] , but, in brief, evidence suggests that people can believe false information for a whole host of reasons, including relying on familiarity and processing fluency as cues of truth 16 , seeking congruence with pre-existing worldviews 14,17,18 , relying on intuitive and non-deliberative thinking [19][20][21] , and using flawed cues of source credibility such as one's perceived similarity with a source [22][23][24][25] . One high-level theoretical account argues that motivated reasoning is largely to blame for endorsement of misinformation and partisan disagreement over the veracity of claims. ...
The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”.
... For example, messages authored by in-group members can be more persuasive than messages authored by out-group members, even when the in-group authors are not experts on the topic. Researchers have demonstrated that messages authored by out-group members may garner less cognitive processing and be more easily dismissed while messages from in-group members can be persuasive even in the absence of careful processing (e.g., Mackie et al., 1992Mackie et al., , 1990. ...
... This ingroup favoritism is present even when in-group attitudes are unwritten or unspoken (Smith & Louis, 2009). Furthermore, the social influence of in-group and out-group members differs as attitudes among in-group members have been found to be more influential than attitudes among out-group members (Lin et al., 2018;Mackie et al., 1990;Turner et al., 1989). From a self-categorization theory perspective, people have a greater tendency to conform to the expectations of in-group members, rather than to those in out-groups, because of the desire to obtain social approval from in-group members (Alvaro & Crano, 1997;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). ...
People’s beliefs and behaviors are influenced by the preferences and behaviors of those around them. This effect is known as “social influence.” Previous studies have found that ingroup favoritism can modulate the effect of social influence on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. In this study, we investigated the interaction of ingroup favoritism and social influence on punishment decisions in unfair situations. In experiment 1, the ultimatum game was used to assess participant’ response to unfairness directed toward oneself in in-group and out-group social influence contexts. In experiment 2, we used a third-party dictator game to examine how ingroup favoritism modulates the effect of social influence on participants’ responses to unfairness toward others. The interaction effect demonstrated that ingroup favoritism was particularly pronounced when the social influence suggested punishment, and absent when social influence suggested no punishment. Conversely, no such interaction was found in the ultimatum game. Our findings suggest that people draw psychologically relevant distinctions between unfairness toward themselves and unfairness toward others.
... According to the theory of matching effect, if the framed message matches an individual's affective and cognitive orientations, it will enhance the effectiveness of persuasion [73]. In other words, matches between people's psychological states and the message will make it more persuasive [74][75][76]. Those related theories do give great inspiration for future research. ...
During a public health crisis, the provision and dissemination of health-related information are important for the relevant authorities to keep the public informed. By using different types of message framing, the authorities can effectively guide and persuade people to adopt health-related behaviors (such as vaccination). In this study, a web-based experiment using a 2 × 2 (message framing: gain framing versus loss framing) × (message presentation: narrative versus non-narrative) design was conducted to investigate the effects of different message frames on vaccination promotion. In total, 298 college students were recruited to participate in this study. The results suggest that, for message framing, loss-framed (vs. gain-framed) messages lead to higher intentions to get vaccinated. Furthermore, compared with non-narrative messages, narrative messages are more persuasive in promoting vaccination behavior. However, the interaction effect between gain–loss message framing and narrative framing is not significant. Additionally, perceived severity, perceived benefits, and perceived costs mediate the effect of narrative framing on behavioral intentions. In other words, compared with non-narrative messages, narrative messages lead to higher levels of perceived severity and perceived benefits, and a lower level of perceived costs, which in turn increase intentions to get vaccinated. This paper provides insightful implications for both researchers and practitioners.
... In this paper, we propose a cognitive mechanism that can be linked to both the positive and negative effects of diversity. We theorize that, when confronted with diverse others, individuals open or close their minds depending on their beliefs about diversity (Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg, & van Ginkel, 2008;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990;Turner et al., 1987;see van Knippenberg, 1999;van Knippenberg & van Ginkel, 2010). Similar others provide greater affordance of consensual shared reality, whereas groups of dissimilar others can create uncertainty (Kruglanski, Shah, Pierro, & Mannetti, 2002). ...
This paper makes a case for explaining diversity effects through cognitive factors as compared to demographic or other differences in backgrounds. We argue that studying perceived diversity in conjunction with diversity beliefs can explain positive and negative effects through a motivated opening or closing of the mind (Need for Cognitive Closure, NFCC). NFCC is the motivation to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity. In Study 1, we experimentally demonstrate that asking participants to think about differences among their coworkers increases their NFCC. Study 2 shows that greater uncertainty about social norms in the workplace is positively related to NFCC. Study 3 confirms the mediating role of NFCC in explaining divergent thinking attitudes in expatriates working in various multicultural cities around the world. Study 4 demonstrates that perceived diversity is positively associated with NFCC when people hold negative beliefs about diversity, whereas positive beliefs mitigate this effect. Lastly, Study 5 shows that the interaction between perceived diversity and diversity beliefs is further moderated by task type. Taken together, the present research highlights the importance of studying cognitive factors to explain diversity effects.
... A large number of experimental studies have shown ingroup biases since the pioneering work by Henri Tajfel and his co-authors in the 1970s (e.g., Tajfel et al., 1971) or the famous Robbers Cave camp experiment by Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues that powerfully demonstrated how intergroup hostility can emerge when groups are united against a common enemy (Sherif et al., 1961). Within such a context, previous experimental studies indicate that the willingness to adopt another person's attitudes and beliefs is strongly influenced by other members' in-group-out-group status (see, e.g., Abrams and Hogg, 1990;Haslam, 1997;Oakes et al., 1994;Mackie et al., 1990;Turner, 1991Turner, , 1995. However, less well explored is that individuals have also competing identities. ...
We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialization affect in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school students with different backgrounds, i.e., French bilingual and monolingual (Vietnamese) students. We find strong evidence for the presence of these two phenomena: our micro-analysis of within-and between-school effects show that bilingual students exhibit higher discriminatory behavior toward non-bilinguals within the same school than toward other bilinguals from a different school, implying that group identity is a key factor in the explanation of intergroup cooperation and competition. JEL codes: C93, C70, D74
... Rationale: Persuasion research has demonstrated that credibility of the messenger has a significant impact on the persuasiveness of the message and subsequent behavioural change (Jones et al., 2003;Wu & Shaffer, 1987). A key dimension of such credibility is how much people feel that they can relate with the messenger: People are more persuaded by messages from fellow ingroup members and those they identify with (Carter et al., 2013;Mackie et al., 1990). For example, people with strong ethnic identities tend to see spokespersons from the same ethnic group as more credible and trustworthy (Morimoto & La Ferle, 2008). ...
An effective response to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is dependent on the public voluntarily adhering to governmental rules and guidelines. How the guidelines are communicated can significantly affect whether people will experience a sense of self-initiation and volition, protecting compliance from eroding. From the perspective of Self-Determination Theory, a broad theory on human motivation and its interpersonal determinants, effective communication involves the delicate combination of providing rules and structure in a caring and autonomy-supportive way. Research in applied domains from public messaging to education and health has shown that when social agents set limits in more autonomy-supportive, caring, and competence-fostering ways, it predicts autonomous forms of compliance, which in turn predict greater adherence and long-term persistence. Building on SDT, integrated with insights from social identity theory, we derive a practice-focused checklist with key communication guidelines to foster voluntary compliance in national crises such as the prevention of COVID-19 spread.
... According to CEM approach (van Knippenberg and Mell 2016), ethically dissimilar others would be considered as out-group and outgroup members are seen as less valid source of information (Brewer 1979;Turner et al. 1987). Subsequently, communications from in-group members are more likely to be attended to and elaborated, and thus more likely to influence the thoughts and actions of the individual, than are communications from out-group members (Mackie et al. 1990;van Knippenberg 1999;van Knippenberg and Wilke 1992). Attesting to this argument, research shows that people are less willing to share information with others they perceive to be different from themselves (Devine 1999;Mesmer-Magnus and DeChurch 2009;Miranda and Saunders 2003;Stasser et al. 1995) and that the tendency to share information is influenced by the degree of similarity among team members (Crane et al. 2019;Thomas-Hunt et al. 2003). ...
Building from an interactionist view of ethics, this study sought to integrate individual and contextual factors for understanding ethical perceptions in teams. Given the proximal nature of team members, this study specifically explored how individuals comparatively evaluate their own ethical behaviors and team members’ ethical behaviors to arrive at a perception of ethical person–group (P–G) fit within a team. Grounding our theoretical arguments in relational schemas theory (Baldwin, Psychological Bulletin 112:461–484, 1992), we demonstrate that interpersonal ethical perceptions can have distal impacts on perceptions of team functioning. The results support the hypotheses that a perceived ethical incongruence between the self and other team members (i.e., lack of ethical P–G fit) negatively influenced perceptions of relationship conflict and ultimately information sharing. By exploring individual and team level aspects of ethics concurrently, we contribute to a deeper understanding of contextual forces in ethics through an interactionist approach.
... An important question is whether ideologically inconsistent knowledge sources confer a contagious sense of understanding, and if so, how that understanding influences attitudes. To our knowledge, this question has not been addressed in the literature, although the direct effects of in-group status on argument persuasiveness (e.g., Mackie et al., 1990) are consistent with a cultural cognition interpretation of our data. Finally, liberals and conservatives respond quite differently to climate policies intended to adapt to as opposed to mitigate climate change (Campbell & Kay, 2014). ...
Five experiments are reported to compare models of attitude formation about hot-button policy issues like climate change. In broad strokes, the deficit model states that incorrect opinions are a result of a lack of information, while the cultural cognition model states that opinions are formed to maximize congruence with the group that one affiliates with. The community of knowledge hypothesis takes an integrative position. It states that opinions are based on perceived knowledge, but that perceptions are partly determined by the knowledge that sits in the heads of others in the community. We use the fact that people's sense of understanding is affected by knowledge of others’ understanding to arbitrate among these views in the domain of public policy. In all experiments ( N = 1767), we find that the contagious sense of understanding is nonpartisan and robust to experimental manipulations intended to eliminate it. While ideology clearly affects people's attitudes, sense of understanding does as well, but level of actual knowledge does not. And the extent to which people overestimate their own knowledge partly determines the extremity of their position. The pattern of results is most consistent with the community of knowledge hypothesis. Implications for climate policy are considered.
... e.g., Harkins & Petty, 1981a, 1981b, 1987Ziegler, Diehl, & Ruther, 2002 e.g., Reich & e.g., Ratneshwar & Chaiken, 1991 e.g., Heesacker, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1983Petty et al., 1981Tormala, Briñol, & Petty, 2006 e.g., Chaiken, 1980Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990 1 e.g., Chen, Shechter, & Chaiken, 1996 e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1979 Tormala et ...
In various social situations such as elections or shopping, individuals are often persuaded in multiple directions by different sources (i.e., multiple-source-and-direction persuasion). In this paper, we discussed the attitude change process in this type of situation, based on two dual-process models of persuasion: (1) the heuristic-systematic model and (2) the elaboration likelihood model. These models assume single-source-and-direction persuasion and cannot be applied without modification to multiple-source-and-direction persuasion. Therefore, this paper focuses on the simultaneous consideration of multiple persuasive messages as a process particular to this situation. In addition, by using a concrete experimental design, we demonstrated in this paper how a hypothesized model accounts for a recipient’s attitude change. We emphasized the significance and the future prospects of clarifying the attitude change process in multiple-source-and-direction persuasion.
... 11 For example, Abrams et al. (1990) report that in an Asch line judgement procedure-where participants publicly announce which of a set of lines best matches a standard line in length, after hearing three confederatesparticipants conformed to erroneous views expressed by confederates in 58% of the tasks when the confederates were ingroup members but only 8% of the tasks when the confederates were outgroup members. Mackie et al. (1990Mackie et al. ( , 1992 report that subjects changed their attitudes toward an advocated position coming from an anonymous ingroup member but were unaffected by the same message coming from an outgroup member. People appear more likely to conform to ingroup norms when their group membership is made more salient by highlighting group concerns, by making explicit comparisons between the ingroup and the outgroup, or by making group identity more salient than individual identity (Spears et al. 2001, Mackie & Wright 2003, Cialdini & Goldstein 2004. ...
I review evidence that individuals associate themselves—or identify—with groups in two fundamental ways: ingroup bias and conformity to group norms. The evidence spans many spheres of economic activity, including consumption, production, hiring, promotion, education, cooperation, financial investments, and law enforcement. Group identities are not fixed, even when it comes to ethnic and religious identities. I argue that the choice of identity can be captured by a simple trade-off between gains from group status and costs to distance from the group. I outline a simple conceptual framework that captures the main empirical regularities and illustrate how it can be used to study the two-way interaction between economic policy and social identity. The analysis implies, e.g., that inequality and immigration of low-skilled workers can strengthen nationalism and reduce redistribution, and that changes in the economic environment can produce shifts in identification patterns that feed into trade policy. Finally, I discuss open theoretical questions and domains where the interaction between identity and economic activity is not well understood. This includes the provision of public services, the evolution of gender norms, and the use of identity to motivate workers.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Economics, Volume 12 is August 3, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... Physicians are more likely to trust the recommendations of their own professional organizations in contrast to the recommendations of an unknown or less-trusted entity, such as an insurance company (9). A known medical director may have more source credibility and more persuasive influence than a hospital administrator who is also a physician but is less well known (10). This observation is consistent with others who have found that a source that shares a recipient's group membership is more likely to influence the recipient's thoughts, judgment, and trust than a nonmember source (5). ...
... In such cases, the function of partner-regulation behaviors is to persuade the target that the actors' solutions are correct and should be enacted. To this end, any factor associated with greater persuasion, such as similarity (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990), intelligence (Hovland & Weiss, 1951), trustworthiness (Priester & Petty, 1995), attractiveness (Mills & Aronson, 1965), liking (Sinclair, Moore, Mark, Soldat, & Lavis, 2010), and feelings of closeness ) may increase the effectiveness of such attempts. In such cases, partner regulation may be particularly effective when actors directly address the reasons the target disagrees with the proposed solutions. ...
In this article, we synthesize existing literatures across numerous domains to introduce a novel model—the Relationship Problem Solving (RePS) model—for understanding the process through which romantic partners influence one another to resolve relationship problems. The first section briefly describes the key constructs and stages of the model. The second section details the interpersonal behaviors that influence various intrapersonal factors (e.g., affect, self-efficacy) that ultimately influence partners’ motivation and ability to progress through the stages of the model. The third section uses the model to generate novel predictions that suggest that the effectiveness of these interpersonal behaviors often depends on contextual factors. Finally, the fourth section discusses the implications of this model for understanding relationship problem solving, highlights the need to consider the role of context in the problem-solving process, and offers numerous specific predictions to be addressed by future research.
... Thus, it is important to not only test the effects of source and audience characteristics on the egalitarian message's effectiveness, but also important interactions between source and audience characteristics. For instance, prior research suggests that persuasive appeals are more effective when audience members share a social identity with the message's source, and that this especially so when the message's content is relevant to the shared social identity as is the case in the present research (Mackie et al. 1990(Mackie et al. , 1992. Similarly, the possibility that White male sources delivering such messages are more effective may not hold among female and URM recipients who may perceive them as patronizing, or speaking with undue authority about an issue that does not negatively affect them (Rothman 2012). ...
Social psychologists have leveraged social norms messaging about prejudice to improve social climates. Less research, however, has explored how social identities of message sources and recipients (e.g., gender) influence receptivity to these messages. Testing for the effects of source and recipient social identity on message receptivity is not just of theoretical importance, but also has practical implications for who can effectively deliver such messages and whether such messages have unintended negative consequences for disadvantaged group members. In the present research, an experimental design explored whether the effectiveness of an egalitarian social norms message (compared to a control message) depended on source gender, recipient gender, and their interaction, as well as whether the egalitarian social norms message had unintended negative consequences for participants. Results of an experiment with undergraduate participants (N = 434) showed that receiving an egalitarian social norms message (compared to a control message) resulted in more positive diversity attitudes and stronger intentions to confront prejudice, and these effects did not depend on source gender. The egalitarian social norms message, compared to the control message, did not have detrimental effects on members of socially disadvantaged groups, and was evaluated as more beneficial for social climate. Implications for intervention are discussed.
... This raises the question: does the contagious sense of understanding conferred by awareness of community knowledge require community co-membership? Prior work suggests it does, since people are more likely to accept claims from ingroup than outgroup members [88,89]. If so, how does community affiliation stack up against more commonly considered dimensions of source credibility (e.g., honesty and expertise [90])? ...
An individual's knowledge is collective in at least two senses: it often comes from other people's testimony, and its deployment in reasoning and action requires accuracy underwritten by other people's knowledge. What must one know to participate in a collective knowledge system? Here, we marshal evidence that individuals retain detailed causal information for a few domains and coarse causal models embedding markers indicating that these details are available elsewhere (others' heads or the physical world) for most domains. This framework yields further questions about metacognition, source credibility, and individual computation that are theoretically and practically important. Belief polarization depends on the web of epistemic dependence and is greatest for those who know the least, plausibly due to extreme conflation of others' knowledge with one's own.
... In this paper, we propose a cognitive mechanism that can be linked to both the positive and negative effects of diversity. We theorize that, when confronted with diverse others, individuals open or close their minds depending on their beliefs about diversity (Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg, & van Ginkel, 2008;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990;Turner et al., 1987;see van Knippenberg, 1999;van Knippenberg & van Ginkel, 2010). Similar others provide greater affordance of consensual shared reality, whereas groups of dissimilar others can create uncertainty (Kruglanski, Shah, Pierro, & Mannetti, 2002). ...
... Conversely, individuals low in prejudice engaged in more message elaboration when they received a message from the stigmatized source than when they received a message from a non-stigmatized source. Similar results have been found in other studies (e.g., Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990) and even if the information was about a stigmatized individual rather than the stigmatized individual being the source (Fleming, Petty, & White, 2005). ...
The study of personality and individual differences is one of the oldest and most extensive literature in all of psychology (see Pervin, 1990; Barenbaum & Winter, 2008; Revelle, Wilt, & Condon, 2011). Variations in personality and individual differences have been linked to a vast array of behavioral, cognitive, and affective outcomes within the context of many social processes (e.g., see Chamorro-Premuzic, von Stumm, & Furnham, 2011; John, Robbins, & Pervin, 2008). The study of social influence is no exception. Over the past few decades, a sizeable amount of empirical literature has accumulated documenting the effects of numerous personality traits and individual differences in social influence processes such as conformity, compliance, obedience, and persuasion (e.g., see Briñol & Petty, 2005).
The goal of the present report is to provide an overview of the research literature on the role of personality and individual differences in social influence. Our overview will draw primarily from the discipline of social-personality psychology, but as will be seen, at various points we will also draw on research from areas as diverse as consumer behavior, organizational behaviour, communications, health psychology, clinical psychology, and political psychology. The intent of this report is not to provide a detailed scholarly review of the many individual studies comprising this literature (although a number of specific research findings will be discussed). Rather, our objective is to provide a more conceptual introduction to this area of research. In doing so, our focus will be on explicating a theoretical framework in which to organize this literature and reviewing the key themes and principles that have emerged in empirical research. The report will aim to provide the reader with a guide focused on the “forest rather than the trees.”
We will begin our report by providing an introduction to the key constructs in the personality/individual difference literature and the social influence literature, as well to some of the key methodological practices that have shaped this literature. In the second section of our report, we will introduce the reader to the wide array of personality and individual difference constructs that have been studied and illustrate how these constructs can be organized more parsimoniously within the context of a general conceptual framework. We will also discuss how this framework permits the many seemingly disparate effects associated with these constructs to be understood in the context of a relatively finite set of basic underlying psychological processes. Our review of this framework will conclude with a discussion of some of the general conclusions and implications that emerge from this conceptual perspective. In the third section of this report, we will turn our attention to a more detailed review of the empirical literature on the role of personality traits and individual differences in social influence. Our review of this literature will be structured along the lines of the framework presented. For each set of personality traits and individual differences, we will provide an introduction to the various individual characteristics making up this set, discuss the various effects that have been documented for each characteristic, and discuss the potential mechanisms that might be responsible for these effects. In the final section of the report, we will conclude with a general summary of the key empirical themes that have emerged from the literature and comment on some of the applied implications of this literature within the context of the Canadian Forces. We will also highlight important issues that remained to be resolved within the literature.
... For example, people are more influenced by ingroup than outgroup members (Abrams, Wetherell, Cochrane, Hogg, & Turner, 1990), and more willing to learn from ingroup members, especially ones who have superior knowledge (Kane, Argote, & Levine, 2005). And although ingroup members are more persuasive when they use strong arguments, outgroup members are equally unpersuasive regardless of argument strength (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). ...
Openness to criticism and dissenting opinions is enormously important to group decision-making. Past research has found that people are more persuaded by criticism of their group when it comes from fellow ingroup members rather than outgroup members. But this ingroup advantage is not boundless. Three experiments demonstrate that the ingroup advantage related to openness to criticism is erased when perceivers feel their group is under threat. The results further suggest that the psychological mechanism underlying defensive responses to criticism is attributional—Threat elicits greater suspicion of ingroup critics’ motives, which eliminates the ingroup critic’s advantage relative to outgroup critics. A final experiment tests an intervention designed to increase openness to criticism and finds that reminders of the importance of dissent and free speech emerge as an effective remedy to increase the persuasiveness of criticism despite high threat.
... Speakers that are evaluated negatively are often less persuasive (Pornpitakpan, 2004), while those that are likable, attractive, or similar to the audience can increase their persuasiveness (Wilson & Sherrell, 1993). Research has also suggested that individuals are less likely to carefully process persuasive messages from members of an out-group (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990), and therefore may rely more heavily upon heuristics, such as speaker evaluation, as a basis for opinion formation. In the context of our model, we expected that speakers who were unfavorably evaluated would be perceived as having weaker arguments and would be less effective at increasing support for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. ...
Despite the historical importance of dominant group solidarity with movements for social justice, little empirical work has examined how the social identity of movement supporters influences the persuasiveness of their social movement messages. Across two experiments, we manipulated the group identity (White, Black, or anonymous) of a speaker in a message supporting the #BlackLivesMatter movement to examine its effects on White Americans' perceptions of the speaker and their ultimate support for the movement. Results indicated that identity cues affected evaluations of the speaker (Study 1), and that these evaluations, in turn, mediated the effects of identity cues on attitudes toward the social movement (Study 2). Among White participants, White speakers were evaluated (a) more favorably in general than anonymous speakers, and (b) as less racist than both Black and anonymous speakers. Such evaluations were ultimately associated with increased support for #BlackLivesMatter. Implications of solidarity effects in social movement messaging are discussed.
... Intergroup bias causes members to trust information that is shared by ingroup members more than information that is shared by outgroup members [45]. The presence of outgroup members in diverse teams thus increases the chance that team members do not pay attention to and elaborate upon task-relevant information [46]. Accordingly, van Knippenberg et al. [11] proposed that "intergroup biases elicited by workgroup diversity are disruptive to elaboration of task-relevant information and therefore to group performance" (cf. ...
Information elaboration—the act of exchanging, discussing, and integrating information and perspectives through verbal communication—tends to be considered as the silver bullet that drives the performance of diverse teams. We challenge this notion by proposing that the effect of information elaboration on team performance depends on the accuracy of within-group competence attributions, i.e. the extent to which attributions of task competence among team members correspond with members’ actual task competence. We argue that information elaboration may actually harm performance when within-group competence attributions are inaccurate, given that in such teams decisions are likely to be based on suggestions from members who have much influence but little competence. We conducted an experiment with 97 gender-heterogeneous teams working on gender-typical problems and coded their interactions. Our findings support our hypotheses that members who are perceived as more competent are more influential in the information elaboration process, and that information elaboration harms performance when competence attributions are not accurate. In contrast to our expectations, pro-diversity beliefs did not mitigate this negative effect of inaccurate competence attributions. We argue that this speaks to the robustness of our findings regarding the detrimental effects of information elaboration when competence attributions are inaccurate.
... As a result, out-group information will likely be dismissed and receive only minimal attention (Stapel, Reicher, & Spears, 1994). Mackie and colleagues found empirical support for the notion that information from out-group members elicits relatively little attention and systematic processing (Mackie et al., 1992;Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). Consistent with this argument, I expect that decision makers who strongly identify with their organization (i.e., the in-group) will pay less attention to cues from other actors in the organizational environment (i.e., the out-group). ...
This article contributes to the emerging stream of micro-institutional research, which zooms in on the internal organizational processes that are responsible for organizations' differential responses to the external environment. Specifically, the investigation offers new knowledge of how organizational identity processes can shape whether decision-makers will resist versus give in to environmental pressures. Building on the notion that organizational identity acts as a filter through which decision-makers relate to the external environment, I develop the theoretical argument that strong organizational identification increases resistance to environmental pressures due to two mechanisms: (1) it bolsters the decision-maker's certainty and (2) it deflects the decision-maker's attention from the environment. A series of laboratory experiments not only test the mediated relationship between organizational identification and resistance to environmental pressures but also contrast different types of organizational identity. The empirical results support the hypothesized positive link between organizational identification and resistance, which becomes particularly strong when the organizational identity is normative (vs. utilitarian). The findings reported here enrich institutional theory by adding microfoundations to organizational practice adoption decisions and shedding new light on relevant enabling conditions for agency and within-field heterogeneity.
... By extension, identification with a group (e.g., a party) is understood as "a feeling of oneness with a defined aggregate of persons, involving the perceived experience of its successes and failures" ( Mael & Tetrick, 1992, p. 814). Due to that feeling of oneness, information is perceived to be highly relevant when it relates to a group with whom a person identifies ( Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990). As reviews by Fleming and Petty (2000) and van Knippenberg (1999) have shown, various studies have demonstrated that this dynamic, in turn, precipitates a more effortful processing and evaluation of presented information. ...
When a celebrity receives negative news coverage, his or her endorsements of politicians can pose negative consequences for the politicians. We investigated such negative consequences with the help of two experimental studies. In Study 1 (celebrity involved in tax scandal), we manipulated whether an endorsement was initiated by a politician or a celebrity (i.e., controllability) in a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment. We also manipulated politicians’ responses (i.e., no response vs. response). Study 2 was a conceptual replication of the first experiment (celebrity involved in a real estate scandal). Results of Study 1 revealed that politicians are perceived to be more in control of self-initiated endorsements than other-initiated ones. Perceived controllability, in turn, influenced feelings of anger and pity, eventually affecting voting intentions. For self-initiated endorsements, no response appears to be the best reaction. By contrast, public response is advised when the endorsement was initiated by another entity. Results were replicated in Study 2. However, particular responses of a political candidate revealed no influences in connection with a real estate scandal. We explain our findings by applying the theory of planned behavior, attribution theory, and situational crisis communication theory.
Interpersonal and group chats, such as WhatsApp, have become channels for information exchange. Unfortunately, they have also become channels for fake news. But if fake news spreads through chat groups, it begets the question if corrections also be effectively disseminated in the same way. Guided by the frameworks of social identity theory and social presence theory, this study examined the impact of source familiarity (familiar versus unfamiliar) and mode of delivery (interpersonal chat versus group chat) on the perceived credibility of a correction message to debunk misinformation sent on WhatsApp. Through a five-day-long experiment involving 114 student participants in Singapore, this study found no main effect of either source familiarity or mode of delivery on the perceived credibility of the correction message. However, the study found a significant interaction effect—when the correction was sent to a chat group, members rated it as more credible when it was sent by a familiar source than when it was sent by a source they had never met.KeywordsInterpersonal chatsGroup chatsSocial identity theorySocial presence theoryCorrection messages
Objectives
Therapy expectations and attitudes towards psychotherapy contribute substantially to the outcome, process and duration of psychotherapy. The a priori use of role model videos seems to be promising for changing expectations and attitudes towards psychotherapy. In contrast, underlying mechanisms, like identifying with the role model, have been sparsely investigated in studies so far. For instance, the effects of similarities and differences between the role model and the observer are not clear yet.
Methods
A total of 158 persons were recruited and randomly assigned to four groups. In one of three experimental groups, participants watched an expectation-optimised video with patients giving information about their mostly positive therapy outcomes (positive model) . Two further experimental groups saw the same video, but either received instructions to focus on similarities (similarity group) or on differences (discrepancy group) between the patients and themselves. A further control group watched a video with patients who gave information about their symptoms. As the primary outcome variable, we assessed attitudes towards psychotherapy using the Questionnaire on Attitudes towards Psychotherapy (QAPT). It was filled in before and after watching the video and after a two-week follow-up period.
Results
Contrary to the hypotheses, the discrepancy group and the experimental group without further intervention (positive model) showed significant improvements in their attitudes towards psychotherapy after watching the video, while such an effect was not found in the similarity group or control group.
Conclusion
Focusing on similarities between patient examples and the observer does not support a change in therapy expectations or attitudes through observation, while a positive video model without instructions, or with the instruction to focus on differences does. Attentional interference and depth of cognitive evaluation are discussed as possible reasons.
Trial registration
Ethical approval (2018-19k) was obtained from the ethics committee of the Psychological Department, University of Marburg, and the trial was registered at Aspredicted.org (#22,205; 16.04.2019).
Past research finds that a majority of gun and non-gun owners support key gun safety policies, yet gun owners tend to underestimate other gun owners' support for these policies. We predicted that these misperceptions of support might lead gun owners to view non-gun owners as being less similar to themselves, which might undermine intergroup cooperation to promote gun safety policies and fuel intergroup animosity. Importantly, we also predicted that correcting these misperceptions would be an effective way to reduce intergroup division and enhance intergroup cooperation. We tested these predictions across two studies in which participants were randomly assigned to read information designed to correct misperceptions of gun owner support or to read other, control information. Across both studies, we find that correcting gun owners' misperceptions of gun owner support for gun safety policies leads to greater perceptions of identity overlap between gun and non-gun owners, greater willingness to work with each other to promote gun safety policies, and less negative affect towards each other. This suggests that correcting gun owner misperceptions of gun owners' support for gun safety policies might be an effective intervention to facilitate intergroup cooperation to promote these policies. Therefore, efforts to promote gun safety policies might benefit from educating gun owners about the degree of support for these policies that already exists among gun owners. Doing so might present a simple and cost-effective way to mobilize gun owners in support of these policies.
We conducted a framed field experiment to explore a situation where individuals have potentially competing social identities to understand how group identification and socialisation affect in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The Dictator Game and the Trust Game were conducted in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City on two groups of high school students with different backgrounds, i.e., French bilingual and monolingual (Vietnamese) students. We find strong evidence for the presence of these two phenomena: our micro-analysis of within- and between-school effects show that bilingual students exhibit higher discriminatory behaviour toward non-bilinguals within the same school than toward other bilinguals from a different school, implying that group identity is a key factor in the explanation of intergroup cooperation and competition.
Although considerable attention has been paid to the application of leadership in virtual communities, the field of live streaming has not been involved. This exploratory study aimed to explore how different broadcaster leadership traits (charismatic, authoritarian, and servant) influence audiences’ loyalty (cognitive and conative). And audience self-construal was chosen as a key moderator. The top 15 broadcasters from the regional rankings were selected from each of the two popular live streaming platforms, Douyu and YouTube, for the study. And we used snowball sampling with a link to an online questionnaire as a recruitment procedure. 310 audiences with live streaming experience from the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan participated. Hierarchical linear modeling was adopted for the analysis. This study found that broadcasters with servant and charismatic leadership traits positively affected cognitive loyalty. Broadcasters with servant leadership traits also had a positive effect on conative loyalty. Additionally, independent self-construal negatively moderated the relationship between servant leadership and cognitive loyalty. Independent self-construal positively moderated the relationship between authoritarian leadership and conative loyalty. Furthermore, interdependent self-construal negatively moderated the relationship between charismatic leadership and conative loyalty. Interdependent self-construal positively moderated the relationship between authoritarian leadership and conative loyalty. These conclusions extend the understanding of broadcasters’ traits and audiences’ psychology concerning the booming phenomenon of live streaming and can help platform managers motivate audiences’ loyalty on these platforms.
Los equipos de trabajo son la piedra angular de las organizaciones, pero ¿Qué los diferencia de un rebaño? Su autonomía, su capacidad para colaborar, su compromiso con el objetivo. La tesis señala donde poner el énfasis para hacer que el trabajo de un equipo sea excelente.
Koronaviruksen leviämisen ehkäiseminen vaatii ihmisiä omaksumaan monia totutusta poikkeavia tapoja, kuten fyysisen etäisyyden pitämistä ja tiheää käsienpesua. Viranomaisten antamien suositusten ja ohjeiden noudattamista on mahdotonta kaikilta osin valvoa ja osa varotoimenpiteistä saattaa jatkua hyvinkin pitkään, joten ohjeiden toimivuus on huomattavassa määrin kiinni ihmisten vapaaehtoisesta pyrkimyksestä noudattaa niitä. Psykologiassa ja sosiaalipsykologiassa on pitkä tutkimustraditio asenteisiin, motivaatioon ja käyttäytymiseen vaikuttamisen mekanismeista ja menetelmistä. Tämän artikkelin tavoitteena on 1) esitellä epidemian leviämistä ehkäisevien käyttäytymismuutosten analyysin sekä systemaattisen interventiosuunnittelun malli , sekä 2) linjata käyttäytymistieteellisiin teorioihin ja tutkimusnäyttöön perustuvia konkreettisia toimintaohjeita politiikkatoimenpiteitä suunnitteleville viranomaisille. Artikkeli perustuu keskeisiä sosiaalipsykologisia teorioita kuten itsemääräämisteoriaa, sosiaaliseen identiteetin teoriaa sekä tottumusteoriaa hyödyntäneisiin tutkimuksiin sekä tuoreisiin tieteellisiin artikkeleihin käyttäytymistiedon hyödyntämisestä nimenomaan sars-cov2-viruksen leviämisen ehkäisyssä. Käyttäytymistiedettä voidaan hyödyntää esimerkiksi suunniteltaessa havainnollistavaa ja motivoitumista tukevaa kansalaisviestintää tai uusien tottumusten luomista tukevia interventioita sekä räätälöitäessä sopivia toimenpiteitä eri väestöryhmille. Parhaimmillaan toimenpiteet aktivoivat ihmisten sosiaalista identiteettiä ja tukevat heidän omaehtoista motivaatiotaan synnyttäen vahvan omakohtaisen sitoutumisen vaadittuun käyttäytymiseen.
This study examines the attitude change process based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) in persuasion among two individuals holding different opinions, as the simplest situation of multiple directions of persuasion by different sources. Participants with restricted or unrestricted cognitive resources were asked their attitudes after reading two different persuasive messages: one was a persuasion from in-group member with weak arguments and the other was from out-group member with strong arguments. Cognitive resources were manipulated with a dual task (Study 1) and time constraints (Study 2) to allow either heuristic or systematic processes to predominate. Both studies showed participants were more likely to form their attitudes in response to the persuasion from in-group member, which had positive heuristic cues, with weak arguments under a restricted condition than under an unrestricted condition. This provides evidence that the HSM can explain the attitude change process under multiple-source-and-direction persuasion.
For over 50 years, scientists have sounded alarms that the burning of fossil fuels is causing changes to the Earth's climate, and that failure to take action on climate change will have devastating consequences. Despite this urgency, CO2 emissions (and global temperatures) continue to climb. Progress on mitigating climate change is slowed by the stubborn persistence of climate skepticism, as well as a failure for nonskeptics to translate their concern about climate change into meaningful action. The goal of this article is to describe and synthesize research on how to understand (and reduce) this public inaction on climate change. In the first half of the article, we examine the question of how to understand (and overcome) climate change skepticism. We review international evidence regarding the role of demographics, ideologies, and conspiracist worldviews in shaping people's willingness to believe in the reality of human‐caused climate change. We then review theory and research on how to successfully capture the attention of—and change the behavior of—people who traditionally resist climate change messages, such as those high in conservatism and free‐market beliefs. In the second half of the article, we examine how to promote more climate‐friendly behaviors among people who believe in the reality of climate change. Evidence will be reviewed suggesting that many people agree that climate change is caused by humans, but are not yet willing to make the necessary investments and sacrifices to respond to this threat. We then draw on relevant literatures to critically discuss three strategies for promoting proenvironmental behavior: (i) optimistic versus pessimistic messages; (ii) in‐group versus out‐group messenger effects; and (c) the use of descriptive and injunctive norms.
Although it has long been recognized that stereotypes achieve much of their force from being shared by members of social groups, relatively little empirical work has examined the process by which such consensus is reached. This paper tests predictions derived from self-categorization theory that stereotype consensus will be enhanced (a) by factors which make the shared social identity of perceivers salient and (b) by group interaction that is premised upon that shared identity. In Experiment 1 (N=40) the consensus of ingroup stereotypes is enhanced where an ingroup is judged after (rather than before) an outgroup. In Experiment 2 (N=80) when only one group is judged, group interaction is shown to enhance the consensus of outgroup stereotypes more than those of the ingroup—an apparent ‘outgroup consensus effect’. In Experiment 3 (N=135) this asymmetry is extinguished and group interaction found to produce equally high consensus in both ingroup and outgroup stereotypes when the ingroup is explicitly contrasted from an outgroup. Implications for alternative models of consensus development are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This chapter outlines the two basic routes to persuasion. One route is based on the thoughtful consideration of arguments central to the issue, whereas the other is based on the affective associations or simple inferences tied to peripheral cues in the persuasion context. This chapter discusses a wide variety of variables that proved instrumental in affecting the elaboration likelihood, and thus the route to persuasion. One of the basic postulates of the Elaboration Likelihood Model—that variables may affect persuasion by increasing or decreasing scrutiny of message arguments—has been highly useful in accounting for the effects of a seemingly diverse list of variables. The reviewers of the attitude change literature have been disappointed with the many conflicting effects observed, even for ostensibly simple variables. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) attempts to place these many conflicting results and theories under one conceptual umbrella by specifying the major processes underlying persuasion and indicating the way many of the traditionally studied variables and theories relate to these basic processes. The ELM may prove useful in providing a guiding set of postulates from which to interpret previous work and in suggesting new hypotheses to be explored in future research.
Copyright © 1986 Academic Press Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that the group-size effect in an Asch-type conformity experiment is a function of the concern with being right and the concern with being liked. In addition to a manipulation of group size, there were manipulations of manner of responding (public or private) and of the nature of the judgments (objectively determined or undetermined). Consistent with expectations, each of the latter two variables interacted with group size. There was also a significant main effect for group size, and a significant deviation from control indicating that conformity occurs with private judgments relating to objective stimuli.
Tested the view that the number of arguments in a message could affect agreement with a communication by serving as a simple acceptance cue when personal involvement was low but could affect agreement by enhancing issue-relevant thinking when personal involvement was high. In addition to manipulating the personal relevance of the communication topic, both the number and the quality of the arguments in the message were varied. In a pilot study with 46 undergraduates, when the issue was of low relevance, Ss showed more agreement in response to a message containing 6 arguments (3 strong and 3 weak) than to messages containing either 3 strong or 3 weak arguments. Under high involvement, however, the 6-argument message did not increase agreement over the message containing only 3 strong arguments. In the full experiment, 168 undergraduates received either 3 or 9 arguments that were either all cogent or all specious under conditions of either high or low involvement. The manipulation of argument number had a greater impact under low than under high involvement, but the manipulation of argument quality had a greater impact under high than low involvement. Results indicate that increasing the number of arguments in a message could affect persuasion whether or not the actual content of the arguments was scrutinized. (53 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A theoretical distinction is made between trait categorization in person perception and categorization by means of well-articulated, concrete social stereotypes. Three studies test the prediction that social stereotypes are both more associatively rich and more distinctive than are trait-defined categories. In Study 1, subjects sorted adjectives related to extraversion and introversion. A cluster analysis using similarity measures derived from the sorting indicated that distinct social stereotypes were associated with each trait. This supports and extends earlier findings (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In Study 2, subjects generated attributes of the trait categories and stereotypes that emerged in Study 1. More nonredundant attributes, especially visible features, were listed for the stereotypes than for the trait categories. Study 3 elicited the explicit associative structure of traits and related stereotypes by having subjects rate the association between a series of attributes (derived from the responses in Study 2) and each category label. Results showed that social stereotypes have distinctive features that are not shared with the related trait category, whereas trait categories share virtually all of their features with related stereotypes. The implications of the trait/stereotype distinction for social information processing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments with 96 undergraduates tested the hypothesis that high issue involvement enhances thinking about the content of a persuasive communication. Exp I varied involvement and the direction of a message (pro- or counterattitudinal). Increasing involvement enhanced persuasion for the proattitudinal but reduced persuasion for the counterattitudinal advocacy. Exp II again varied involvement, but both messages took a counterattitudinal position. One message employed compelling arguments and elicited primarily favorable thoughts, whereas the other employed weak arguments and elicited primarily counterarguments. Increasing involvement enhanced persuasion for the strong message but reduced persuasion for the weak one. Together the experiments provide support for the view that high involvement with an issue enhances message processing and therefore can result in either increased or decreased acceptance. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Presented the same communication to each of 72 female undergraduates under 4 conditions: information indicating that the communicator was either attractive or expert was presented either at the beginning or at the end. In confirmation of the hypothesis, it was found that agreement with the expert communicator was lower when the information about him was given after the communication than when it was given before, but agreement with the attractive communicator was just as great when the information about him was given after as when it was given before. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Conducted an experiment with 34 high school graduates about to enter college to test the hypothesis that when a belief is at issue, agreement from a dissimilar other will increase judgmental confidence more than agreement from a similar other; whereas when a value is at issue, agreement from a similar other will be more influential. After listening to tape-recordings purported to be excerpts from 2 university applicants, Ss judged either the relative academic success of the 2 students (belief) or which of the 2 they liked most (value). The Ss were then given an evaluation of the students written by another S who they had been led to believe was similar or dissimilar to themselves in terms of style of judging other people. In all cases, Ss were given the evaluation which agreed with their own. The results support the predictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments, with 60 undergraduates, examined what types of events instigate causal reasoning and what effects causal reasoning has on the subsequent use of information stored in memory. Ss were shown descriptions of behaviors performed by hypothetical characters, wrote brief continuations, and were given a surprise recall test on the behavior description phrases. Memory and use of explanatory content were assessed. Results indicate that unexpected events elicit causal reasoning and that causal reasoning produces relatively elaborate memory representations of these events so that they are more likely to be recalled. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of causal reasoning during acquisition, retention, and retrieval in social memory tasks. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the relation between the degree of involvement in a task and the complexity of strategy that Ss apply to the task. 48 female university volunteers were randomly assigned to either a dating (high-involvement) condition or 1 of 2 (low-involvement) control conditions. In addition, Ss in each condition were assigned to a person information or an abstract information condition. Ss in the person information condition received information about a particular male's dating preferences; those in the high-involvement condition were told that they would date this person. All Ss then performed a covariation judgment task (involving the male's dating preferences) for which the likelihood of their using simple or complex strategies was calculated. High-involvement Ss used more complex strategies and tended to be more accurate. These data are discussed in terms of the functionality of human information processing, heuristic analyses of inference strategies, and the importance of considering level of personal involvement in analyses of task performance. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
An experiment with 182 undergraduates investigated the effect of chronic category accessibility on impression formation and recall under information overload and nonoverload conditions. Ss read about a person who behaved mainly honestly but sometimes dishonestly or about a mainly dishonest person who sometimes behaved honestly. Ss were divided into overload and nonoverload groups. In the nonoverload condition, Ss were given control over the presentation rate of the individual behavioral descriptions. These Ss formed an impression of the person during information acquisition and gave more processing to and had better free recall of the minority than the majority behaviors. In the overload condition, Ss were given only enough time to read each behavior once before the next was presented. Under these conditions, Ss with a chronically accessible category for honesty still formed an impression and had better recall of minority than majority behaviors, whereas Ss without such an accessible category did not. Implications for the generalizability of the person memory model, which was discussed by both R. Hastie (1980) and T. K. Srull (1981, 1984), and the conditions under which social judgments will and will not be based on memory are discussed. (57 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In Exp I, 183 undergraduates read a persuasive message from a likable or unlikable communicator who presented 6 or 2 arguments on 1 of 2 topics. High involvement (HI) Ss anticipated discussing the message topic at a future experimental session, whereas low-involvement (LI) Ss anticipated discussing a different topic. For HI Ss, opinion change was significantly greater given 6 arguments but was unaffected by communicator likability. For LI Ss, opinion change was significantly greater given a likable communicator but was unaffected by the argument's manipulation. In Exp II with 80 similar Ss, HI Ss showed slightly greater opinion change when exposed to 5 arguments from an unlikable (vs 1 argument from a likable) communicator, whereas LI Ss exhibited significantly greater persuasion in response to 1 argument from a likable (vs 5 arguments from an unlikable) communicator. Findings support the idea that HI leads message recipients to employ a systematic information processing strategy in which message-based cognitions mediate persuasion, whereas LI leads recipients to use a heuristic processing strategy in which simple decision rules mediate persuasion. Support was also obtained for the hypothesis that content- vs source-mediated opinion change would result in greater persistence. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
Hypothesized that when a persuasive communication was on a topic of (a) high personal relevance, attitude change was governed by issue-relevant arguments, and (b) low personal relevance, peripheral features were more important. 145 undergraduates expressed their attitudes on the issue of comprehensive senior exams after exposure to a counterattitudinal advocacy that was of high or low personal relevance containing either strong or weak arguments that emanated from a source of either high or low expertise. Another 18 Ss were controls who were surveyed but not exposed to a counterattitudinal advocacy. Interactions of the personal relevance manipulation with the argument quality and expertise manipulations revealed that under high relevance (the exams were to be instituted the following year), attitudes were influenced primarily by the quality of the arguments in the message, whereas under low relevance (the exams were to be instituted in 10 years), attitudes were influenced primarily by the expertise of the source. It is suggested that an increase in involvement is associated with an increase in the importance of message arguments because people are motivated to hold "correct" and defensible opinions, and they have a better framework for things that are relevant to the self. (45 ref)
The present study is an examination of the attitude changes which occur over time when reference groups and membership groups are identical and when they are disparate The Ss were women students at a large private coeducational university In the social context of the lives of the subjects, and in a natural social experiment which provided randomization of the relevant condition effects, the influence of both membership and reference groups on attitude change was assessed. All subjects shared a common reference group at the start of the period of the study. When divergent membership groups with disparate attitude norms were socially imposed on the basis of a random event, attitude change in the subjects over time was a function of the normative attitudes of both imposed membership groups and the individuals' reference groups. The greatest attitude change occurred in subjects who came to take the imposed initially nonpreferred, membership group as their reference group.
A field experiment in the paint department of a large retail store supported the hypothesis: a recipient's behavior with respect to an object is modifiable by the communicator's appeal to the extent that the recipient perceives that he and the communicator have a similar relationship to the object. A salesman, who reported his own magnitude of paint consumption as similar or dissimilar to the purchaser's, attempted to induce the purchaser (N = 88) to switch to a different price level. The findings were ordered to theories of identification (Stotland) and social comparison (Festinger). (17 ref.)
Organizational Identity presents the classic works on organizational identity alongside more current thinking on the issues. Ranging from theoretical contributions to empirical studies, the readings in this volume address the key issues of organizational identity, and show how these issues have developed through contributions from such diverse fields of study as sociology, psychology, management studies and cultural studies. The readings examine questions such as how organizations understand who they are, why organizations develop a sense of identity and belonging where the boundaries of identity lie and the implications of postmodern and critical theories' challenges to the concept of identity as deeply-rooted and authentic. Includes work by: Stuart Albert, Mats Alvesson, Blake E. Ashforth, Marilynn B. Brewer, George Cheney, Lars Thoger Christensen, C.H. Cooley, Kevin G. Corley, Barbara Czarniawska, Janet M. Dukerich, Jane E. Dutton, Kimberly D. Elsbach, Wendi Gardner, Linda E. Ginzela, Dennis A. Gioia, E. Goffman, Karen Golden-Biddle, Mary Jo Hatch, Roderick M. Kramer, Fred Rael, G.H. Mead, Michael G. Pratt, Anat Rafaeli, Hayagreeva Rao, Majken Schultz, Howard S. Schwartz, Robert I. Sutton, Henri Taijfel, John Turner, David A. Wherren, and Hugh Willmott. Intended to provide easy access to this material for students of organizational identity, it will also be of interest more broadly to students of business, sociology and psychology.
The ability of majorities and minorities to induce privately accepted attitude change by systematic or nonsystematic processing was investigated in four studies. In two of these studies, subjects simultaneously exposed to a majority with which they disagreed and a minority with which they agreed showed considerable issue-relevant processing of the majority message and long-term, generalized private acceptance of the majority position. A third experiment demonstrated that this change was in response to the majority position and was not a reaction against the minority view. Subjects provided with consensus information about the majority and minority (without a persuasive communication) also demonstrated significant attitude change, but this change did not generalize and was not maintained or mediated by subjects' thoughts about the issue. Subjects exposed to a minority with which they mildly disagreed showed slight movement toward the minority position.
Conformity to the group is a complex phenomenon, which should be differentiated into several distinct psychological processes, and has often been contrasted with nonconformity or independence. This chapter describes the various aspects of conformity, public compliance and private change, conditions of responding, characteristics of the group, and nature of the task. Nonconformity consists of two conceptually distinct types of behavior, and may reflect independence, or it may actually be anticonformity. These three types of behavior—conformity, independence, and anticonformity—are related to each other as the apexes of a triangle. It makes a great deal of difference whether agreement with the group is public compliance, or true private change, or whether nonconformity represents independence or anticonformity. Although, there have been a few studies of generalization of conformity, little is known of the generality of conformity, and investigations have not been conducted on the generality of conformity across situations outside the laboratory. A subject in a conformity situation has information and beliefs about several important features of the situation: the task, other members of the group, and the experimenter. Theories of conformity, which have been advanced in recent years, include psychoanalytic, cognitive, reinforcement, and even mathematical models. Research should be directed toward understanding the variables that affect nonconformity, as well as conformity.
To test the hypothesis that the salience of a communicator's attractiveness influences whether a persuasive communication is processed heuristically or systematically, female undergraduates read a strong or weak version of a persuasive communication that was accompanied by a vivid color photograph of an attractive male communicator (high-salience conditions) or by a degraded Xerox copy of the photograph (low-salience conditions). The interaction obtained on the opinion measure indicated that the strong version of the persuasive communication elicited greater agreement than the weak version did when the communicator's attractiveness was not salient, but that message quality had no effect on the degree of agreement when the communicator's attractiveness was highly salient. Consistent with the argument that the communication was processed systematically in the low-salience conditions and heuristically in the high-salience conditions, the number of negative message-oriented thoughts generated was negatively c...
College undergraduates were either warned or not warned of the persuasive intent of a communication which was either of direct or only indirect personal relevance to them. Consistent with the hypothesis based on reactance theory (Brehm, 1966), the inhibiting effect of the forewarning (i.e., reduced persuasion, increased counterargumentation, and reduced favorable thoughts) was greater under high than low involvement conditions.
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In the absence of information to the contrary, an individual tends to assume that members of an out group have values which differ from his own. The effect is even more marked for highly prejudiced persons. In the present paper two experiments are reported which extend the belief similarity hypothesis. (Author)
Research literature shows that people with access to attitude-relevant information in memory are able to draw on relevant beliefs and prior experiences when analyzing a persuasive message. This suggests that people who can retrieve little attitude-relevant information should be less able to engage in systematic processing. Two experiments were conducted with college students to test these ideas and to explore the relationship between retrieval and processing of message content. It was anticipated that the recipients would engage in a systematic processing strategy, actively attempting to comprehend, evaluate, and assess the validity of message arguments. Message positions judged to be valid on the basis of this analysis (messages delivered by expert sources or containing high quality arguments) were expected to be more persuasive than less valid ones (nonexpert sources or low quality arguments). Variation in cues that did not affect perceived message validity, such as source likability and message length were not expected to affect the recipients' opinions. It was further predicted that those who could retrieve little attitude-relevant information would follow a heuristic strategy, using simple decision rules to identify when the adovcated position was the correct one to take. They were expected to be more persuaded when the position was associated with positive source cues (likable, expert) or positive message cues (long, high quality) than when it was associated with negative ones. These predictions were generally obtained between extent of retrieval and the persuasiveness of message and source attributes. In addition, retrieval was found to enhance recipients' comprehension and elaboration of message content. (Author/HOD)
Evidence from 4 studies with 584 undergraduates demonstrates that social observers tend to perceive a "false consensus" with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses. A related bias was shown to exist in the observers' social inferences. Thus, raters estimated particular responses to be relatively common and relatively unrevealing concerning the actors' distinguishing personal dispositions when the responses in question were similar to the raters' own responses; responses differing from those of the rater, by contrast, were perceived to be relatively uncommon and revealing of the actor. These results were obtained both in questionnaire studies presenting Ss with hypothetical situations and choices and in authentic conflict situations. The implications of these findings for the understanding of social perception phenomena and for the analysis of the divergent perceptions of actors and observers are discussed. Cognitive and perceptual mechanisms are proposed which might account for distortions in perceived consensus and for corresponding biases in social inference and attributional processes. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Subjective status of a heterogeneous group of adults was first studied by means of an intensive interview. It was shown that estimates of status depend upon such variables as the reference group (e.g. friends vs. general population), personal values, and the criteria used in determining status (e.g. money, education, achievements). There are several dimensions of status (social, intellectual, etc.). The genesis of status, satisfaction with it, the role of it in behavior, and thoughts about it were surveyed. A self-rating type of scale was then devised and shown to have adequate reliability for 41 cases. In
S's use of the scale, the reference group was varied by means of instructions, with resulting shifts in status rating, changes in intercorrelations of the dimensions of status, and changes in reliability of the ratings. Negligible correlations between the ratings and economic radicalism were found. General status is probably a composite of specific statuses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Elaborates a theory concerning the conditions under which public compliance with and without private acceptance is obtained. Public compliance without private acceptance will occur if the person is restrained from leaving the situation by threat of punishment for noncompliance. Compliance with private acceptance occurs if the individual desires to remain in the relationship with those influencing him. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Advances a social-cognitive theory of the human social group with respect to group formation, the cognitive salience of group membership, and motivational biases for positive self-esteem. It is argued that psychological group membership is more a matter of shared self-definition (i.e., social identification) than cohesive interpersonal relationships and that social categorizations can be internalized as cognitive structures in self conception. When functioning, their basic consequence is the stereotypical minimization of individual differences and the enhancement of perceptual interchangeability between the self and members of the same social category. This consequence produces the distinctive features of intragroup relations, such as mutual cohesiveness, cooperativeness, and uniformity. It is hypothesized that group behavior and relationships are mediated by a cognitive redefinition of the self in terms of shared social category memberships and associated stereotypes. The group was thought of as an adaptive psychological mechanism for "depersonalizing" individual behavior. Commentaries to this approach, as well as the present author's responses, are subsequently submitted. (French abstract) (74 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments were conducted in order to compare the influence of ingroup and outgroup minorities and to assess the role of Zeitgeist perception in minority influence. The results confirmed that ingroup minorities are more influential than outgroup minorities. This overall finding was observed in two different experimental paradigms, using either a small group setting in which subjects interacted with the minority or the simultaneous social influence paradigm in which both influence sources impinge simultaneously (via written information) upon the subjects. These results were supportive of Tajfel's social identity theory while contradicting Kelley's augmenting/discounting principle. Finally, subjects' perception of the Zeitgeist was unrelated to the magnitude of minority influence.
The chapter discusses two types of social behavior: compliance and conversion. Four assumptions are discussed in the chapter, in order to understand Compliance and Conversion. The four assumptions present a picture in which a consistent minority can exert an influence to the same extent as a consistent majority, and that the former will generally have a greater effect on a deeper level, while the latter often has less, or none, at that level. These assumptions allow formulating some interesting and verifiable predictions: (1) Conversion is produced by a minority's consistent behavior; (2) The conversion produced by a minority implies a real change of judgments or opinions; (3) The more intense the conflict generated by the minority, the more radical is the conversion; (4) At least where perceptions are involved, conversion is more pronounced when the influence source is absent. The chapter presents a certain number of facts that substantiate these predictions and make them more plausible. Experimental studies are also mentioned wherein preliminary results, direct and indirect influences, conflict and conversion behavior, minority influence, majority influence and compliance are discussed. Final observation indicates convergence between the elements of the proposed theory and the experimental illustrations of conversion behavior.
This classic text surveys a number of different theoretical approaches to the related phenomena of attitude and belief change. These theories are grouped into seven major approaches, each presented and evaluated in a separate chapter. Each contributes in an important way to a complete understanding of the persuasion process. Appropriate for both upper level undergraduates and graduates in the social sciences.
This experiment studied the effect of an individual's response style on different issues over a long period of time. A hypothetical situation depicted the repeated responses given by one person on a target issue and on four other issues for one year. The 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design varied consistency of the stimulus person's position on the target issue during the year (consistent or variable); his consistency on other issues during the year (consistent or variable); and social context (alone or dissenting group). Subjects were 155 college students. Results showed an interaction between consistency on the target issue and consistency on other issues for the three dependent measures (p < .001). That is, significantly greater persuasiveness, confidence, and dis-positional causality were attributed to stimulus persons whose opinions were either completely consistent or completely variable on all issues during the year. Results suggest that the consistency of response style across issues—and not the constant advocacy of a specific position–is the crucial factor in the effectiveness of a long-term minority influence.
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A study was conducted to assess the effects of personality schemata on attentional allocation, impressions, and memory among observers of a complex social interaction. Subjects were first primed with schematic descriptions of an actor, and then they listened to an audiotape in which that actor and another participated in several separate conversations, with the primed actor either in the foreground or in the background. Other subjects could throw a switch to shift either actors' conversations into the foreground. As predicted, subjects in this last group shifted their attention away from the primed actor after determining that his behavior did not violate the schema they had been given and shifted their attention back when the primed actor acted in a schema-inconsistent manner. Analyses of all three attentional conditions revealed that the less attention subjects were able to pay to the primed actor, the more they relied on their schemata in making impression judgments, the more confident they were in the occurrence of schema-consistent "false alarm" behaviors, and the less confident they were in the occurrence of schema-inconsistent and schema-irrelevant behaviors. These results are discussed in terms of subject strategies in dealing with information overload when processing complex stimuli.
Several modifications of the Asch experiment in which the S judges the length of lines in the company of a group of "stooges" who carry out the experimenter's instructions are described. These include a face-to-face situation, an anonymous situation, and a group situation, with self-commitment, public commitment and Magic Pad commitment variations. The results indicate that, even when normative social influence in the direction of an incorrect judgment is largely removed (as in the anonymous situation), more errors are made by Ss in experimental groups than by Ss making their judgments when alone.
A series of interrelated hypotheses has been presented to account for data on informal social communication collected in the course of a number of studies. The data come from field studies and from laboratory experiments specifically designed to test the hypotheses. Three sources of pressures to communicate have been considered: (1) communication arising from pressures toward uniformity in a group (2) communications arising from forces to locomote in a social structure [and] (3) communications arising from the existence of emotional states.
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