We are going to be talking persuasion in this chapter and, for this lecture, I am going
to be using all examples of advertising. I am doing this for two reasons. One is because
they're good illustrations of the content. But two, again, I want to continue with the message
that social psychology is everywhere and it is certainly present in advertising that always
need and we absolutely see advertising all the time in our life. So now, whenever you
are seeing advertising, I also want you to think about social psychology and how you
can use social psychology to understand your daily lives.
This is the elaboration likelihood model. The elaboration likelihood model says that
persuasion occurs through one of two routes, the central route or the peripheral route.
The central route uses facts to persuade people and the peripheral route uses feelings. So,
here is an example of the central route and the peripheral route in an ad. I will give
a moment to look at these and we will talk about them. So you can see the central route
ad is giving a lot of facts about this Mercedes- Benz and it’s giving you things, you know,
concrete things, to think about why you might want to purchase a Mercedes-Benz. If you contrast
it with the peripheral route ad, it’s just a cool-looking ad and it makes you think like
“Woo, the Mercedes-Benz is kind of cool.” There is no facts you are learning about the
Mercedes-Benz but you are having positive feelings towards this Mercedes-Benz. So, these
ads are examples of a central route ad and a peripheral route ad.
Both elements into an ad that’s best and pause the video, and look at this. When you
are ready, un-pause it and we will talk about it. So, in this ad, you have a peripheral
route, you have positive feelings because that’s a pretty adorable baby. So, you are
going to have positive feelings towards that baby. It also has central route because there
are facts and the facts are talking about protecting her from these childhood diseases
by giving her a vaccine. In this ad, it’s using both peripheral route and central route to give a message.
About promotion versus prevention focus. A
promotion focus ad or a persuasive argument is going to say “Hey! If you do this, then
good things will happen.” A prevent focus will say “Hey! If you do this, bad things
will happen.” A promotion focus ad is going to be about all the positive things and a
prevention focus ad will talk about the negative things. So what I am going to do is I'm
going to have you click this link below and watch this Subway food ad. After you watch
it, come back to the lecture and, while you are watching it, think about which part of
the ad is promotion focus and which part of the ad is prevention focus. So, go ahead and
click the link. When you are done, come to this lecture.
So, that ad always makes me laugh. The first part of the ad is the prevention focus part
of the ad talking about how you don’t want these things, you don’t want double
blubber or thunder thighs. The promotion part of the ad is the part of the ad that talks
about these are the things that fit into healthy heart diets and you do want to have a healthy
heart. This ad does a great job of illustrating both prevention focus and promotion focus.
That’s why I always use it but I want to take a little bit more time to talk about
the distinction between prevention focus and promotion focus. Prevention focus ads tend
to be far more effective than promotion focus ads because prevention focus is on the basis
of fear. Fear is a very basic emotion. And if you can get somebody by their fear, it’s
really hard to overcome this. I am going to give an example of a persuasive message that
has prevention focus and how, despite the fact that this message is really not correct,
people continue to believe it because it’s framed prevention focus and it makes it hard
for them to evaluate this message. So what we are going to talk about is the
MMR vaccine and autism hoax. Some of you may always know about this. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield
published a paper linking MMR vaccine to autism. First, I should say that there are many many
more vaccines of MMR vaccines. One of the problems is that people are taking this paper
and they are applying it from just MMR vaccines to all vaccines. But we are going to explain
how this paper itself isn’t worth anything. There are serious and major violations in
this study…appalling kinds of violation. So first, the researcher was paid to find
evidence that this vaccine causes autism and had applied patents for an alternative vaccine
so he was paid for and he also had even more financial interest because he wanted to prove
that the vaccine that was being used wasn’t worthwhile so his vaccine would be selected.
So he had a huge financial incentive to find that there was a link between this particular
vaccine and autism. Next, it only had a sample size of 12 people and several of the participants’
parents had financial incentive to report that the vaccine causes autism. So it was
a very small sample size and, even with a small sample size, it’s hard to believe
that a lot of those parents were correctly reporting what was going on because they had
a financial reason to say that there was the link. So, this paper in 2010 was fully retracted
and Wakefield was thrown out of the medical profession. There are some people who said
that this is the most dangerous medical hoax within the last hundred years. The rise of
measles, mumps, and rubella is a serious thing and there are a lot of doctors who are very
concerned about it. None of that would have happened if this guy hadn’t been trying
to make money. That is sort of the information why the study is totally false. Further, signs
of autism tend to manifest around the age as when children are receiving vaccines. Now,
we are all very good critical thinkers and we are all psychologists here and we know
that correlation does not equal to causation. So even if your child receives a vaccine and
later on develops signs of autism, that doesn’t mean the vaccine caused autism because age
is a confound. Age is happening both to determine when your child should be getting vaccines
and when signs of autism might manifest. As psychologists and people who understand research,
you understand that you cannot make a causal claim with just correlational data. Lastly,
there is overwhelming evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism. There was a meta-analysis
of 1.2 million children, which is pretty much too big to even wrap your head around, by
Taylor, Swerdferger, and Eslick (2014). They found that vaccines don’t cause autism and,
in fact, children who did not have the vaccine were 16% more likely to have autism than children
who did. So, not only do vaccines not cause autism, but the children who didn’t have
the vaccine were even more likely to have autism. So, why do I present all this information?
Because the point is that, if you tell a parent, this vaccine might cause autism. That is a
prevention focus message saying “Don’t get this vaccine because, if you do, this
bad thing is going to happen, your child might have autism.” Despite all of this evidence
that you can see right now on your screen that there is no reason to believe that this
vaccine causes autism, many parent cannot overcome that prevention focus message and
take this information into consideration and realize that vaccines actually should be given
to their children. Because prevention focus message is so incredibly strong and people
find it very difficult to overcome them, they are very very effective. In this case, it’s
actually causing a huge problem, a lot of children are getting sick and there is a lot
of doctors who are very concerned. This prevention focus message is having sort of a disastrous
effect. Even with all of this evidence that you can give to parents, they cannot overcome
this prevention focus message. So, this is meant to explain to you how strong prevention
focus messages can be.