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Every day, you are bombarded with ads, salespeople, or friends trying to persuade you to do something,
like watch a new show on Netflix or try out a new diet.
Those messages don’t always convince you, but sometimes they do — and you might not
even realize it’s happening.
Dozens of factors can cause you to agree or disagree with a message, and a lot of them
have to do with how you respond to persuasion in the first place.
But if you can recognize when you’re being persuaded, it’s a lot easier to stop and
make sure your opinions are actually your own.
A lot of researchers who study persuasion think about it in terms of what’s called
the Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM, which divides your response to persuasion
into two main categories:
There’s the central route, where you thoughtfully consider a message, or the peripheral route,
where you make a decision using quick judgements or gut feelings.
Most of the time, you end up using the peripheral route — like when you’re watching a commercial
and decide the actor playing a doctor knows what she’s talking about because she’s
wearing a white coat.
Obviously, it’s good to think critically about some things, but we don’t have time
to do that for everything, so both routes are important and useful.
It helps to recognize which route you’re taking, though, so you can decide whether
it’s worth stopping to think critically about whatever someone’s trying to convince
you of.
A few things can affect which route you take.
Some are personality traits, like what’s known as the need for cognition, which describes
how much people like to think about things.
People with a higher need for cognition tend to pay close attention to arguments, while
people with a low need prefer to make decisions based on quick cues, like how credible someone
seems.
One experiment in 1986 showed that people with a high need are more likely to take the
central route, while those with a low need tend to take the peripheral route.
In the study, researchers presented a few hundred university students with strong and
weak arguments for raising the school’s tuition.
They found that strong arguments were more persuasive than weak ones, but especially
when students had a high need for cognition.
You’ll also be more likely to use the central route if a topic is important to you.
If you’re obsessed with good TV and someone says they’ve found the best show ever, you
might spend hours looking at its cinematography and writing before you decide you agree with
them.
But if you just want something to binge watch, you might not care about all that.
If a TV-loving friend says Game of Thrones is the best thing they’ve ever seen, that
might be enough to convince you…
especially if you hear it over and over and over again, every Sunday night.
I gave up.
I finally watched Game of Thrones.
Are you happy?
The situation is also important.
Even if you love the topic, you’re more likely to use the peripheral route if you’re
distracted or don’t have much time to think.
Other factors are less straightforward, which is where persuasion gets complicated.
For example, feeling an emotion can persuade you in a bunch of different ways depending
on the situation.
An emotion could be critical evidence, like if you’re trying to figure out if a comedy
movie is good.
If you felt happy while watching it, that’s a pretty good reason to decide that you liked
it.
Other times, your emotions can influence your opinions without you actively thinking about
it.
If you feel good watching a commercial, for example, you’ll probably feel good about
the product, too.
Emotions can also affect how you think and how much you think about something.
If you’re in a positive mood, you might not think as deeply about what you’re hearing.
So the same emotion can persuade you in different ways, depending on the context.
But they can also make you more vulnerable to being convinced of something without thinking
critically about it.
The credibility and source of the message also play a big part.
A 2016 study found that people who read a product review were more likely to think negatively
about the product if they knew the review was sponsored.
That’s probably because, if we know someone was paid to say good things, it’s harder
for us to trust that the message is true, so we’ll think more critically about it.
We’re also more likely to think harder about arguments if the message comes from someone
in the minority opinion.
In an experiment in Spain, students read a message that supported making green the official
school color.
When the message said the majority of students supported the idea, it didn’t much matter
whether the arguments for it were good or bad.
The reader already thought it was probably a good idea.
But if it was a minority opinion, they only tended to think it was a good idea if it had
good arguments.
Meaning that if you see lots of people sharing something on Facebook, for example, you might
not think as critically about whether the content itself is actually making a good point.
But if only one friend shares that opinion, the argument starts to matter more.
So, there are a lot of different things that can affect whether a commercial or person
will persuade you.
None of them are guaranteed to work, though — especially if you realize what’s happening.
Your mind is your own, and when you recognize that you’re in a situation where you’re
more likely to be convinced of something, you can decide whether it’s worth taking
a little bit of time to think about it.
Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow Psych!
If you’d like to see more videos like this about the complicated things that make our
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