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Having looked at some basic ways that people influence other people’s behavior, let’s consider a direct form of social influence called persuasion, referring to the ways in which people try to change someone else’s mind by changing his or her attitudes. Attitudes are evaluations of social stimuli that range from positive to negative. People can have attitudes about pretty much anything in their social world, ranging from consumer products (e.g., air freshener) to people (e.g., themselves, presidential candidates), to social issues (e.g., global warming).

Why are people interested in persuading others? People’s attitudes toward something often predict how they intend to behave toward that thing (though not always, as we’ll see later on). If you have a positive attitude toward Brand X computers, for instance, then you’re more likely to purchase Brand X computers than if you have a negative attitude. Thus, the goal of persuasion is to change attitudes in the hope of eventually changing behavior.

Efforts to persuade are all around us. We are exposed to them on a daily, if not an hourly, basis. Any time a person turns on the television, listens to a streaming music station, watches a movie, surfs the Net, or browses a magazine, advertisers rush to persuade that person to prefer certain products and services. Here’s an informal demonstration: In the 10 minutes it took your current author to walk to the Student Union this morning, he recorded 43 commercial messages posted on T-shirts, posters, packages, and even across people’s buttocks! In fact, the president of one marketing firm suggested that whereas the average American was exposed to about 500 advertisements a day in the 1970s, today that number is closer to 5,000 (Johnson, 2009).

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Everyday examples of persuasion go far beyond the commercial realm. They appear in every corner of social life, from romantic relationships to international politics. To mention just a few, teachers, writers, and filmmakers try to persuade us of particular moral messages or values about life. Our friends and other significant others may try to persuade us to eat at a new restaurant or change the way we treat someone. Psychotherapists try to get us to view aspects of ourselves and our worlds differently. Doctors try to get us to change our attitudes and behaviors toward more healthy lifestyles. Attorneys in courtrooms try to persuade judges and juries to be more favorable to their preferred positions or clients. Parents try to persuade their kids to have the right attitudes and engage in the right behaviors, whereas the kids attempt to persuade their parents to buy toys and gaming systems. On first dates, each person tries to persuade the other that he or she is attractive and relationship worthy.

As these examples convey, persuasion can have a substantial impact on people’s lives. Sometimes it can change their attitudes and behaviors in ways that benefit themselves and others. For example, in 2010 an earthquake utterly destroyed Port au Prince, the capital of Haiti. News of the tragedy and donation opportunities were widely circulated on pop-up ads, social networking sites, and cell phones. As a result, millions of people donated their hard-earned money to help strangers who survived the earthquake, giving more money through private and corporate donations than any individual nation’s government and even more than the World Bank emergency grant (Evans, 2010).

The flip side of the same coin, however, is that persuasion can also produce harmful changes in attitudes and behavior. For example, it often leads people to make decisions that simply don’t make sense in light of the facts. Consider this: You might expect a health-conscious person deciding on a breakfast cereal to choose Kellogg’s Raisin Bran over a new Scooby-Doo themed cereal probably because she associates bran with all-natural nutrition. But her attitudes toward those cereals certainly didn’t come from a close examination of the nutritional data (presented in FIGURE 8.1), which clearly show that one cup of Raisin Bran has more calories and sugar, and less of some important vitamins, than a full cup of the Scooby-Doo cereal. Most likely her attitudes toward the cereals were created by years of commercial messages strategically designed to equate the idea of bran with wholesome grains and a simple, healthy lifestyle.

Because persuasion is so pervasive in everyday life, and has important consequences for people’s well-being, social psychologists have focused their research on discovering what makes some attempts at persuasion more effective than others in changing attitudes. It’s to this research that we now turn.

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