July/August 2002
Volume 15, Number 6
Devious Persuasion
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We are bombarded with advertising and marketing. Products, causes, candidates; TV and radio commercials, infomercials, print ads - it's everywhere! And for the vast majority of these communications, we're not talking about objective, balanced information.
Is there anything that can be done to try to withstand all of these persuasive attempts, especially the less legitimate ones? APS Fellow and Charter Member Robert Cialdini addressed this issue in the Bring the Family Address at this year's APS Convention. In a presentation titled "Devious Persuasion: What Can Be Done to Recognize and Resist It?" Cialdini outlined a very simple formula that can be used to teach people how to resist devious or manipulative persuasive attempts.
While Cialdini and other researchers have done extensive studies of persuasion, there is relatively little research on a person's ability to resist persuasive appeals. "We know almost nothing about the mechanisms and tactics that allow an individual to effectively resist otherwise effective persuasive appeals," said Cialdini, Regents' Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.
So Cialdini set out to "examine the effectiveness and mediators of resistance to persuasion." He also wanted to create a brief tutorial or educational program that could help people withstand the pressures of persuasion.
A promotional communication may be deceptive through its content - for example, by exaggerating, omitting, or lying about facts - or through its presentation. An example of deceptive presentation in marketing is the frequent use of authority figures who do not have genuine expertise. When an actor who plays a fictional doctor in a television series is featured in ads giving testimony about the effectiveness of a product, the message is based on false credibility attributed to the actor because of his role.
RESEARCH RULES
Cialdini wanted to design an intervention that teaches people to recognize this and other bogus forms of authority. His goal was to provide a rule that distinguished between genuine and illegitimate persuasive messages and that recommended resistance only to the latter. He also wanted to create a rule that was simple and easy to learn, and could be easily incorporated into a variety of educational contexts.
In working to create a rule, Cialdini relied on a construct of "Undue Manipulative Intent," under which individuals are unmoved by information they think is designed to manipulate them unfairly. This construct doesn't require the participants to be knowledgeable about the legitimacy of the claim ("Does it actually do what it claims to do?"), but rather it only requires an assessment of whether the approach the message takes is legitimate.
To test Cialdini's intervention technique, research participants were shown a series of genuine and illegitimate ads. A control group was asked only to respond to the color and tone of the ads. The experimental group was given an explanation of the differences between legitimate and illegitimate ads, and those participants were taught the rule the experimenters created, stating that, "Authority-based appeals are objectionable and should be rejected if the depicted authority does not at least possess special expertise on the topic." They were then asked if "the person depicted in the ad was truly an expert" and other questions on the persuasiveness and fairness of the ads.
The researchers also wanted to test whether the participants would extend what they learned in the laboratory to real-life settings. To do this, a different set of researchers went into the classes of the participants, pretending to be representatives from the student newspaper testing new promotional features. The students were shown two ads (one legitimate and one not legitimate) and were asked to rate how much they liked each ad, and how likely they were to buy the product. The results showed that the training the experimental group had been given had carried to outside of the laboratory, and they preferred the legitimate ad.
The control group rated the illegitimate ads more positively than the legitimate ads, which was what the researchers were expecting. But what was really interesting was that the majority of effect was to make the legitimate ads even more convincing to the experimental group. If this intervention were put into effect, people who look at legitimate ads would now want to buy "the safer products, the more effective toothpaste" more than ever, Cialdini said.
NO WAY, NOT ME
In the follow-up interviews with participants, the researchers repeatedly heard: "It couldn't happen to me. I recognized what they were trying to do, but I wouldn't fall for that." This reveals a concept called "Unique Perceived Invulnerability," which plagues many public policy makers trying to demonstrate the dangers of unprotected sex, drunk driving and a host of other dangerous behaviors. People recognize the dangers of various behaviors, but they don't consider themselves vulnerable to them. The participants in this study understood that advertising messages can be deceiving, but they did not think they personally would fall for the deceptive message.
In response, a follow-up study was designed to demonstrate the participants' vulnerability. In one condition, "Asserted Vulnerability," the participants were shown an illegitimate ad, taught the rule, and then were told to: "Take a look at ad No. 1. Did you find it convincing? If so, then you got fooled. Unethical ads like this fool most people. But if we want to protect ourselves from being manipulated, we need to know what makes an ad ethical or unethical."
In the other condition "Demonstrated Vulnerability," after viewing the ad, the participants were told to "Take a look at your answer to the first question. Did you find the ad to be even 'somewhat convincing'? If so, then you got fooled." In this instance, the experimenters are hoping to directly puncture the participants' unique perceived invulnerability by referring back to each participant's individual response to the question.
The results showed that in the Demonstrated Vulnerability condition, as Cialdini said, the "bottom drops out, people are adamantly resistant to those ads when their perceived unique vulnerability has been punctured, because they know they are susceptible."
Thus it was shown that in order to teach resistance to dishonest promotional messages, an effective intervention must first, expose the advertiser's deceptive intent, and secondly, puncture the audience members' illusions of invulnerability to the deception.
