What can emotions involve?
- Cognitive assessment of a situation
- Physiological arousal
- Subjective set of feelings
- Motivation to behavior specifically
- Motor reaction or facial expression
What is appealing to emotions?
Pathos –> emotion as a persuasive tool
- intentionally eliciting specific emotions
- “awakening emotions in the audience to induce them to make the desired judgement”
What is fear appeal?
internal emotional reaction –> physiological and psychological dimensions –> aroused when a serious and personally relevant threat is perceived
What is a threat?
- danger or harm that exists in an environment
- can be real (actually harmful) or percieved (viewed as harmful)
What is fear appeal in persuasive communication?
attempt to scare people into changing their attitude
–> conjures negative consequences aligned with a result of not following the message’s recommendation
–> describing terrible things
needs two things:
1) message
2) consequence of not following message
e.g. anti drink and drive ads
What is the inverted-e curve model?
- a model that shows the theory of fear appear
- early scientific model
- what is the most effect level of fear for persuasion
- too high/low/extreme may not change attitudes or behavior (exists on a curved scale)
- if its too low: consequence is not extreme enough
- if its too high: consequence makes receiver freeze due to consequence seeming unavoidable
What is the extended parallel process model (EPPM)?
- fear appeals must do more than generate fear
- effectiveness of fear appeal is directly influenced byh receiver’s cognitive processing
What are the key elements of EPPM?
- Fear appeal appraisal –> perceived susceptibility & severity
- Appraisals of Efficacy –> perceived response efficacy & self-efficacy
What is percieved suseptibility?
an individual’s personal belief about their risk of experiencing that threat
e.g. subjective probability that a person gets covid-19
What is percieved severity?
an individual’s personal beliefs about the magnitude/importance of the harm
e.g. subjective harmfulness as a consequence of getting covid-19
What is perceived threat?
functions of perceived susceptibility and severity
–> high percieved threat only if BOTH perscieved susceptibility and severity are high
What is perceived response efficacy?
an individual’s personal beliefs about the effectiveness of the recommendded behavior from the persuasive message in averting the threat
e.g. people might not belief vaccinating or masking is helpful in preventing covid-19
What is perceived self-efficacy?
an individual’s belief in their ability to perform recommended behavior from the persuasive message
e.g. individual’s phobia of vaccine or being tired of asking
What are the three possibly outcomes of fear appeal messaging?
- no response
- danger control
- fear control
What might lead to no response to the message?
- little or non-perceived threat
- receivers ignore message bcause they think of themselves as irrelevant to the threat
What might lead to a danger control response to the message?
- when all 4 perceptions are high
- permorning the recommended action
- desired outcome of fear appeals
- receivers perform recommended action to control or reduce danger
What might lead to a Fear control response to the message?
- defense mechanism
- high percieved threat is high but perceived efficacy is low
- receivers don’t perfom recommended action because they think that they can’t take the action for some reason
- instead attempt to control or reduce fear via psychological defense mechanism
What is charisma in persuasion?
- a certain quality of a person which sets them apart from others and is seen as exceptional
- powerful influence on ordinary pople
- characteristics in the communicator
–> authority
–> credibility
–> attractiveness
Provide an overview of Milgram’s Experiment.
- participants billed as a study of memory and learning
- randomly assigned one of two roles: teacher or student
- student asked to remember list of word pairs
- teacher instructed to give electric shock penalty when sutdent made mistakes, escalating the shocks in slow increments
–> 66% of teacher obeyed their instructions, giving secere electric shocks (but there was no shock
Goal: understand obedience to authority
What are the different fators involved in obedience to authority?
- early socialization
- trappings of authority
- binding forces
- power of the situation
What is socialization in obedience to authority?
- process in which individuals internalize norms, customs, values, and ideologies of their society
- primary mean of maintaining social and cultural continuity
–> this is how people learn to respect authority
What are some binding forces?
Military (units)
Classrooms (class/grade group)
How can authroity act and vary in different contexts?
- Conformity in a variety of political and organization contexts
–> political leader
–> boss in an organization
–> teacher in school - Concern: what if your boss asks you to do something unethical?
- Calls into question authority as a heuristic and ethos in Plato’s theory
- Ethos involves:
== virtue, goodwill, useful skill, practical wisdom
What is credibility as it related to the relationship between the audience and the communicator?
- attitude towards a source of communication held at a given time by a reciever
- audience perception of the communicator’s qualities
- NOT a psychological characteristic of the communicator, but a variable
–> two way interaction between communicator and audience, communicator must earn audience’s respect
