View article

Persuasion plays an essential role in everyday social life. We use the term persuasion to refer to any procedure with the potential to change someone’s mind. Although persuasion can be used to change many things such as a person’s specific beliefs (eg, eating vegetables is good for your health), the most common target of persuasion is a person’s attitudes. Attitudes refer to general evaluations individuals have regarding people (including yourself), places, objects, and issues. Attitudes can be assessed in many ways and are accorded special status because of their presumed influence on people’s choices and actions (eg, attitude change mediates the impact of belief change on behavior change). That is, all else being equal, when making choices people will decide to buy the product they like the most, attend the university they evaluate most favorably, and vote for the candidate they approve of most strongly. In the typical situation in which persuasion is possible, a person or a group of people (ie, the recipient) receives a communication (ie, the message) from another individual or group (ie, the source) in a particular setting (ie, the context). The success of a persuasive attempt depends in part on whether the attitudes of the recipients are modified in the desired direction. Designing appropriate strategies for attitude change depends on understanding the basic mechanisms underlying persuasion. Therefore, the primary goal of this chapter is to explain the psychological processes that are responsible for attitude change and provide an overview of the main theories and research findings from social psychology.