How Does Social Psychology Help Us in Understanding the Process Involved in Persuasion?
This essay will base itself around the Yale attitude change approach, which has formed the basis of much of the more recent social psychology rese… (More) This essay will base itself around the Yale attitude change approach, which has formed the basis of much of the more recent social psychology research in this area and is also used as the basis of contemporary communications theory in marketing and advertising (Belch & Belch, 2004). The approach simply asks ‘who says what to whom and with what effect?’ This gives rise to three main variables of persuasion: the communicator, the source; the communication, the message itself; and the audience, those who receive the communication (Hovland et al., 1953). Within the process itself Hovland et al. discerned four steps to persuasion: attention, comprehension, acceptance and retention. The persuasive process, if successful, can cause one (or more) of four outcomes: opinion change, perception change, affect change or action change. The finer
