Resisting Persuasion

Persuasion knowledge is an established construct in the explanation of recipients’ coping with persuasive communication. It gains particular importance when persuasion attempts are covert. This is the case for sponsored content, as it closely adapts to its media environment. Hence, disclosures are employed to uncover such content as persuasion attempt. In the present study, we argue that disclosures activate different sub-dimensions of persuasion knowledge which can lead to paradoxical effects: On the one hand, disclosures increase recipients’ activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge by highlighting the persuasive intent of sponsored content. On the other hand, disclosures decrease recipients’ activation of attitudinal persuasion knowledge by making sponsored content appear less deceptive. This results in two opposing mediation effects where disclosures simultaneously increase and decrease anger through persuasion knowledge activation. The findings of two experimental studies show that these mediation effects occur consistently in the contexts of social media and blogs, while a third experiment reveals divergent findings in the context of journalistic media.

This thesis investigated undergraduate students’ perceptions and interpretations of language cues used within instructor email requests. Guided by Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT; Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981), this thesis examined whether instructor email requests, containing different levels of powerful language and verbal immediacy cues, would impact students’ willingness to follow through with instructor requests. Two hundred thirty-four undergraduate students participated in the four-condition experiment which consisted of the email manipulation conditions containing varying levels of an instructors’ powerful language (e.g. “must;” Miller et al., 2007) and verbal immediacy (e.g., “our class;” Witt & Wheeless, 2001) cues. After reading an email, students completed a post-test measuring their thoughts (Quick & Stephenson, 2007), source credibility (McCroskey & Teven, 1999), state reactance (Dillard & Shen, 2005), intention to follow through (Ajzen, 1991; Moore & Richards, 2019), basic needs satisfaction (autonomy; Gagné, 2003), and email expectancy (Gorham, 1988; Miller et al., 2007; Witt & Wheeless, 2001). Results revealed significant correlations between instructor credibility and intention to follow through with requests, as well as significant relationships between these variables and the two dimensions of PRT. Finally, an indirect effect of verbal immediacy on both dimensions of psychological reactance was revealed. These findings provide practical and theoretical implications on the subject of language choice in persuasive messages both in and outside of the instructional communication context. Future research should continue to examine language choice decisions in mediated communication within hierarchical relationships and explore the role PRT plays in relationships both initially and as time elapses.

Persuasion knowledge is personal knowledge about persuasion attempts that has an effect on the way people respond to these attempts. Persuasion attempts are made to effectively handling the Covid-19 pandemic, which is dependent on high public compliance with vaccination programs. Drawing on the idea of persuasion knowledge, we aimed at elaborating the various categories of perceived information gaps experienced by vaccine hesitants during the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. At the beginning of 2021 we conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Israelis who had decided not to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Analysis of the interviews revealed three main categories of information gaps experienced by the interviewees: missing information, manipulated information, and discrepant information. We analyzed how these are associated with distrust and may impair the persuasion efforts of governments and health authorities. Perceived information gaps, as part of persuasion knowledge, may increase negative responses, and therefore constitute an important factor in persuasion campaigns.

The freedom concept has been an important one, to daily engagement in activities and everything that becomes so close to people. One of them is computing systems that we use every day and they serve several purposes in moulding human lives. An important aspect of this is behaviour change as many have been successful while others have failed because they are too restrictive for use. However, the presence of freedom does not guarantee the success of many systems. Therefore, this work focuses on how reactance can still be experienced in a persuasive website that ensures freedom and non-forced compliance. Specifically, the work studied anger, compliance and perceived usability of a persuasive website that was developed to provide intervention for users in the area of healthy meal planning through manipulation of freedom levels. Results indicated that participants exposed to high freedom text had lower anger, higher perceived usability and higher compliance than participants exposed to low freedom text and social high freedom message. This led to the conclusion that users’ freedom feeling during a persuasive attempt can be boosted with the inclusion of high freedom message design and that the integration of social agents for persuasion enhancement must be done with great care.Keywords: Psychological Reactance, Freedom, Behaviour change, Social Influence, compliance, persuasion, computing devices

In 1970, Flanders stressed that “teaching behavior is the most potent, single, controllable factor that can alter learning opportunities in the classroom” (Flanders, 1970, p. 13). Since that time a growing number of educational studies have shown that teaching behavior is indeed an important variable in classroom research. However, these studies have also shown that the distinction between teaching behaviors and the attitudes and perceptions of teachers is not a clear one. For example, many of the labels associated with behavioral characteristics such as honest, aggressive, authoritarian, destructive, democratic, are the same labels used to describe teachers’ attitudes and personalities. There appears to be no general agreement as to whether changes in behavior lead to attitudinal changes or if changes in attitudes lead to behavioral change. It is generally agreed, however, that attitudinal or behavioral change is most often evident among those individuals who sense some reason for change. If the attitudes and behaviors of teachers stem from the role they have defined for themselves as teachers (Brophy & Good, 1974, p. 130), it seems plausible that clarification or redefinition of that role might lead to particular attitudinal or behavioral changes.

Psychological reactance theory suggests that the higher the threat-level of persuasive messages, the higher the reactance. Previous research has revealed ways to manipulate messages to either arouse or reduce psychological reactance. By contrast, the current work compares people’s reactance across different target actions while keeping the threat-level of the message consistent. We propose that reactance to a message depends on the target action’s pre-existing felt obligation. We demonstrate that low-obligation actions are more sensitive than high-obligation actions to the threat-level of a persuasive message. The current work provides one explanation for inconsistencies in the literature regarding message effects. This work also suggests that pre-existing obligation of a target action should be accounted for in order to successfully implement a message intervention.

BackgroundAn epidemic of health disorders can be triggered by a collective manifestation of inappropriate behaviors, usually systematically fueled by non-medical factors at the individual and/or societal levels. This study aimed to (1) landscape and assess the evidence on interventions that reduce inappropriate demand of medical resources (medicines or procedures) by triggering behavioral change among healthcare consumers, (2) map out intervention components that have been tried and tested, and (3) identify the “active ingredients” of behavior change interventions that were proven to be effective in containing epidemics of inappropriate use of medical resources.MethodsFor this systematic review, we searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and PsychINFO from the databases’ inceptions to May 2019, without language restrictions, for behavioral intervention studies. Interventions had to be empirically evaluated with a control group that demonstrated whether the effects of the campaign extended beyond trends occurring in the absence of the intervention. Outcomes of interest were reductions in inappropriate or non-essential use of medicines and/or medical procedures for clinical conditions that do not require them. Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts, and full text for inclusion and extracted data on study characteristics (e.g., study design), intervention development, implementation strategies, and effect size. Data extraction sheets were based on the checklist from the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews.ResultsForty-three studies were included. The behavior change technique taxonomy v1 (BCTTv1), which contains 93 behavioral change techniques (BCTs), was used to characterize components of the interventions reported in the included studies. Of the 93 BCTs, 15 (16%) were identified within the descriptions of the selected studies targeting healthcare consumers. Interventions consisting of education messages, recommended behavior alternatives, and a supporting environment that incentivizes or encourages the adoption of a new behavior were more likely to be successful.ConclusionsThere is a continued tendency in research reporting that mainly stresses the effectiveness of interventions rather than the process of identifying and developing key components and the parameters within which they operate. Reporting “negative results” is likely as critical as reporting “active ingredients” and positive findings for implementation science. This review calls for a standardized approach to report intervention studies.Trial registrationPROSPERO registration number CRD42019139537

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), a pandemic, has enforced a global emergency worldwide. More than 200 countries are affected by this pandemic. Different strategies (like, quarantine, isolation, work from home approach, positive leadership, etc.) are practiced globally to recover from pandemic. COVID-19 has endangered the economic health in various counties. The crisis in economic health, globally, has initiated a behavioral and attitudinal change in the human being. Due to longer lockdown duration, the negative impact on human behavior is dominating than the positive one and as a result, people feels to be irritated, frustrated and addictions of unnecessary competition, at times. Nowadays, technological development and availability of gadgets have reformed human lives and behavior. The article is based on a survey on a list of technological parameters which is responsible for bringing behavioral changes in any individual during pandemic. The perspectives include social, cultural, environmental factors, etc. A detailed questionnaire was made and distributed to people of different age groups, their responses are then analyzed. A detailed survey will allow researchers and people to better understand both negative and positive effects of different perspectives, and how these factors can initiate a behavioral change and extreme psychological burdens to an individual.

Based on constructs from source credibility and narrative engagement theory, this research examines (a) the mediators or processes whereby celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources enhance narrative persuasion and (b) the moderators or conditions under which celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources persuade. The study employed a two-group (celebrity vs. non-celebrity) between-subjects experimental design with 360 participants. Results showed that, compared to the non-celebrity source, the celebrity source was perceived as more attractive, which increased narrative engagement, consequently led to more positive behavioral intentions and policy opinions, particularly among those with low involvement. These results practically suggest that health campaigns that aim at low involvement audiences could benefit from the use of celebrity sources in narrative messages. This research integrates theories of narrative transportation, source credibility, and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to examine how celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources influence health campaign effectiveness. By testing the sequential mediating effects of source credibility and narrative engagement, the study provides a more comprehensive understanding of narrative persuasion using celebrity sources, particularly in the context of health campaigns for cardiovascular diseases.

A major problem with political microtargeting is that users are often unaware that they are being targeted, while current transparency approaches apparently fail to inform them. This is problematic because users are more vulnerable to manipulation when they fail to recognise persuasive messages, as they do not critically reflect on the content. Disclosures can be used to offset these effects by improving transparency and informing the public. Therefore, the current work investigates whether a more salient disclosure has the potential to increase users’ persuasion knowledge which might, in turn, enable them to resist the message and lower source credibility and attitude towards the advertised politician. In a preregistered online between-subjects experiment 547 German Facebook users were exposed to either the disclosure that is currently used by platforms, or a salient and dynamic disclosure informing users about the parameters and data points used to target them. Results showed no evidence that a more salient disclosure increased users’ persuasion knowledge. However, results showed that if people are aware that a political message is an advertisement, they question the content of the message, which, in turn, relates to lower credibility perceptions towards the source and less favourable attitudes towards the politician.

Despite their prevalence in eHealth applications for behavior change, persuasive messages tend to have small effects on behavior. Conditions or states (e.g., confidence, knowledge, motivation) and characteristics (e.g., gender, age, personality) of persuadees are two promising components for more effective algorithms for choosing persuasive messages. However, it is not yet sufficiently clear how well considering these components allows one to predict behavior after persuasive attempts, especially in the long run. Since collecting data for many algorithm components is costly and places a burden on users, a better understanding of the impact of individual components in practice is welcome. This can help to make an informed decision on which components to use. We thus conducted a longitudinal study in which a virtual coach persuaded 671 daily smokers to do preparatory activities for quitting smoking and becoming more physically active, such as envisioning one's desired future self. Based on the collected data, we designed a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-approach that considers current and future states to maximize the effort people spend on their activities. Using this RL-approach, we found, based on leave-one-out cross-validation, that considering states helps to predict both behavior and future states. User characteristics and especially involvement in the activities, on the other hand, only help to predict behavior if used in combination with states rather than alone. We see these results as supporting the use of states and involvement in persuasion algorithms. Our dataset is available online.

This paper presents the results of a research that proposes a model for the de- velopment of professional skills for pre-service teachers, with an emphasis on metacognition on educational practice, classroom research and incorporation of technology. This is a qualitative study and uses the technique of verbal pro- tocol analysis to inquire about the teacher’s behavioral changes in pedagogical practice while they build some learning environments using ontologies, plan lessons, interact in the classroom and inquire about the learning process in three subject matters: Social Sciences, Biology and Mathematics. The project in- volved six ninth-semester students from Universidad Pedago?gica Nacional. The results show that the proposed training model provides high quality professional learning for teachers and is effective in terms of teachers’ attitudinal changes towards their teaching practices. It is possible to establish that a teacher training model focused on developing technological, metacognitive and research skills improves the educational practices of pre-service teachers, and consequently in- crease students’ achievements.

Two behavioral measures--chart audits and requests for psychiatric consultations--and two attitudinal measures--case conference comments and a case management questionnaire--were used to assess changes in pediatric residents' approaches to psychosocial issues over the course of liaison training. Both attitudinal measures showed changes in the residents' approaches, including an increased attention to patients' and families' feelings and an expanded awareness of the options available in dealing with psychosocial problems. These changes in attitude, however, did not result in increases in the amount of psychosocial data recorded in the charts or increases in resident-initiated consultation requests. The authors use their observations on the wards and in case conferences and interviews with pediatric residents to explain why chart contents and psychiatric consultation practices are resistant to change. Their findings indicate a gap between attitudinal and behavioral change that requires further research on how pediatric residents identify psychosocial problems, and how liaison training is integrated with the needs and expectations of nonpsychiatric physicians.

The rapid expansion of live commerce has been structurally dependent on high-arousal marketing stimuli—including artificial scarcity, digital countdown timers, and hyper-energetic host paralinguistics. While the prevailing academic literature employs the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) paradigm to examine these tactics as drivers of short-term impulse purchasing, comparatively little attention has been paid to the long-term psychological consequences of sustained sensory pressure. This qualitative, descriptive phenomenological study explores the lived experience of live commerce burnout by integrating Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT) and the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) as complementary analytical lenses. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eighteen active digital consumers in Southeast Asia, the study mapped experiences of cognitive exhaustion and platform alienation. Inductive thematic analysis yielded three emergent themes: (1) sensory overload and host fatigue, (2) manufactured scarcity and trust erosion, and (3) the rebellion response. The findings suggest that high-arousal tactics may operate on an inverted U-curve relationship with sustainable consumer engagement—a theoretical proposition wherein stimuli that initially capture attention appear, beyond a cognitive tolerance threshold, to trigger PRT-consistent motivational states and PKM-activated persuasion coping responses. These contextually rich findings provide a foundation for future quantitative investigation and offer actionable guidance for practitioners seeking to architect more sustainable, low-arousal digital selling environments.

The studies reported here assumed that informal classroom group processes affect students' attitudes as well as their academic performances and that teachers can modify these group processes constructively. Three action research interventions are described in this paper which, in various degrees and in different ways, helped teachers improve the informal group processes in their classrooms. The major intervention of Project z was a teacher development laboratory with seven core training activities: (i) sensitivity training and related human relations experiences, (2) didactic discussions on basic research about classroom group processes, (3) problem-solving techniques for improving group processes, (4) analyses of diagnostic data from the teachers' own classrooms, (5) discussions about useful classroom practices developed by other teachers, (6) role-play tryouts of new classroom practices, and (7) follow-up discussions during the school year. This laboratory was compared with a seminar in which the participants experienced all phases of the laboratory except for sensitivity training, related human relations experiences, and roleplay tryouts of new classroom practices. Both the laboratory and seminar were compared with a control group in which no interventions were attempted. An overview of the results indicated that the laboratory teachers and students made more positive changes in their group processes than those in the seminar group; both of these groups were more improved at the end of the school year than the control group. In Project 2, psychological consultants attempted to enhance teachers' capabilities for coping with group processes in the classroom. The consultants spent four hours each week for 15 weeks in small-group discussions, classroom visitations, and individual conferences. The contacts between consultants and teachers were problem-oriented, centering on the teachers' reactions to classroom processes and how the teachers might try to improve group interaction in their classrooms. The consultants attempted to explore how teachers might relate to students with interpersonal problems, low self-esteem, and disinterest in learning. Results indicated that cognitive and attitudinal changes did occur in the teachers, but that these were not also accompanied by behavioral changes that made a difference in their classroom groups. Constructive changes in classroom group processes and students' attitudes did not occur as a result of the consultations. Project 3 involved an organizational development laboratory for a school faculty which was aimed at improving such organizational processes as interpersonal relations and feelings, communication patterns, and group norms of the staff. The laboratory included structured group exercises, small-group discussions relating the exercises to school processes, total staff discussions on their own group processes, and problem-solving techniques applied to total staff problems. A majority of the teachers, quite unexpectedly, tried new group procedures in their classrooms patterned after their laboratory experiences, even though classroom applications were never formally mentioned during the laboratory. It was concluded that an organizational development laboratory encourages a faculty to try out new group processes in the school organization or in the classroom. Problem-oriented and self-reflective discussions with consultants help teachers perceive that they can improve classroom group processes by modifying their own behaviors. But the regular presence of a psychological consultant does not appear, by itself, to change teachers' actual behaviors in the classroom. A teacher development laboratory which includes problem-solving techniques, sensitivity training, and role-play tryouts increases the likelihood that changes in teachers' cognitions and attitudes will be accompanied by behavioral changes in the classroom. These three interventions can fit well into integrated action programs that might be used by school systems for improving classroom group processes.