Psychology

Psychology

Dalton Francik
3/28/14
PSY 211


Paper 1: Persuasion and Advertising
An organization of beliefs, feelings and behavioral tendencies toward socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols is a person’s attitude. Attitudes can be described two ways; affective and cognitive. An affectively based attitude toward something is that persons feelings or emotions about an object. A cognitive based attitude toward something is that person’s knowledge or belief of the attitude object. For example, if a person says “I am afraid of heights” they are giving their affectively based attitude. If someone says, “I think I am afraid of heights,” then they are giving their cognitively based attitude. These attitudes sometimes come from our own beliefs; however some attitudes are formed because we have been persuaded to have those attitudes. As described in the elaboration likelihood model, there are central path and peripheral path persuasion. Central path persuasion involves a person who may have more knowledge of the topic at hand and already has a good idea about what you are talking about. Peripheral path persuasion, on the other hand, is when you are talking with someone that has little interest in the subject. Peripheral path persuasion will sometimes use hints towards other things that the person will feel positively about in hopes to make them feel better about the original subject. Both of these types of persuasion are related to cognitive based attitudes because they focus on the knowledge a person has about the subject to actively persuade the person rather than their beliefs about the subject. I believe that a person would be more successful using the peripheral route to persuasion just because sometimes a person or audience will become too full of facts and will easily get tired of hearing about what they think they already know. If you were to add a few outlying sources to what you are persuading them to believe, that’s when I believe it will be most...

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