The Role Of Thought Confidence In Persuasion
The aim of persuasion is to bring about behavioral change by altering someone’s attitude or opinion. People tend to have attitudes about everything, from food to religion, fashion to race – but, of course, our attitudes are not always the same. This makes understanding persuasion important as a tool to resolve political conflicts, increase social harmony, and reduce health problems through public health campaigns. Historically, persuasion studies have focused on how much people engage with the message (extent of thinking) and how positively people receive the message (direction of thinking).
A more recent wave of research, however, is taking a step back, and examining what is called meta-cognition.
"Meta-cognition is ‘people’s awareness of and thoughts about their own or others’ thoughts or thought processes’ (Petty & Briñol, 2004)."
One branch of this research is called thought confidence, otherwise known as the ‘self-validation hypothesis’ (Petty, Briñol & Tormala, 2002) – something that has been shown to affect the degree of attitude change. This emerging concept can therefore further our knowledge of how best to instil long-lasting attitude change.
References
[1] Blankenship, K., Nesbit, S. & Murray, R. (2013). Driving anger and metacognition: The role of thought confidence on anger and aggressive driving intentions. Aggressive Behavior, 39(4), 323-334.
[2] Briñol, P. & Petty, R. (2004). Self-validation processes: The role of thought confidence in persuasion. In G, Haddock & G, Maio, Contemporary Perspectives on the Psychology of Attitudes, Hove and New York: Psychology Press.
[3] Briñol, P., Petty, R., Valle, C., Rucker, D., & Becerra, A. (2007). The effects of message recipients’ power before and after persuasion: A self-validation analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(6), 1040–1053.
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[7] Petty, R., & Cacioppo, J. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
[8] Petty, R. E., Briñol, P., & Tormala, Z. L. (2002). Thought confidence as a determinant of persuasion: The self-validation hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(5), 722–741.
[9] Petty, R., Barden, J., Wheeler, C. The Elaboration Likelihood Model: Developing health promotion for sustained behavior change. (2009). In R. DiClemente, R. Crosby & M. Kegler (Eds.), Emerging Theories in Health Promotion Practice and Research. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
[10] Santos, D., & Rivera, R. (2015). The accessibility of justice-related concepts can validate intentions to punish. Social Influence, 10(3), 180-192.
[11] Slater, M., & Rouner, D. (2002), Entertainment—education and elaboration likelihood: Understanding the processing of narrative persuasion. Communication Theory, 12(2), 173-191.
[12] Tormala, Z., Briñol, P., & Petty, R. (2006). When credibility attacks: The reverse impact of source credibility on persuasion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42(5), 684–691.
[13] Updegraff, J, Sherman, D., Luyster, F., & Mann, T. (2007). The effects of message quality and congruency on perceptions of tailored health communications. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(2), 249–257.
[14] Zhou, T. (2012). Understanding users’ initial trust in mobile banking: An elaboration likelihood perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(4), 1518-1525.
About the Author
Zoe Adams
Zoe is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. She is bridging the gap between public health and language attitudes by studying how British accents affect the persuasiveness of public health interventions. Her interests include consumer psychology, attitude change, and stereotyping.
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