Source factors in persuasion: A self-validation approach

Abstract

The persuasion literature has examined several mechanisms that have contributed to understanding the effectiveness of credible, attractive, similar, and powerful sources. These traditionally studied processes focus on how persuasive sources can affect attitudes by serving as peripheral cues or by influencing the direction or the amount of thoughts generated. After describing these processes that operate at the primary level of cognition, we review research on self-validation that demonstrates how and when source factors can affect a secondary cognition—thought confidence. Thought confidence refers to a metacognitive form of cognition. This recently discovered mechanism can account for some already established persuasion outcomes (e.g., more persuasion with high- than low-credibility or similar sources), but by a completely different process than postulated previously. Moreover, under some circumstances we have also been able to obtain findings opposite to those typically observed (e.g., more persuasion with low- than high-credible or similar sources). Our research reveals that a consideration of self-validation processes provides an integrative mechanism for understanding many other unexplored source variables, such as oneself as a source, source matching and mimicry, and threatening sources.

Notes

¹ Of course, as noted earlier, when motivation to think is already set at a high or low level, these same source factors can serve in other roles. For example, when motivation to think is relatively low, a fast-talking speaker can be more persuasive, presumably because the fast-talking speaker is assumed to be more knowledgeable (e.g., see Smith & Shaffer, 1995).

² Identifying with the source of a message can (a) serve as a peripheral cue to decide about the proposal under low elaboration conditions, (b) bias the direction of the thoughts that come to mind under high thinking conditions, and (c) increase thinking under moderate elaboration likelihood. In general, a match of any kind (e.g., similarity) between the message source and the recipient, not just identity, can lead to persuasion through different processes in different situations. Thus, in addition to the mechanisms already described, similarity with the source or a matching in any dimension between source and recipient can presumably operate through self-validation processes as well. For example, if a woman who is highly identified with her gender learns that the speaker is a woman after thinking about the message, a feeling of confidence in her thoughts should be enhanced relative to conditions in which the recipient learns that the source is a male.

³ We have also measured confidence and doubt using an implicit measure (IAT) in the context of studying the implicit ambivalence that can emerge from automatic–deliberative discrepancies (see Petty & Briñol, 2009).

⁴ We use the term self-validation in order to emphasise that what people validate are their own thoughts. In a persuasion paradigm, the objects of validation are the cognitive responses that the person generates in response to the persuasive proposal received. However, as we describe later in this review, our self-validation view argues that metacognitive confidence can magnify the effect of not just attitude-relevant thoughts, but any content that is currently available in people's minds. It is important to note that the term self-validation has been used slightly differently in other domains of social psychology. For example, Crocker and Park (2004) use the term self-validation to refer to situations in which people want (mostly through others) to validate their abilities and qualities, and ultimately their self-worth. In this case, self-validation is a goal that motivates people to seek and pursue self-esteem. This use of the term self-validation is similar to the meaning of that exact term within clinical psychology where self-validation is often seen as the process of restoring and reinforcing the sense of self-worth, meaning of life, and personal identity.

⁵ In addition to self-validation, Tormala et al. (2007b) uncovered another mechanism relevant to understanding ease of retrieval effects in the most common paradigm in which people are asked to generate a high (difficult) or low (easy) number of cognitions in a given direction. Specifically, it was predicted and found that when it is difficult for people to generate the specific type of cognition requested, they are more likely to spontaneously generate unrequested cognitions, and the presence of these opposite-direction cognitions can play a mediating role in ease of retrieval effects.

⁶ In this section we briefly mention cases when recipients of persuasion imitate what they observe in the source of a communication. If the source of a persuasive message smiles or nods their head at you, you are likely to smile and nod back. Alternatively, however, people sometimes respond to others' behaviour in contrasting, complementary ways (e.g., Tiedens & Fragale, 2003). The self-validation effect would follow the impact of the recipient's own behaviour.

⁷ A final case of mimicry comes from research in which the source adapts his or her behaviour to match the non-verbal behaviour of the recipient. Recent research has suggested that even behaviours performed by a computer-controlled digital representation of the person in a virtual environment can induce subsequent changes in judgement. In one illustration, Bailenson and Yee (2005) found that digital agents who were high in behavioural realism by mimicking the head movements of participants were more persuasive than agents who did not mimic and merely displayed other realistic movements. Of course there are multiple mechanisms by which these effects can come about (e.g., mimicking a persona's behaviour might enhance thought confidence).

⁸These findings were restricted to participants who considered the self to be a valuable source (i.e., high self-esteem). For those with low self-esteem the opposite interaction emerged, revealing that external sources had more impact on the reliance on their thoughts than internal sources.