The development of persuasive communication skills: The influence of developments in interpersonal constructs on the ability to generate communication‐relevant beliefs and on level of persuasive strategy

Abstract

This experiment sought to determine whether children's performance on a persuasive message production task could be improved through exposure to a series of priming questions designed to elicit communication‐relevant beliefs and whether exposure to such a manipulation would attenuate the advantage developments in the interpersonal construct system ordinarily confer on a child faced with a persuasive task. Results showed that simple exposure to the manipulation had no effect on children's performance, since a child's level of construct development influenced his or her ability to answer the priming questions with information useful for and relevant to the persuasive message task.