The Role of Threat and Counterarguing in Therapeutic Inoculation

ABSTRACT

Although inoculation theory was originally developed as a prophylactic strategy to protect favorable attitudes from challenges, scholars have begun to demonstrate the potential for therapeutic inoculation aimed at audiences with unfavorable and neutral attitudes. The current investigation builds on our previous work showing that inoculation messages fostered attitude change and protection among people who originally held negative and neutral attitudes. We return to our original three-phase experiment to explore the previously-unconsidered role of threat and counterarguing for promoting resistance in therapeutic inoculation. Results indicate that, while audiences with initially favorable attitudes demonstrated elevated levels of threat and counterarguing, neutral and opposed audiences did not. These results suggest that different mechanisms may drive resistance in the therapeutic inoculation among audiences who initially hold neutral and opposing attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat
• counterarguing
• attitude change
• resistance
• prophylactic inoculation
• therapeutic inoculation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One exception is that we reported the effects of the inoculation message on threat and counterarguing among people with positive attitudes as a manipulation check in Ivanov et al. (2016). That analysis, however, was conducted as a manipulation check and limited to people with positive attitudes in the control and inoculation conditions. The supportive message condition was excluded as were the groups holding neutral and negative attitudes.

2. https://osf.io/fsqtz/?view_only=7762e3d9a4a04a719e6d3a9e71a5cab2.