Persuasion and Influence in Online Courses
16th January 2007
Okay. I’ve only been doing this for a couple of weeks, so my wealth of experience with online courses is impoverished. My work in this domain is limited to one university and one course, so your mileage may vary from mine . . . but that said, it is abundantly clear to me that online communication is a wildly different form of human communication compared to face to face interaction. (Wow, Steve! Did you need a doctorate to make that observation or did it come from years of experimental lab research?) Bear with me.
Right now I’m teaching for the first time an online advanced undergraduate course for West Virginia University in the Department of Communication Studies. I’ve been teaching (or training or leading) persuasion to adults for 20 years in just about every kind of format one can imagine. In some respects my experience in persuasion created all of my larger opportunities beyond normal academic social science. It’s hard to imagine connecting with Dr. Fred Butcher when he ran the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center at WVU if I hadn’t been doing persuasion. It’s hard to imagine connecting with Dr. Al Munson when he ran the Health Effects Lab Division for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Persuasion has simply been a crucial part of my success conventionally defined as a professional. So, I work hard at it, think about it a lot, seek training and guidance from experts, and in general devote a lot of resource to doing it and getting better at it. This is a long way of saying, that I think I’m pretty good at this. (And let’s keep our bearings here and ask Melanie about other skills I think I possess and she’ll give you a little laugh and a tight smile that you often see married people show when they are biting their tongues.)
And, yet, for all my experience and success in all things persuasion, this online course is surprising me almost everyday. I’m used to having a persuasion classroom completely under my control, but an online classroom is a very different animal. Beyond the obvious technology challenges (gee, you mean the university server randomly selects some emails to send and receive?), the biggest surprise to me has been the difference in the psychology of online communication. Right now, two theories seem most relevant: ELM and attribution theory.
For an online course, I think most people most of the time are considerably more high WATT when they process messages for an online course than when they are in the face to face world (f2f) or in other online activities (i.e. general surfing on the web). I’ve got no numbers on this, but based on more years of study than I care to count, it just feels that way even without a 2 X 2 ANOVA design on this.
Normally, this would be exactly the state of affairs I’d want in a teaching/learning environment. Gee whiz, if you can get high WATT processors and you’ve got strong arguments (and I think I do), then you should be in hog heaven. Yet, I see behavior in both myself and my online participants that indicate more problems where there should be fewer. My ELM interpretation of this is that while people may be more high WATT in an online course, it appears that this high WATT processing is more likely to be Biased rather that Objective. If you know ELM (or HSM) theorizing, this means that everyone is very willing and able to think about information, but Objective processors tend to go with the information given whereas Biased processors tend to make that information fit with an existing scheme, plan, or bias.
Thus, my claim here is that online courses generate Biased high WATT processing. People do not tend to ride with the bits of information they encounter, but rather actively look for information that confirms what they are looking for and when they can’t quickly, easily, and obviously find that information, you tend to show pretty hot attitudinal responses. (Look, if you’re one of my students in this online course, don’t get fired up here. I’m not saying you or anyone else is mean, crazy, or stupid. Just keep reading the ELM chapter in the Primer and in O’Keefe, okay?)
The second obvious area of influence comes from attribution theory. When you’re doing an online course, your style and content of attribution will change compared to either the f2f world or other online activities (again, surfing). I just did a quick search on PsychInfo on attribution theory and various keywords related to online activities and got no hits. (I can’t believe this application has not occurred to anyone yet. I must be using the wrong key terms.) When you have no f2f context, feedback, or comparison, and when you are in a high WATT Biased processing mode, attributions have got to change and it is unlikely that the change will be in a favorable, happy, and milk of human kindness direction. I’d predict that virtually anything you encounter that is not exactly what you expected will trigger a biased attributional process that will tend to protect you and maim the other.
In sum, then, I think that online education produces a “paranoid style” of information processing in most people most of the time, especially in early phases of the experience. And, if no one takes steps to moderate this style, then things will not get better and may get worse (again relative to f2f or other web activities). It’s an interesting practical persuasion and influence problem.