Healthy Influence Blog

By definition, every persuasion play is a demand for change.  A source is telling a receiver to be different.  Most people do not react well to a demand for change because if you’re living life correctly, there should be no demands for change, right?  Thus, a persuasion play is an implicit challenge to competence – “Hey, dummy, stop doing THAT and start doing THIS!”  No wonder the Rule: All People Resist Significant Change.  Persuasion is tough and likely to fail.

Now, when we fail to change someone, we’ve actually made things worse because the failed play acts as an unintended inoculation treatment that serves to strengthen the very thing we were trying to change.  Hence another Rule:  If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.  Yet, if we don’t try, we can never succeed.  A new study in the journal Health Psychology provides an excellent example of how to cut this Gordian knot.  Here’s how.

Provide self-affirmation before the persuasion play.

It means pretty much what it says.  Affirm the self.  Make people feel good about themselves and affirm that, in the words of the immortal Stuart Smalley, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me!”  Stated more directly and without any irony or silliness, you want to generate information that reinforces key beliefs, feelings, traditions, values, or habits BEFORE you start the persuasion play.  By affirming these core elements of self, the following demand for change from the persuasion play seems less threatening and evokes less defensive, Biased Processing from the target.

Guido van Koningsbruggen, Enny Das, and David Roskos-Ewoldsen looked at self affirmation with health risk behaviors.  The way they manipulated self-affirmation is suprisingly easy.  They just had participants take a well established scientific survey of values, then the “self affirmed” . . .

“. . . participants were asked to choose their most important value and to write about why it was important to them and to describe a specific occasion when it had been particularly important. In the nonaffirmed status condition, they were asked to choose their least important value and to write about why the value might be important to the average student.”

After this manipulation, participants were then hit with a strong Central Route persuasion play aimed at changing a health behavior (related to caffeine consumption).  van Koningsbruggen et al. replicated what other researchers have reported:  The self-affirmed changed more than the control participants (a medium effect with a Windowpane of 63/37), so this is not a small effect just crawling over the threshold of random variation. van Koningsbruggen et al. also provided excellent process and mediation data I won’t report here that helps explain how self-affirmation operates and if you are a stone cold persuasion maniac, I recommend the report for this.

For the rest of the Free World As We Know It, however, just the simple manipulation and the substantial effect size are the Main Points.  Just get people to think about a core belief, value, tradition, etc., in other words Stuff That’s Really Important or Fighting Words or My Creed or . . . you get it.  Then ask them to explain it, describe it, give a good example of it.  That’s all.  You don’t argue with them or make any disclosures of your own, just get them to think and talk about a core belief.

That self-affirmation reduces the sting of a persuasion play’s demand for change.  You are not a dummy who needs to change, but you are a strong, stable, centered person who can listen to alternatives.  You are moving from strength due to the affirmation manipulation.

If you want to take a strong Argument, Central Route approach, self-affirmation recommends itself as a fabulous dimmer switch to affect WATTage.  Normally, such self-oriented moves tend to produce Biased Processing, but in this case, it makes people more Objective Processors of the following Arguments you provide.  Clearly, self-affirmation is NOT part of a Peripheral Route persuasion play.

Interesting, isn’t it?