Glenda B. Claborne
Paper 1/Comm 620
Spring 98

Controversial Findings/Perspectives in Social Influence Research

One can find a variety of contradictory research findings and theoretical perspectives in the literature of persuasion research but I have chosen to highlight only two on the basis that these have occupied a central place in past research. Moreover, these have sparked considerable debate and generated a substantial body of research in persuasion. The first deals with the debate that has surrounded the relationship between attitudes and behavior and the second concerns the debates over the concept of source credibility. I have tried to present these two controversies in such a way as to show the evolution of the concepts of attitudes and source credibility and how these also reflect the paths that have been taken in persuasion research.

Do attitudes predict and cause behavior?

A precise definition of the concept of attitude has led many psychologists to look at it as having structural properties in terms of dimensions, polarities, associative networks, and consistency or balance between the properties. Attitudes have been conceptualized as internal states with their own internal structures and as such, their empirical measurement relies on their relevant, overt, observable representations. The observation of overt behaviors as representing the positive or negative valence of the relevant attitude in the person's mind has seemed a logical direction to take in studying attitudes. It seems to make sense to expect that what goes on in the mind must somehow find some direct expression in overt behaviors. Allport (1935), most notably, ascribed to attitudes directive and dynamic powers over behaviors.

However, early empirical findings have shown the relation between attitudes and behavior to be tenuous. Early studies, mostly involving attitudes of whites to blacks or orientals (LaPiere, 1934; Kutner, Wilkins & Yarrow, 1952; DeFleur & Westie, 1958; Rokeach & Mezei, 1966), have shown weak correlations between what people think they would do under certain conditions and what they actually did when faced with those conditions. These weak correlations were taken by many critics to discredit the assumption that the evaluative nature of behaviors necessarily follows from relevant attitudes. Most notably, Wicker (1969) wrote an article based on his review of the empirical findings on the issue and concluded that it is more likely that actions influence attitudes than the other way around.

Wicker's article attracted a lot of attention to the issue of attitude-behavior relation and some social scientists took issue with his conclusions. These scientists ( e.g. Kelman, 1974; Schuman & Johnson, 1976) argued that research outcomes could differ markedly depending on the research methods used. They pointed out that Wicker included mostly laboratory studies in his review when in fact the more significant correlations between attitudes and behavior can be found in survey research findings. Survey research tends to deal with attitudes that are more involving and that therefore may be more influential on people's behavior. Furthermore, compared to the constrained conditions in the laboratory, survey research methods allow for more freedom to express the relevant behaviors.

Norms and situational constraints have also been argued as lowering the consistency between attitudes and behavior because these constraints discourage people from expressing what they really think and feel about an attitude object. Norms about politeness must have kept in check the real attitudes of whites toward minorities, Campbell (1963) argued based on his analysis of the early LaPiere (1934) study where white proprietors of hotels and restaurants treated LaPiere's Chinese friends quite well, contrary to expectations.

The early discussions on the effects of research methods used and the type of attitudes assessed led to later empirical demonstrations that the variations in the observed consistency between attitude and behavior can be explained mostly in terms of measuring principles. One of these principles is that a behavioral measure aggregated across a number of specific behaviors would explain a larger proportion of variability than would a single behavioral measure. This has been empirically demonstrated by Fishbein and Ajzen (1974; 1975) and has led them to the idea that attitudes and behavior must be compatible (or correspondent) to have high correlations. Compatibility has been defined in terms of specificity or generality: general atttitudes are better predictors of general behaviors as specific attitudes are to specific behaviors. Important as these ideas are to researchers in predicting behavior, Eagly and Chaiken (1993) see them as not contributing much to the understanding of the directive control of attitudes over behaviors as Allport (1935) conceptualized attitudes to be.

However, Fishbein's and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action, which introduced the psychological construct of intention into the attitude-behavior equation, did place attitudes in a causal relation to behavior. Intention, as representing a person's motivation to act in a planned and directed way and being so under the control of attitudes, provided a direct link between attitudes and behavior. The theory of reasoned action, however, was criticized as being limited to behaviors that are volitional or voluntary, obscuring the fact that many behaviors are not fully volitional or voluntary because people lack the resources, skills, or opportunities to choose to perform them. Moreover, the theory was also criticized as disallowing spontaneous, impulsive, instinctual behaviors that require little intervening thought.

Although it has been shown that Fishbein's and Ajzen's ideas are limited to certain behaviors, other researchers went on to specify several conditions that increase the magnitude of correlations between attitudes towards targets (i.e., the entity toward which the behavior is directed, not the attitude object) and behaviors. These conditions include direct experience with the attitude object, high accessibility of the attitude, possession of substantial information about the attitude object, and perception of an explicit link between the attitude and the behavioral choice at hand (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993 p. 216). However, the research on attitudes toward targets, like the research on attitudes towards behaviors, does not provide a general theory of attitude-behavior relations because it only explains the set of human behavior that is volitional when in reality, most human behavior must be habitual. In this regard, Eagly and Chaiken (1993) recommend that in order to arrive at a general theory of attitude-behavior relation, social scientists must move beyond simple, voluntary behaviors and must consider non-attitudinal determinants of behavior such as habits and norms.

What makes a credible source?

The systematic and scientific study of the concept of attitudes appears to be the bedrock of persuasion research but it is recent when placed along the timeline that persuasion researchers draw for their field of interest. The study of persuasion is traced to the ancient Greek and Roman writings, most notably Aristotle's Rhetoric, which placed great importance on the credibility of the speaker. The speaker himself, according to Aristotle's ethos, is proof of credibility. Very simply stated, a good speaker is a good man.

Miller, Burgoon & Burgoon (1984) credited Aristotle's notion of ethos as having provided "an important stimulus for the extensive literature dealing with the dimensions and effects of communicator's credibility" (p. 401). The same was not said of the voluminous writings on communicator styles and manners of speaking that were emphasized in early modern (post-classical, pre-scientific) rhetorical studies of persuasion but these studies, nevertheless, closely associated credibility with the source himself. This close association of credibility with personal attributes of the source such as expertise and trustworthiness has occupied center stage in a long line of research on attitude change. However, this emphasis on source credibility as crucial to attitude change was challenged especially by Kelman's and Hovland's (1953) finding of a sleeper effect which showed that people "tend to disassociate source and content over time and that the effects of source credibility are not as pervasive as had been previously suggested" (Miller, Burgoon, & Burgoon, 1984).

That source credibility may not be that central to the persuasive effects of messages has led to the study of the concept as multi-dimensional. Expertise and trustworthiness were the dimensions most consistently associated with source credibility while dynamism and sociability emerged in particular studies (Miller, 1987). In addition to being multi-dimensional, some argued that the dimensions of source credibility are independent of each oother, so that a speaker can be viewed as safe but unqualified, or as dynamic but dishonest (Berlo et al., 1969).

Several critics, however, have pointed out shortcomings in the dimensional study of source credibility and have suggested other factors to consider. Cronkhite and Liska (1976) argued that the questions asked and the rating scale used by different researchers determined the answer he/she got and suggested that further studies of credibility should take into account the function a source performs for a receiver in a particular context. Kinder and Sears (1985) asserted that cultural changes make different components of credibility salient. Culture as influencing credibility judgments was also pointed out by King, Minami and Samovar (1985). The size of the audience was also pointed out as influencing audience judgments of the source's credibility so that dynamism may be more influential in large rallies while sociability may be the criteria used by smaller audiences.

While contextual factors do seem to affect audience's perceptions of source credibility, studies have shown that individuals do use a source's personal attributes to judge his/her credibility and that they use some criteria more than others. As has been mentioned earlier, expertise and trustworthiness emerged as the more often used criteria. Other key dimensions of source credibility such as physical attractiveness and similarity have also been found to exert considerable influence on audience's attribution of credibility to the source under varying conditions and with different personalities.

The study of source credibility in terms of dimensions was done largely within the variable analytic paradigm which started to wane in the 1970's. In response to this, Miller and Burgoon (1978) suggested the more promising concepts of communicator styles and persuasive message strategies. Burgoon's Language Expectancy Theory provides a theoretical framework for studying the persuasive effect on the receiver of the source's expected language style and the intensity of his/her message. Bormann (1980) argues that this emphasis on style and strategy looks promising for persuasion research only if the investigators do not fall into the trap of recasting these concepts in terms of dimensions or variables to be manipulated in order to discover their effects on paper-and-pencil attitude scores.

Summary

The concept of attitude has been the core of much of persuasion research and one of the enduring controversies surrounding this concept has been its relation to behaviors. Although it is probably logical to think that attitudes must direct behavior, empirical investigations of this causal relationship only showed weak correlations. Furthermore, where size of correlations were significant, these were noted to apply only on behaviors that require resources and skills to consciously and decidedly perform them. Such limitation does not account for much of behaviors in everyday life that are driven by habits and norms. It is recommended that a general theory of attitude behavior relation should take into account behaviors that are not fully volitional.

The concept of source credibility has occupied a central place in persuasion research as far back as the Greeks and Romans and has evolved from a unitary concept to a multi-dimensional one. The breakdown of the concept of source credibility into many components has helped define the variables that predict a source's persuasiveness. However, the challenges to the variable-analytic paradigm under which most of the source credibility research have been done has led some investigators to view source attributes in terms of styles and strategies and how these interact with the message and the receiver in persuasion contexts. It is suggested that the promise of this emphasis on styles and strategies depends on the investigators' avoidance of recasting styles and strategies in terms of variables to be manipulated.

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