Pratkanis, Anthony : University of California-Santa Cruz
Anthony Pratkanis is professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has appeared on
many television and radio shows, including "Dateline NBC," "CNN," and "The Oprah Winfrey
Show." He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the author of many articles on persuasion
practices.
Aronson, Elliot : University of California-Santa Cruz
Elliot Aronson is one of our nation's most eminent social psychologists. He is professor emeritus at the University
of California, Santa Cruz and Visting Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. The author of seventeen books,
including Nobody Left to Hate (W. H. Freeman, 2000) and the award-winning classic The Social Animal, he is the
recent recipient of the American Psychological Associations highest award for a lifetime of scientific contributions.
Sample Chapter
33 ON THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS
Suppose you inherited controlling interest in a television network. Here is a golden opportunity to influence people's
opinions on important issues. Let's say you are an enthusiastic proponent of national health insurance, and you
would like to persuade others to agree with you. Having read about the persuasion tactics described in this book,
you know how to do it, and you are in control of a very powerful medium of communication. How do you set about
doing it?
That's simple: You choose a time slot following a highly intellectual program (in order to be certain that well-informed
people are watching) and, accordingly, you present a two-sided argument (because two-sided arguments work best
on well-informed people). You arrange your arguments in such a manner that the argument in favor of national health
insurance is stronger and appears first (in order to be fresh in the viewer's mind). You describe the plight of
the poor, how they get sick more frequently and die earlier for lack of affordable medical care. You frame the
need for national health care in terms of a personal loss for the viewer -- the current piecemeal system is costly
and driving up taxes. You use vivid personal examples of people you know. You discuss these events in a manner
that inspires great fear; at the same time, you offer a specific plan of action, because this combination produces
the most opinion change and the most action in the most people. You present some of the arguments against your
position and offer strong refutation of these arguments. You arrange for the speaker to be expert, trustworthy,
and extremely likable. You make your argument as strongly as you can, in order to maximize the discrepancy between
the argument presented and the initial attitude of the audience. And then you sit back, relax, and wait for those
opinions to start changing.
It's not that simple, however. Imagine a typical viewer: Let's say she is a 45-year-old, middle-class real estate
broker who believes the government interferes too much in private life. She feels any form of social legislation
undermines the spirit of individuality, which, she believes is the essence of democracy. She tunes in your program
while looking for an evening's entertainment. She begins to hear your arguments in favor of free health care. As
she listens, she becomes slightly less confident in her original convictions. She is not quite as certain as she
had been that the government shouldn't intervene in matters of health. What does she do?
If she is anything like the subjects in an experiment conducted by Lance Canon, she would reach over, turn the
dial on her television set, and begin to watch Wheel of Fortune.1 Canon found that, as one's confidence is weakened,
a person becomes less prone to listen to arguments against his or her beliefs. Thus the very people you most want
to convince and whose opinions might be the most susceptible to being changed are the ones least likely to continue
to expose themselves to a communication designed for that purpose.
Information campaigns frequently fail to change attitudes, a fact of persuasive life that was observed by Herbert
Hyman and Paul Sheatsley as far back as 1947.2 In explaining the frequent failure of information campaigns, Hyman
and Sheatsley noted that people tend to acquire information mostly about things that they find of interest and
tend to avoid information that does not agree with their beliefs. Should someone find that they have been unavoidably
exposed to uninteresting and disagreeable information, a common response is to distort and reinterpret that information,
thus ignoring its implications for updating beliefs and attitudes.
Despite these apparent psychological barriers, attempts to influence attitudes and change behavior by providing
reasonable information -- whether it be a mass mailing on the AIDS epidemic from the U.S. Surgeon General, crisis
information in the front of the phone book, a Ross Perot political infomercial, or our health insurance documentary
-- are as common as ever. To the extent that such campaigns fail to consider our tendency to expose ourselves selectively
to information and systematically to distort discrepant communications, they are likely to fail.
Must you resign yourself to broadcasting your message to an audience composed of viewers who already support national
health insurance? That may be the case -- if you insist on airing a serious documentary devoted to the issue. After
considering your alternatives, however, you might decide to take another approach.
You call a meeting of your network executives. The programming director is instructed to commission several scripts
dramatizing the plight of families facing financial ruin because of high medical costs associated with serious
illness. You order the news department to do some feature segments on the success of national health insurance
in other countries. Finally, you provide the late-night talk show host with a couple of jokes he might tell about
his inept but affluent doctor.
Although none of these communications would match the documentary in terms of the information provided, their cumulative
impact could be more significant. Embedded in dramas or news segments, they would not necessarily come labeled
as arguments supporting national health insurance; they seem innocuous, but their message is clear. Not appearing
to be explicit attempts at persuasion, they should arouse little resistance, avoiding an inoculation effect and
inhibiting the formation of counterarguments by distracting the audience. Most importantly, people will probably
watch them without switching channels.
The use of entertaining programs to disseminate a point of view has been successful in achieving high audience
ratings and in changing people's attitudes and behaviors.3 For example, the Harvard Alcohol Project convinced TV
producers to include "designated drivers" in the scripts of 35 prime-time television series during the
1989-1990 season as a means of promoting this alternative to drinking and driving. Subsequent research revealed
an increase in the use of designated drivers as a result of the shows.
However, must we abandon the mass media as a means of communicating critical information and accept programs delivering
trivial entertainment? Cy Schneider thinks so, especially when it comes to our children. Mr. Schneider has created
over a 1,000 kids' commercials for over 400 products including such notables as the Barbie doll, Chatty Cathy,
and Agent Zero M. He has also been involved in the production of children shows sponsored by the toy-maker Mattel
such as Matty's Funday Funnies and Beany and Cecil. He offers this apology for the state of children's television:
The fact is that better shows, programs with more substance, have been tried over and over again by the commercial
networks and stations. For the most part they have not attracted a large audience and consequently are not economically
practical. There is only so much of this kind of programming that television is willing to support.4
Although it may be difficult to use the mass media to convey information, it is not impossible. Information campaigns
can succeed if they follow these simple rules: (a) make the program entertaining (a principle we observed in the
previous chapter), (b) do not directly attack a viewer's attitudes and beliefs, and (c) use the tactics described
in this book to make the program persuasive.5 For example, during World War II, a radio program hosted by singer
Kate Smith was highly successful in strengthening American commitment to the war effort and selling $39 million
worth of bonds to finance the war.6 In 1965, CBS sought to promote safe driving by airing The National Drivers
Test -- an involving show where drivers were given a quiz about how to handle road situations; the show was viewed
by 30 million Americans of whom 1.5 million wrote CBS for more information.7 Both of these programs followed these
rules.
Public television has attempted one of the most ambitious efforts to use the mass media to inform and teach with
such shows as Sesame Street (to encourage academic achievement) and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood (to promote positive
social relations). The logic behind these shows is clear: By the time a typical American child graduates from high
school, he or she will have spent more time in front of a television set (17,000 hours) than in a classroom (11,000
hours).
The efforts appear promising.8 Sesame Street has been on the air since 1969 and is watched on a weekly basis by
about half of all preschoolers in America. It features a lovable set of characters -- Bert & Ernie, Elmo, Big
Bird, and Oscar the Grouch -- and a sequence of fast-moving, attention-getting segments that teach such skills
as counting, letter and number recognition, and vocabulary. Early evaluations of the program found that preschoolers
who watched Sesame Street showed significant gains on education tests measuring knowledge of letters and numbers
and on tests of matching, sorting, and classifying skills. However, there is a fly in the ointment: In natural
settings not all children watch Sesame Street, particularly those from disadvantaged homes (the originally intended
audience). However, this problem can be overcome if viewing is encouraged in the home or through highly successful
early intervention programs such as Head Start.
Positive results have also been obtained for shows such as Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. On this program, Fred Rogers
creates an accepting atmosphere where children can discover such things as how plants grow or tortilla chips are
made, learn that each person (including you) is special, and take a trolley to the "land of make-believe"
where imaginations explore the social world. Research finds that children who watch such shows on a regular basis
are more likely to be altruistic and co-operative with their peers and to engage in other forms of pro-social behavior.
Contrary to the opinion of Mr. Schneider, it does appear that TV can offer higher quality shows that inform and
teach; we can educate as we entertain.
Although "teaching as we entertain" is a laudable goal (especially for our children), it is often easier
said than done. This is particularly the case when dealing with "adult" issues that can be complex, rapidly
developing, and require the communication of sophisticated and detailed information. In such cases, it may be difficult
or impossible to provide the needed information in a highly dramatic, highly personalized, and very entertaining
manner.
Robert Entman argues that, although the opportunity to gain more information about political affairs has increased
dramatically in the last twenty years, Americans' interest in and knowledge of such affairs have not increased
and may well have declined during this period.9 The public, the press, and political leaders appear to be caught
in a spiral. The communication of complex information requires an interested and informed public. Without an educated
audience, journalists and leaders must simplify their message and package it as "entertainment," thus
reducing further the sophistication of the public at large. The result may be, as Entman puts it in the title of
his book, A Democracy Without Citizens. Many of us lament the unrealistic cartoon world that our children view
every day on television and demand more educational fare. We would argue that, as adults, we should have the same
laments and demands for ourselves.
Review
"Pratkanis and Aronson warn in their conclusion that we're all headed for an 'ignorance spiral' if we don't
stop American standards of persuasion from deteriorating. . . . Don't be part of the problem. Read the book."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"A people's guide to baloney-detecting."
--Seattle Times
"In one brilliant tour-de-force, Pratkanis and Aronson give us . . . a comprehensive text of what we really
need to know about the most pervasive cultural phenomena of our time."
--George Gerbner, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg School of Communication
"The authors . . . inform, provoke, and occasionally shock the reader about the ways in which our beliefs,
preferences, and choices are constantly influenced."
--Mahzarin Banaji, Yale University
"After reading this book, I have begun to doubt that I ever had much control over how I have been influenced
by media hype and clever half-truths."
--James Randi, debunker of psychic fraud and author of Flim-Flam and The Mask of Nostradamus
"I could easily list ten reasons why you should read this book, but your boss and colleagues will probably
tell you more about it at the office tomorrow--or worse, your competitors will show you next week."
--Peter H. Farquhar, Center for Product Research, Carnegie-Mellon University
". . . a gold mine of valuable information and insights into the persuasion process."
--Robert B. Cialdini, Arizona State University, and author of Influence
W.H. Freeman and Company Web Site, March, 2001
Summary
We live in an age of propaganda. Americans consume 57% of the world's advertising while representing only 6%
of the population, and half of our waking hours are spent with the mass media. Persuasion has always been integral
to the democratic process - it's how we make decisions, elect governments, do business, and resolve disputes, but
increasingly, thoughtful discussion is being replaced with simplistic sound bites, manipulative messages, and deceptive
propaganda tactics.
An eye-opening analysis of the use and abuse of persuasion in daily life, Age of Propaganda reveals how persuasion
influences our behavior, which propaganda strategies are most commonly used today, and why some techniques work
better than others. Drawing on the history of propaganda and modern research in social psychology, the authors
show how the tactics used by political campaigners, sales agents, advertisers, televangelists, demagogues, and
others, often take advantage of our emotions by appealing to our deepest fears and most irrational hopes, creating
a distorted vision of the world we live in.
Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of Age of Propaganda includes coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky
scandal, recent election campaigns, the rise of talk radio, teen suicide, U.F.O abductions, the Columbine shootings,
and novel propaganda tactics based on hypocrisy and false allegations. Also included is a completely new chapter
on how to protect yourself from unwanted propaganda.
An invaluable guide to today's message-laden world, Age of Propaganda provides us with the knowledge we need to
understand how manipulative messages work, how to deal with them sensibly, and how to use persuasion wisely and
effectively.