Hello Everyone
Hope your having a good week
Today I would like to talk to you about how ads persuade you to do something, to take action. Giving you a better understanding of how are brains process persuasion of a message.
Every Day you’re bombarded with ads, salespeople or friends trying to persuade you to do something, like watch a new show on Netflix or try out some new product. Those messages don’t always convince you, but sometimes they do and you might not even realize its happening. But why are you persuaded to take action.
Dozens of factors can cause you to agree or disagree with a message and a lot of them have to do with how you Respond to persuasion in the first place. But if you can recognize when you’re being persuaded, it’s a lot easier to stop and make sure your opinions are actually your own.
A lot of researchers who study persuasion think about it in terms of what’s called the elaboration likelihood model, or ELM, Which divides your response to persuasion in to two main categories.
Central Route:
Where you thoughtfully consider a message
Peripheral Route:
Where you make a decision using quick judgement or what’s otherwise known us gut feeling.
When Do You Use Each Routes
Most of the time, you end up using the peripheral route when viewing ads like in a product commercial where you decide the actor playing a doctor for example- knows where she is talking about because she’s wearing a white coat.
A few things can affect which row be you choice to take. Some are personality traits, like what’s known as the need for cognition, which describes how much people like to think about things. People with a higher need for cognition tend to pay close attention to arguments, white people with Low need prefer to make decisions based on guide and cues like how credible someone is.
One experiment in 1986 showed that people with a high need are more likely to take the central route, while those with a low need tend to take the peripheral route.
In the study of researchers presented a few hundred Uni students with strong and weak arguments for raising the school’s tuition. They found that strong arguments were more persuasive than weak ones, but especially when students had a high need for cognition if you care about a topic you most likely take the central route but if you don’t care or are busy then you most likely will go for the peripheral route.
Other factors
Other factors are less straight forward, for example Feeling an emotion can persuade you in different ways to depending on the situation. An emotion could be critical evidence other times your emotions can influence your opinions without you actively thinking about it.
So there are a lot of different things that can affect whether a commercial or ad will persuade you. None of them are guaranteed to work though especially, if you realize what’s happening. Your mind is your own and everybody is a bit ‘different.
That’s all for today until next time this has been Jack Thomson
