Book Review: Resistance and Persuasion

In all social relations, we want people to go along with us, affirm our views, and act in our support. Trying to do these things is an exercise in persuasion. Influence is more embracing in that we commonly influence people, positively or negatively, without any attempt to persuade. This book of readings on the subject of resistance to persuasion is written by psychologists, mainly social psychologists, because, as one article says: “The study of persuasion is at the core of social psychology, communication, rhetoric, advertising and public relations” (chap. 7, p. 117). The readings supplement books like the Pratkanis and Aronson (2001) book, The Age of Propaganda, though a few of the articles go over old ground. Most of the experiments are on various student populations. Under experimental conditions, contexts can be fixed, which is not true in the real world. Nonetheless, we suspect discernibly similar findings in real life. Resistance is one of those words that can be treated as a product (outcome) in the form of a refusal to go along with the persuasive message, or as a motivational process wherein barriers and counterarguments are developed to combat persuasive messages. In selling, we speak of overcoming objections rather than overcoming resistance to the salesperson’s persuasive endeavors. Every buying situation is an approachavoidance situation in that there are approach motives and avoidance motives. One of the readings by Knowles and Linn (chapter 7) specifically views approach-avoidance as reflecting two broad strategies that encompass the tactics in persuasion. “Alpha” strategies persuade by increasing the approach forces, whereas “Omega” strategies persuade by decreasing the avoidance forces of reluctance to change. Knowles and Linn quote the early Dollard and Miller (1950) work, showing that, in an approach-avoidance situation, as we move closer to the goal desired, the avoidance gradients arise more steeply than the approach gradients, which suggests the need for that final promotional push. Knowles and Linn argue that persuasion has focused largely on Alpha approaches, that is, enhancing the desirability of the approach factors by making messages more persuasive, adding incentives, increasing source credibility, emphasizing scarcity, engaging the norm of reciprocity, and emphasizing consistency and commitment, rather than dealing with the avoidance factors. Dollard and Miller focus on studying the resistance or avoidance factors in terms of enhancing resistance or reducing them. Convincing someone to resist is typically more difficult than providing excuses to accept. Thus, in general, overcoming resistance is more difficult when selling than getting the buyer to want the product. Knowles and Linn also quote McGuire (1964), who first suggested the “inoculation” strategy, where the motivation to resist is built up while providing those to be persuaded with the “weapons” of resistance. Targets of the persuasive message are taught to adopt attitude bolstering, involving the selective recall of information that supports current attitudes or providing them with information that derogates the source of the persuasive message. Another reference is to Brehm (1966), who talked of “cognitive reactance” as a source of resistance. A boomerang effect can occur if a persuasive message is perceived as a threat to one’s perceived freedom not to believe: reactance is anything that threatens freedom of choice. If the persuader is perceived as moving toward a position where the recipient feels his or her freedom of choice is being reduced, an uncomfortable state of reactance is said to occur which motivates an effort to resist and reassert one’s freedom. Knowles and Linn list the traditional Omega tactics of persuasion: