Persuasion Theories And The Domino Model

Key concepts in Communication defines persuasion as being “Intentional influence of opinions, beliefs, values or attitudes by an external agency.”(O’Sullivan et al, 1994, p.224) It is a carefully planned process that when executed effectively can successfully sway a person to slightly change, or even completely abandon their current opinions and feelings towards a subject. The media is often responsible for attitude changes towards small, peripheral issues such as a football team or a brand of laundry detergent. However, persuasion as we use it in PR is typically not strong enough to drastically alter centrally held issues. For example, no matter how persuasive a campaign about Christianity may be, it is highly unlikely that a Buddhist would be persuaded to abandon their religion and adopt an entirely n

Another theory we can look at that applies to messages is Greenwald’s Cognitive Response theory. This looks at the thought process of a message recipient and how these thoughts relate to their existing beliefs. For example, if there is a campaign promoting Western Australia and how exciting it is but a person has already been there and decided otherwise, they will not fully adopt the intended attitude that WA is exciting. The Cognitive theory suggests that we are aware of this problem and that there are two things to consider when constructing a message to avoid this- the current involvement of the individual, and distraction methods. A person highly involved with a particular issue will be more likely to have a strong response, like our example did. However if they have no involvement in the issue they may have no response at all. For these reasons distraction methods are vital to avoid negative cognitive thoughts. In our example, this could mean saying bad things about other states in comparison to WA to distract from WA’s own downfalls.

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