Social psychology has been studying for many years the kinds of persuasion techniques that can be used to change attitudes and encourage people to behave in a particular way.
These studies aim not only to help implement engaging advertising campaigns, but also to reinforce changes that include healthy and appropriate attitudes.
- Eagly and Chaiken define the concept of attitude as “a psychological trend resulting from the assessment of the favorability or disadvantage of an object”.
The concept of attitude is usually represented in a continuum in which aspects of valence emerge (positive or negative character of attribution to the atnal object) and intensity (the gradation of this valencia).
Generally the attitude can be positive or negative, however, it is also possible to be neutral or indifferent.
For Rosenberg and Hovland, attitude would have three components: affective (feelings of pleasure-disgust), cognitive (beliefs, opinions and ideas) and cognitive behavioral (behavioral intentions or tendencies to action).
From social psychology different techniques or strategies were presented to change attitudes, in particular we have the following:
While there are some essential variables in the process of persuasion to change attitudes, such as the appearance and credibility of the source, whether the message is more rational or emotional, the information presented with examples or the promotion of the recipient’s self-efficacy are also specially developed techniques to influence people’s behavior.
The most important are as follows
The environment in which we live constantly bombards us with persuasive techniques.
In our system, changing people’s attitudes is an objective to achieve, both through the media and through politics and advertising, who are trying to sell us products that we often do not need or have not planned to buy.
Knowing all these techniques to change attitudes allows us to be more aware and be attentive not to fall into the traps, often want to manipulate us not only to make a purchase, but also to get our data for free.
It is worth knowing that, deep down, we do not need many objects or things that we have or do, we usually buy more by social influence than by will.
In that sense, it is never necessary to learn to distinguish between when we take the bait and when we make a free decision, in this way we will feel more responsible for our own decisions and will not be so influenced.