Content uploaded by Michael D Slater
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Michael D Slater on Oct 07, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Processing Social Information in MessagesSocial Group Familiarity, Fiction Versus Nonfiction, and Subsequent Beliefs
Abstract
This experiment examines the impact of messages on subsequent beliefs about social groups. As a result of probable differences between the processing of familiar versus unfamiliar social information, nonfiction messages are expected to influence beliefs about social group member characteristics more than do fiction messages only when the social group described is relatively familiar. The experiment is a 2 × 2 within-subjects design, with 16 stimuli arranged in a 4 × Greco-Latin square. Twenty-four subjects received one of four sets of prose excerpts, each excerpt labeled as fiction or nonfiction and manipulated to refer to a familiar or unfamiliar social group. Interactions between familiarity and fiction / nonfiction status on beliefs about social group member characteristics and on confidence in belief estimates are found. It is concluded that the impact of fiction messages about unfamiliar peoples on readers' beliefs may well be equal to or greater than that of nonfiction messages.
... Oben wurde bereits angedeutet, dass nicht nur der Realitätsgrad einer Sendung Kultivierungseffekte beeinflussen kann, sondern auch ihre Glaubwürdigkeit. So sind stärkere Effekte durch nonfiktionale oder Reality-Genres auch damit zu erklären, dass ihnen zumindest teilweise eine höhere Glaubwürdigkeit zugeschrieben wird als fiktionalen Sendungen (oder wie oben beschrieben billig produzierten Reality-Krimiserien Slater (1990) untersuchte den Einfluss unterschiedlich glaubwürdiger Prosatexte über soziale Gruppen auf die Wahrnehmung dieser sozialen Gruppen in der Realität. Die Glaubwürdigkeit der Texte wurde operationalisiert, indem sie als fiktional oder nonfiktional beschrieben wurden: "Messages believed to be nonfictional should be perceived as somewhat more credible with respect to their portrayals of people than are fictional messages." ...
... Diese Überlegung setzte Slater (1990) in einem zweifaktoriellen experimentellen Design mit Messwiederholung um. Variiert wurden das Genre der Prosatexte (fiktional vs. nicht fiktional) und die Bekanntheit der darin beschriebenen sozialen Gruppen (bekannt vs. unbekannt). ...
... In Anlehnung an Shapiro und Lang (1991) vermutet sie, dass sich das Auftreten von Kultivierungseffekten dadurch erklären lässt, dass die Fernsehzuschauer die Quelle ihrer aus dem Fernsehen gelernten Informationen und damit die mangelnde Glaubwürdigkeit von Fernsehinformationen schlichtweg vergessen: "Television's effects on social reality might be the result of individuals mistakenly remembering that something depicted on television was actually experienced." (Mares, 1996: S. 280) Wie Slater (1990) ging die Autorin davon aus, dass sich ein ähnlicher Effekt auch im Zusammenhang mit Nachrichten und fiktionalen Fernsehinhalten zeigen müsste. Die Glaubwürdigkeit von Nachrichtensendungen dürfte generell höher sein als die Glaubwürdigkeit fiktionaler Fernsehinhalte. ...
... Theoretically (Slater, 1990) (Eurostat, 2015) and the Spanish Youth Institute (Instituto de la Juventud, 2012). ...
Alcohol consumption represents a major problem for public health. As a consequence, there is a growing interest in understanding which communication strategies have the ability to increase the persuasive power of anti-alcohol campaigns. Many designers of health campaigns use both actors and real people interchangeably to deliver their messages. Nevertheless, little is known regarding which of these two types of message sources are more persuasive. Aim & Methodology. In this study, we used an experimental design to explore the effect of recipients’ perceptions of the message source (presented as either real people or actors) on their drinking intentions. Results. We observed a significant difference in the drinking intentions as an effect of our manipulation, depending on previous recipients’ drinking levels. Heavy consumers were more readily persuaded by the real source message. In contrast, light consumers showed less drinking intentions after receiving the message from the fictional source than from the real one. Conclusions. This indicates that in the context of anti-alcohol campaigns, the same strategy could have both positive and negative effects simultaneously on different target groups. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.
... These elements usually appear at the beginning or end of the advertisement, and are regarded as brand cues in this study. Further, brand cues (embedded brand information) are also part of the narrative content in MA (Karpinska-Krakowiak and Eisend 2020;Slater 1990). ...
With the rapid development of online advertising, mini-film advertising (MA) built on short plotlines has received substantial attention from enterprises. Despite their trending popularity, enterprises must consider how to achieve their advertising goals without compromising the independence and completeness of the MA narrative structure. In accordance with narrative transportation theory, 151 university students were divided into groups to explore the effect of brand cues (temporal and content cues) in MA for this study. The results indicated that a significant difference was observed among various groups regarding the influence of brand cues on advertising effect, the interaction effect of temporal cues (the beginning versus end of advertising), and content cues (brand name versus brand name with interpretative words), and the way transportation mediated the influence of brand cues on advertising effectiveness. Loneliness was used as a moderator for the relationship between brand cues and advertising effect. For people with a high level of loneliness, the brand name and interpretative words appearing at the beginning of the advertisement activated a positive advertising effect. These results can serve as a reference to help enterprises develop MA strategies.
... Much research has applied the use of persuasive tactics to real-world issues, showing the great practical utility of persuasion across many domains of social change. Indeed, examples of Persuasion and Social Change 4 persuasion successfully employed in the real-world can be found within political settings (Iyengar & McGrady, 2005), advertisements (Bitner & Obermiller, 1985;Kardes, 2005;Petty & Cacioppo, 1981a), scientific dissemination and public health campaigns (Leventhal & Cameron, 1994;Leventhal et al., 2005;Petty et al., 2009a), mass media appeals and entertainment (Green & Brock, 2000;Petty et al., 2009b;Slater, 1990;Slater & Rouner, 2002;Strange & Leung, 1999;Wheeler et al., 1999), and anti-drug campaigns (Petty et al., 1991), suggesting the widespread acceptance of persuasion as a method of commanding social change. ...
People orchestrating social change efforts benefit from various social influence strategies, among which persuasion is key. The Elaboration Likelihood Model is articulated and applied to social change. According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, persuasion variables can influence people when they are highly motivated/able to process (high elaboration), not motivated/able to process (low elaboration), or in an indeterminate state of processing capability (moderate elaboration). Research demonstrates how distinct processes explain the effects of persuasion variables at each level of elaboration likelihood. We use research that examined social change topics and provide examples of social change applications to show that the Elaboration Likelihood Model provides a useful explanatory guide to producing influential, lasting social change.
... This article employs a media framing analysis, which discerns "causal interpretations, moral evaluations, and treatment recommendations" in media coverage (Weaver, 2007, p. 143). This approach is relevant to the study of non-local populist actors because media frames are more likely to shape audiences' perceptions of reality about individuals and issues foreign to them (Slater, 1990). ...
Previous research has demonstrated that right-wing populist parties are particularly
successful in gaining engagement and interaction on social media, but less is known about how rightwing
populist parties use social media strategically, both in relation to voters and news media. By
focusing on two Nordic countries, Norway and Sweden, this paper addresses the strategic use of social
media within the Sweden Democrats and the Progress Party based on three different data sets: interviews,
content analysis of Facebook posts, and engagement data from the parties’ Facebook pages. This
study finds that the two populist parties basically follow up their social media strategy in practice, and
the Sweden Democrats are more closely following a populist communication logic in their Facebook
posts. The article argues that right-wing populist parties’ social media strategy and communication
style must be understood in relation to their position in the political system and the parties’ different
phases in the life cycle model of populist parties.
KEYWORDS: social media, political communication, populism, election, Norway, Sweden.
... Interestingly, transportation is not affected by whether the receiver knew the narrative to be fictive or true (Green & Brock, 2000. Furthermore, a number of studies indicate that fictive narratives can bring about changes in beliefs as much, if not more so, than factual ones (Green, 2004;Green & Brock, 2000;Slater, 1990;Strange & Leung, 1999). The traveller may know that these events did not happen but can still nevertheless experience real emotions and believe that similar events could take place in the real world in future (Green, 2004, p. 251). ...
Narrative has recently garnered in much attention in the study of terrorism but remains poorly understood. This paper offers some initial steps towards translating the promise of narrative approaches into a set of steps for systematically analysing and understanding terrorists’ own accounts of their engagement with extremism and militancy. This approach rests on the assumption that terrorist authored accounts are more than post-hoc rhetorical exercises that aim to persuade others, or even the authors themselves, of the righteousness of their political cause or otherwise mitigate their responsibility for their involvement in violence. In particular, I advance a framework for methodically applying narrative approaches to terrorist authored texts, in particular, autobiographies. In doing so, I will demonstrate how this approach can help better comprehend how individuals involved in militancy understand the world, draw upon existing narrative resources and give meaning to their actions.
This study is the first to approach the social theory of disability through film remakes, a technique that permits a novel comparative examination of the construction of autism in different countries. Two American films about characters with autism were compared to their respective Indian Hindi-language remakes by means of a quantitative content analysis. Analysis revealed differences in how disability was constructed across the original films and their remakes, indicating the influence of culture on the construction of disability. Specifically, the Indian remakes depicted characters with autism in more romantic interactions, interactions with children, and with more occupational abilities than the original American films. Religion also featured more in the Indian films in relation to autism. These findings are important because they extend application of social theory to autism, lending insight into the social construction of autism as a disability and, by extension, aiming for the transformation of people with autism.
What does it mean to be transported by a narrative?to create a world inside one’s head? How do experiences of narrative worlds alter our experience of the real world? In this book Richard Gerrig integrates insights from cognitive psychology and from research linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism to provide a cohesive account of what we have most often treated as isolated aspects of narrative experience.Drawing on examples from Tolstoy to Toni Morrison, Gerrig offers new analysis of some classic problems in the study of narrative. He discusses the ways in which we are cognitively equipped to tackle fictional and nonfictional narratives; how thought and emotion interact when we experience narrative; how narrative information influences judgments in the real world; and the reasons we can feel the same excitement and suspense when we reread a book as when we read it for the first time. Gerrig also explores the ways we enhance the experience of narratives, through finding solutions to textual dilemmas, enjoying irony at the expense of characters in the narrative, and applying a wide range of interpretive techniques to discover meanings concealed by and from authors.
Kuga Thas responds to an emerging need to see how personal stories of sexual minorities could be best told in contexts that are increasingly hostile to the language, values and principles of human rights. Conducted in Malaysia and inspired by Poletti’s analysis of Post Secret as an intimate public, Kuga Thas tests the strategies of discourse and materiality in the anonymous telling of first person narratives by sexual minorities and their allies. For this purpose, perceptual reframing is key to shift the weight of credibility from the storyteller’s identity to the story’s content. Discussing audience reception data to two digital stories, Kuga Thas points to how stories for human rights may need to allow audiences to “fill in the blanks” to be persuasive.
Presents a theory of norms and normality and applies the theory to phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it with the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. (3 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A theoretical distinction is made between trait categorization in person perception and categorization by means of well-articulated, concrete social stereotypes. Three studies test the prediction that social stereotypes are both more associatively rich and more distinctive than are trait-defined categories. In Study 1, subjects sorted adjectives related to extraversion and introversion. A cluster analysis using similarity measures derived from the sorting indicated that distinct social stereotypes were associated with each trait. This supports and extends earlier findings (Cantor & Mischel, 1979). In Study 2, subjects generated attributes of the trait categories and stereotypes that emerged in Study 1. More nonredundant attributes, especially visible features, were listed for the stereotypes than for the trait categories. Study 3 elicited the explicit associative structure of traits and related stereotypes by having subjects rate the association between a series of attributes (derived from the responses in Study 2) and each category label. Results showed that social stereotypes have distinctive features that are not shared with the related trait category, whereas trait categories share virtually all of their features with related stereotypes. The implications of the trait/stereotype distinction for social information processing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments were conducted to assess the susceptibility of attitudes formed by either direct experience (DE) or indirect experience (IE) to proattitudinal or counterattitudinal messages delivered by a highly credible or a less credible source. The results were generally consistent with Fazio and Zanna's (1981) theory of DE and IE attitudes and with predictions derived from Petty and Cacioppo's (1981, 1986) elaboration likelihood model. In Experiment 1, DE attitudes proved to be more resistant to a counterattitudinal appeal than were IE attitudes. Moreover, the final attitudes of DE participants reflected these subjects' cognitive elaborations of the message arguments (i.e., the central route to persuasion), whereas the attitudinal responses of IE participants were affected more by source characteristics (i.e., peripheral cues). In Experiment 2, DE attitudes became more extreme in response to a proattitudinal appeal, but IE attitudes did not. In addition, the polarization shifts shown by DE participants were in keeping with these subjects' predominantly favorable elaborations of the message, whereas the attitudes of IE participants were more closely related to subjects' impressions of the communicator. Thus, DE attitudes were more resistant to attack and, yet, more susceptible to proattitudinal influence than were attitudes originating from IE. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The hypothesized operation of personality traits as conceptual prototypes, analogous to visual-pattern prototypes or scripts for everyday episodes, was investigated in a recognition memory paradigm. 200 trait adjectives were rated for degree of relatedness (high, moderate, minimal) to the prototype concepts extravert and introvert . Selected adjectives were then used to describe 4 characters: an extravert, an introvert, and 2 unextraverted and unintroverted characters. 38 undergraduates participated in a prototype explicit condition (in which the extravert and introvert characters were explicitly identified) and 38 took part in a prototype implicit condition. Data from the recognition memory test revealed significant bias in recognition toward conceptually related but nonrepresented items, as predicted, for only the introvert and extravert characters in both the prototype explicit and implicit conditions. The total results suggest the coexistence of veridical and prototype-biased memory for personality information and closely parallel the findings for simple prototypes (e.g., visual patterns) in cognitive psychology. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In Exp I, 183 undergraduates read a persuasive message from a likable or unlikable communicator who presented 6 or 2 arguments on 1 of 2 topics. High involvement (HI) Ss anticipated discussing the message topic at a future experimental session, whereas low-involvement (LI) Ss anticipated discussing a different topic. For HI Ss, opinion change was significantly greater given 6 arguments but was unaffected by communicator likability. For LI Ss, opinion change was significantly greater given a likable communicator but was unaffected by the argument's manipulation. In Exp II with 80 similar Ss, HI Ss showed slightly greater opinion change when exposed to 5 arguments from an unlikable (vs 1 argument from a likable) communicator, whereas LI Ss exhibited significantly greater persuasion in response to 1 argument from a likable (vs 5 arguments from an unlikable) communicator. Findings support the idea that HI leads message recipients to employ a systematic information processing strategy in which message-based cognitions mediate persuasion, whereas LI leads recipients to use a heuristic processing strategy in which simple decision rules mediate persuasion. Support was also obtained for the hypothesis that content- vs source-mediated opinion change would result in greater persistence. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)
The relationship specified by the cultivation hypothesis was elaborated by using a concept of perceived reality that included the dimensions of Magic Window, Instruction, and Identity. As in previous studies, the cultivation effect was nonsignificant after controls for demographics were introduced. However, the cultivation effect was found in certain subgroups of subjects partitioned according to their level of perceived reality.
This essay illuminates critical findings, limitations, and assumptions underlying the literature on perceived reality. Following a process of construct validation, the paper is structured to develop a conceptual definition and to hypothesize how the elements of that definition should be logically and empirically related to other relevant concepts and their measures. Perceived reality should be regarded as a multidimensional construct composed of magic window, utility, and identity elements. The existing research is critically evaluated to determine the extent to which each definitional element is supported.
Concludes that adolescent aggression increases with perceived reality of television violence. (FL)