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Effect Of Distraction On Persuasion

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3) Audience Variables How much the audience is attending to the material also influences persuasion. There are two contrasting hypotheses put forth on the effect of distraction on persuasion; distraction hypothesis and learning-theory hypothesis (Haaland & Venkatesan 1986). Distraction hypothesis suggests that distraction enhances persuasion especially when the content of the message contains information that would attack the recipient’s beliefs. For example, a study conducted by Festinger and Maccoby (Haaland et al. 1968) depicted this effect. The participants, who were members of fraternities, were presented a speech recording that argued against fraternities. Some of the participants just listened to the speech (no-distraction group) while others watched a silent movie while listening to it (distraction group). Attitude change was more pronounced in the distracted group. The …show more content…

Studies found that young adults and older adults to be more persuadable, whereas middle adults tend to be resistant to attitude change (Eaton ,Visser, Krosnick, Anand 2009). There have been some theories looking at why certain ages are more susceptible to attitude change than others. Studies looking at this found that younger people tend to be susceptible to attitude change since they are still at early stage of socialization (Krosnick & Alwin 1957). Other studies looked at middle adults and positions of power at work. Studies suggest that the reason for their resistance could be due to role middle adults take in the workplace (especially in places of power) where it’s expected for one to be unyielding. A series of studies (Eaton et al. 2009) found that middle adults had internalized this role and became a part of their self-concept. It also found that when exposing persuasive messages to different age groups, the middle adults indeed displayed less attitude change than the younger and

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