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Resistance To Persuasion

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What are people attitudes when they are resistance to change? According to Zuwerink & Devine (1996) mentions that although there has been plenty of research done on persuasion, few have focused on the thoughts and behavior when resistance occurs (Zuwerink & Devine, 1996). Everything in our everyday life from TV, to radio, to the wide web prevail in using persuasion to affect the choices we make. In order to set a compass to understand and evaluate resistance to persuasion, we divide it the two processes of persuasion: peripheral route and central route. Zuwerink & Devine describe them as affective and cognitive processing (Zuwerink & Devine, 1996). In order to understand resistance, they had to think about what exactly is considered a strong …show more content…

There are those individuals that strongly hold true to those beliefs and those who feel uncertain towards their beliefs. Swann, Pelham and Chidester’s (1988) research attempted to change the beliefs of those individuals that resist (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). They constructed questions which remained consistent with the beliefs of the individual but more towards an extremist point of view (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). They expected the individuals how had a high certainty in their beliefs would be more resistance towards the more extreme questions, therefore changing their beliefs in the opposite direction, momentarily (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). The first study was to demonstrate the contrast between standard questions on women’s roles versus the extreme questions and the control group was given unbiased questions (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). The study resulted in a weak correlation for low certainty believers would change with standard questions nor, high certainty believer changed for extreme questions (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). The second study was to study the dimensions of the individuals change in thought. Were the changes in beliefs reported from the previous study significant to change their entire view on women role’s or did the individual agreed with changing their beliefs because they were aware or concerned of how they would appear to others if they had agreed to those extreme questions (Swann, Pelham and Chidester, 1988). In the end, their research was sufficient in concluding that individuals with low-certainty beliefs are easily persuaded; individuals with high-certainty beliefs can momentarily change their belief and thus be persuaded with paradoxical questions that shock their self perceptions (Swann, Pelham and Chidester,

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