Pratkanis, Anthony : University of California-Santa Cruz

Anthony Pratkanis is professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has appeared on many television and radio shows, including "Dateline NBC," "CNN," and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the author of many articles on persuasion practices.

Aronson, Elliot : University of California-Santa Cruz

Elliot Aronson is one of our nation's most eminent social psychologists. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Visting Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. The author of seventeen books, including Nobody Left to Hate (W. H. Freeman, 2000) and the award-winning classic The Social Animal, he is the recent recipient of the American Psychological Associations highest award for a lifetime of scientific contributions.

33 ON THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS
Suppose you inherited controlling interest in a television network. Here is a golden opportunity to influence people's opinions on important issues. Let's say you are an enthusiastic proponent of national health insurance, and you would like to persuade others to agree with you. Having read about the persuasion tactics described in this book, you know how to do it, and you are in control of a very powerful medium of communication. How do you set about doing it?

That's simple: You choose a time slot following a highly intellectual program (in order to be certain that well-informed people are watching) and, accordingly, you present a two-sided argument (because two-sided arguments work best on well-informed people). You arrange your arguments in such a manner that the argument in favor of national health insurance is stronger and appears first (in order to be fresh in the viewer's mind). You describe the plight of the poor, how they get sick more frequently and die earlier for lack of affordable medical care. You frame the need for national health care in terms of a personal loss for the viewer -- the current piecemeal system is costly and driving up taxes. You use vivid personal examples of people you know. You discuss these events in a manner that inspires great fear; at the same time, you offer a specific plan of action, because this combination produces the most opinion change and the most action in the most people. You present some of the arguments against your position and offer strong refutation of these arguments. You arrange for the speaker to be expert, trustworthy, and extremely likable. You make your argument as strongly as you can, in order to maximize the discrepancy between the argument presented and the initial attitude of the audience. And then you sit back, relax, and wait for those opinions to start changing.

It's not that simple, however. Imagine a typical viewer: Let's say she is a 45-year-old, middle-class real estate broker who believes the government interferes too much in private life. She feels any form of social legislation undermines the spirit of individuality, which, she believes is the essence of democracy. She tunes in your program while looking for an evening's entertainment. She begins to hear your arguments in favor of free health care. As she listens, she becomes slightly less confident in her original convictions. She is not quite as certain as she had been that the government shouldn't intervene in matters of health. What does she do?

If she is anything like the subjects in an experiment conducted by Lance Canon, she would reach over, turn the dial on her television set, and begin to watch Wheel of Fortune.1 Canon found that, as one's confidence is weakened, a person becomes less prone to listen to arguments against his or her beliefs. Thus the very people you most want to convince and whose opinions might be the most susceptible to being changed are the ones least likely to continue to expose themselves to a communication designed for that purpose.

Information campaigns frequently fail to change attitudes, a fact of persuasive life that was observed by Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley as far back as 1947.2 In explaining the frequent failure of information campaigns, Hyman and Sheatsley noted that people tend to acquire information mostly about things that they find of interest and tend to avoid information that does not agree with their beliefs. Should someone find that they have been unavoidably exposed to uninteresting and disagreeable information, a common response is to distort and reinterpret that information, thus ignoring its implications for updating beliefs and attitudes.

Despite these apparent psychological barriers, attempts to influence attitudes and change behavior by providing reasonable information -- whether it be a mass mailing on the AIDS epidemic from the U.S. Surgeon General, crisis information in the front of the phone book, a Ross Perot political infomercial, or our health insurance documentary -- are as common as ever. To the extent that such campaigns fail to consider our tendency to expose ourselves selectively to information and systematically to distort discrepant communications, they are likely to fail.

Must you resign yourself to broadcasting your message to an audience composed of viewers who already support national health insurance? That may be the case -- if you insist on airing a serious documentary devoted to the issue. After considering your alternatives, however, you might decide to take another approach.

You call a meeting of your network executives. The programming director is instructed to commission several scripts dramatizing the plight of families facing financial ruin because of high medical costs associated with serious illness. You order the news department to do some feature segments on the success of national health insurance in other countries. Finally, you provide the late-night talk show host with a couple of jokes he might tell about his inept but affluent doctor.

Although none of these communications would match the documentary in terms of the information provided, their cumulative impact could be more significant. Embedded in dramas or news segments, they would not necessarily come labeled as arguments supporting national health insurance; they seem innocuous, but their message is clear. Not appearing to be explicit attempts at persuasion, they should arouse little resistance, avoiding an inoculation effect and inhibiting the formation of counterarguments by distracting the audience. Most importantly, people will probably watch them without switching channels.

The use of entertaining programs to disseminate a point of view has been successful in achieving high audience ratings and in changing people's attitudes and behaviors.3 For example, the Harvard Alcohol Project convinced TV producers to include "designated drivers" in the scripts of 35 prime-time television series during the 1989-1990 season as a means of promoting this alternative to drinking and driving. Subsequent research revealed an increase in the use of designated drivers as a result of the shows.

However, must we abandon the mass media as a means of communicating critical information and accept programs delivering trivial entertainment? Cy Schneider thinks so, especially when it comes to our children. Mr. Schneider has created over a 1,000 kids' commercials for over 400 products including such notables as the Barbie doll, Chatty Cathy, and Agent Zero M. He has also been involved in the production of children shows sponsored by the toy-maker Mattel such as Matty's Funday Funnies and Beany and Cecil. He offers this apology for the state of children's television:

The fact is that better shows, programs with more substance, have been tried over and over again by the commercial networks and stations. For the most part they have not attracted a large audience and consequently are not economically practical. There is only so much of this kind of programming that television is willing to support.4

Although it may be difficult to use the mass media to convey information, it is not impossible. Information campaigns can succeed if they follow these simple rules: (a) make the program entertaining (a principle we observed in the previous chapter), (b) do not directly attack a viewer's attitudes and beliefs, and (c) use the tactics described in this book to make the program persuasive.5 For example, during World War II, a radio program hosted by singer Kate Smith was highly successful in strengthening American commitment to the war effort and selling $39 million worth of bonds to finance the war.6 In 1965, CBS sought to promote safe driving by airing The National Drivers Test -- an involving show where drivers were given a quiz about how to handle road situations; the show was viewed by 30 million Americans of whom 1.5 million wrote CBS for more information.7 Both of these programs followed these rules.

Public television has attempted one of the most ambitious efforts to use the mass media to inform and teach with such shows as Sesame Street (to encourage academic achievement) and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood (to promote positive social relations). The logic behind these shows is clear: By the time a typical American child graduates from high school, he or she will have spent more time in front of a television set (17,000 hours) than in a classroom (11,000 hours).

The efforts appear promising.8 Sesame Street has been on the air since 1969 and is watched on a weekly basis by about half of all preschoolers in America. It features a lovable set of characters -- Bert & Ernie, Elmo, Big Bird, and Oscar the Grouch -- and a sequence of fast-moving, attention-getting segments that teach such skills as counting, letter and number recognition, and vocabulary. Early evaluations of the program found that preschoolers who watched Sesame Street showed significant gains on education tests measuring knowledge of letters and numbers and on tests of matching, sorting, and classifying skills. However, there is a fly in the ointment: In natural settings not all children watch Sesame Street, particularly those from disadvantaged homes (the originally intended audience). However, this problem can be overcome if viewing is encouraged in the home or through highly successful early intervention programs such as Head Start.

Positive results have also been obtained for shows such as Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. On this program, Fred Rogers creates an accepting atmosphere where children can discover such things as how plants grow or tortilla chips are made, learn that each person (including you) is special, and take a trolley to the "land of make-believe" where imaginations explore the social world. Research finds that children who watch such shows on a regular basis are more likely to be altruistic and co-operative with their peers and to engage in other forms of pro-social behavior. Contrary to the opinion of Mr. Schneider, it does appear that TV can offer higher quality shows that inform and teach; we can educate as we entertain.

Although "teaching as we entertain" is a laudable goal (especially for our children), it is often easier said than done. This is particularly the case when dealing with "adult" issues that can be complex, rapidly developing, and require the communication of sophisticated and detailed information. In such cases, it may be difficult or impossible to provide the needed information in a highly dramatic, highly personalized, and very entertaining manner.

Robert Entman argues that, although the opportunity to gain more information about political affairs has increased dramatically in the last twenty years, Americans' interest in and knowledge of such affairs have not increased and may well have declined during this period.9 The public, the press, and political leaders appear to be caught in a spiral. The communication of complex information requires an interested and informed public. Without an educated audience, journalists and leaders must simplify their message and package it as "entertainment," thus reducing further the sophistication of the public at large. The result may be, as Entman puts it in the title of his book, A Democracy Without Citizens. Many of us lament the unrealistic cartoon world that our children view every day on television and demand more educational fare. We would argue that, as adults, we should have the same laments and demands for ourselves.

"Pratkanis and Aronson warn in their conclusion that we're all headed for an 'ignorance spiral' if we don't stop American standards of persuasion from deteriorating. . . . Don't be part of the problem. Read the book."

--Philadelphia Inquirer

"A people's guide to baloney-detecting."

--Seattle Times

"In one brilliant tour-de-force, Pratkanis and Aronson give us . . . a comprehensive text of what we really need to know about the most pervasive cultural phenomena of our time."

--George Gerbner, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg School of Communication

"The authors . . . inform, provoke, and occasionally shock the reader about the ways in which our beliefs, preferences, and choices are constantly influenced."

--Mahzarin Banaji, Yale University

"After reading this book, I have begun to doubt that I ever had much control over how I have been influenced by media hype and clever half-truths."

--James Randi, debunker of psychic fraud and author of Flim-Flam and The Mask of Nostradamus

"I could easily list ten reasons why you should read this book, but your boss and colleagues will probably tell you more about it at the office tomorrow--or worse, your competitors will show you next week."

--Peter H. Farquhar, Center for Product Research, Carnegie-Mellon University

". . . a gold mine of valuable information and insights into the persuasion process."

--Robert B. Cialdini, Arizona State University, and author of Influence

W.H. Freeman and Company Web Site, March, 2001

We live in an age of propaganda. Americans consume 57% of the world's advertising while representing only 6% of the population, and half of our waking hours are spent with the mass media. Persuasion has always been integral to the democratic process - it's how we make decisions, elect governments, do business, and resolve disputes, but increasingly, thoughtful discussion is being replaced with simplistic sound bites, manipulative messages, and deceptive propaganda tactics.

An eye-opening analysis of the use and abuse of persuasion in daily life, Age of Propaganda reveals how persuasion influences our behavior, which propaganda strategies are most commonly used today, and why some techniques work better than others. Drawing on the history of propaganda and modern research in social psychology, the authors show how the tactics used by political campaigners, sales agents, advertisers, televangelists, demagogues, and others, often take advantage of our emotions by appealing to our deepest fears and most irrational hopes, creating a distorted vision of the world we live in.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of Age of Propaganda includes coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, recent election campaigns, the rise of talk radio, teen suicide, U.F.O abductions, the Columbine shootings, and novel propaganda tactics based on hypocrisy and false allegations. Also included is a completely new chapter on how to protect yourself from unwanted propaganda.

An invaluable guide to today's message-laden world, Age of Propaganda provides us with the knowledge we need to understand how manipulative messages work, how to deal with them sensibly, and how to use persuasion wisely and effectively.