Page 111 - The Social Animal

Mass Communication, Propaganda, and Persuasion 93

In addition, the more vivid the examples are, the greater their
persuasive power. A real-life demonstration of this comes from the
area of energy conservation. Several years ago, my students and I set
out to persuade homeowners to make the improvements necessary to
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have an energy-efficient house. We worked with home auditors
from local utility companies and taught them to use vivid examples
when recommending home improvements. For example, most audi-
tors, when left to their own devices, simply point to cracks around
doors and recommend that the homeowner install weatherstripping.
Instead, we trained several auditors to tell homeowners that if all the
cracks around all the doors were added up, they would equal a hole
the size of a basketball in their living room wall. “And if you had a
hole that size in your wall, wouldn’t you want to patch it up? That’s
what weather-stripping does.” The results were striking. Auditors
trained to use this kind of vivid language increased their effectiveness
fourfold; whereas previously only 15 percent of the homeowners had
the recommended work done, after the auditors began to use more
vivid communication, this increased to 61 percent. Most people are
more deeply influenced by one clear, vivid, personal example than by
an abundance of statistical data. Thus, your friend’s Volvo story or
the thought of a basketball-sized hole in your living room will prob-
ably be extraordinarily powerful.

One-Sided Versus Two-Sided Arguments Suppose you are
about to make a speech attempting to persuade your audience that
capital punishment is necessary. Would you persuade more people if
you simply stated your view and ignored the arguments against cap-
ital punishment, or would you be more persuasive if you discussed
the opposing arguments and attempted to refute them? Before try-
ing to answer this question, let us take a close look at what is in-
volved. If a communicator mentions the opposition’s arguments, it
might indicate that he or she is an objective, fair-minded person; this
could enhance the speaker’s trustworthiness and thus increase his or
her effectiveness. On the other hand, if a communicator so much as
mentions the arguments on the other side of the issue, it might sug-
gest to the audience that the issue is controversial; this could confuse
members of the audience, make them vacillate, and ultimately reduce
the persuasiveness of the communication. With these possibilities in
mind, it should not come as a surprise to the reader that there is no