Page 119 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

108 TODAY’S BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

have the same affect on another person. As always with communication,
the more you know about your audience, the better able you will be to
achieve your message’s strategic objectives.

How People Process Information About You

As we said previously, when confronted by persuasive messages, people
process information about both the message and its sender. This should
make sense because we all know that messages are not processed in a
vacuum. Although we know that people we may think of as “crackpots,”
“know nothings,” or “do littles,” can occasionally have brilliant ideas, we
are less likely to believe them when they share those ideas. These people
aren’t terribly convincing because we have a difficult time separating our
thoughts about the message from our thoughts about the sender. This
failure is a fallacy that audiences make called the genetic fallacy, where we
believe the origin of an idea affects its quality. Research tells us that what
seems to matter most when people are processing information about the
senders of persuasive appeals are credibility and likability.
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Let’s consider credibility. In Chapter 1, we shared with you our
conclusion that your credibility drives your effectiveness. In that chapter,
we discussed that credibility comprises your trustworthiness (warmth)
and expertise (strength). A recent article in Harvard Business Review
described the significance of these two traits.

Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two crit-
ical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?”
and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together
these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions
to other people, groups, and even brands and companies.
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Those professionals with the most persuasive power are thought to have
both trustworthiness and expertise. The tricky thing about these traits
is that they are, what social scientists call, perceiver constructs. In other
words, nobody possesses credibility. Instead, a person’s credibility exists
entirely in the mind of the perceiver (i.e., the audience). Therefore, we are
only as credible as our audience believes us to be. All of this must beg the
question, How can we get others to perceive us as trustworthy experts?