{"id":574,"date":"2025-05-14T02:43:47","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T02:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/?post_type=chapter&p=574"},"modified":"2025-07-13T21:20:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-13T21:20:40","slug":"why-is-persuasion-hard","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/chapter\/why-is-persuasion-hard\/","title":{"raw":"Why is Persuasion Hard?","rendered":"Why is Persuasion Hard?"},"content":{"raw":"Persuasion is hard mainly because we have a bias against change. As much as we hear statements like \u201cThe only constant is change\u201d or \u201cVariety is the spice of life,\u201d the evidence from research and from our personal experience shows that, in reality, we do not like change. Recent research, for example, in risk aversion, points to how we are more concerned about keeping from losing something than with gaining something. Change is often seen as a loss of something rather than a gain of something else. Change is a step into the unknown, a gamble (Vedantam & Greene, 2013).\r\n\r\nIn the 1960s psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe wanted to investigate the effect of stress on life and health. As explained on the Mindtools website:\r\n
They surveyed more than 5,000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experienced any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years. Each event, called a Life Change Unit (LCU), had a different \u201cweight\u201d for stress. The more events the patient added up, the higher the score. The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill. (The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, 2015)<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nYou can find the Holmes-Rahe stress scale on many websites. What you will find is that the stressful events almost all have to do with change in some life situations\u2014death of a close family member (which might rate 100 LCUs), loss of a job, even some good changes like the Christmas holidays (12 LCUs). Change is stressful. We do not generally embrace things that bring us stress.<\/span>\r\n\r\nAdditionally, psychologists have pointed to how we go out of our way to protect our beliefs, attitudes, and values. First, we selectively expose our- selves to messages that we already agree with, rather than those that confront or challenge us. This selective exposure <\/strong>is especially seen in choices of mass media that individuals listen to and read, whether TV, radio, or Internet sites. Not only do we selectively expose ourselves to information, we selectively attend to, perceive, and recall information that supports our existing viewpoints (referred to as selective attention, selective perception, and selective recall).\r\n
\r\n\r\nSelective exposure<\/strong>\r\n\r\nthe decision to expose ourselves to messages that we already agree with, rather than those that confront or challenge us\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThis principle led Leon Festinger (1957) to form the theory of cognitive dissonance<\/strong>, which states, among other ideas, that when we are confronted with conflicting information or viewpoints, we reach a state of dissonance. This state can be very uncomfortable, and we will do things to get rid of the dissonance and maintain \u201cconsonance.\u201d Ideally, at least for a public speaker, the dissonance is relieved or resolved by being persuaded (changed) to a new belief, attitude, or behavior. However, the easiest way to avoid dissonance is to not expose oneself to conflicting messages in the first place.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nCognitive dissonance<\/strong>\r\n\r\na psychological phenomenon where people confronted with conflicting information or viewpoints reach a state of dissonance (generally the disagreement between conflicting thoughts and\/or actions), which can be very uncomfortable, and results in actions to get rid of the dissonance and maintain consonance\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nAdditionally, as mentioned before, during a persuasive speech the audience members are holding a mental dialogue with the speaker or at least the speaker\u2019s content. They are putting up rebuttals or counter-arguments. These have been called reservations <\/em>(as in the audience member would like to believe the speaker but has reservations about doing so). They could be called the \u201cyeah-buts\u201d\u2014the audience members are saying in their minds, \u201cYeah, I see what you are arguing, but\u2014\u201d. Reservations can be very strong, since, again, the bias is to be loss averse and not <\/em>to change our actions or beliefs.\r\n
\r\n\r\nIn a sense, the reasons not <\/em>to change can be stronger than even very logical reasons to <\/em>change. For example, you probably know a friend who will not wear a seatbelt in a car. You can say to your friend, \u201cDon\u2019t you know that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2009) says, and I quote, \u20181,652 lives could be saved and 22,372 serious injuries avoided each year on America\u2019s roadways if seat belt use rates rose to 90 percent in every state\u2019?\u201d What will your friend probably say, even though you have cited a credible source?\r\n\r\nThey will come up with some reason for not wearing it, even something as dramatic as \u201cI knew a guy who had a cousin who was in an accident and the cop said he died because he was wearing his seatbelt.\u201d You may have had this conversation, or one like it. Their arguments may be less dramatic, such as \u201cI don\u2019t like how it feels\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t like the government telling me what to do in my car.\u201d For your friend, the argument for wearing a seatbelt is not as strong as the argument against it, at least at this moment. If they are open-minded and can listen to evidence, they might experience cognitive dissonance and then be persuaded.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Solutions to the Difficulty of Persuasion<\/h2>\r\nWith these reasons for the resistance audience members would have to persuasion, what is a speaker to do? Here are some strategies.\r\n\r\nSince change is resisted, we do not make many large or major changes in our lives. We do, however, make smaller, concrete, step-by-step or incremental changes in our lives every day. Going back to our scale in Figure 13.1, trying to move an audience from -3 to +2 or +3 is too big a move.\r\n\r\nHaving reasonable persuasive goals is the first way to meet resistance. Even moving someone from -3 to -2 is progress, and over time these small shifts can eventually result in a significant amount of persuasion.\r\n\r\nSecondly, a speaker must \u201cdeal with the reservations.\u201d First, the speaker must acknowledge they exist, which shows audience awareness, but then the speaker must attempt to rebut or refute them. In reality, since persuasion involves a mental dialogue, your audience is more than likely thinking of counter-arguments in their minds. Therefore, including a refutation section in your speech, usually after your presentation of arguments in favor of your proposition, is a required and important strategy.\r\n\r\nHowever, there are some techniques for rebuttal or refutation that work better than others. You would not want to say, \u201cOne argument against my proposition is . . . , and that is wrong\u201d or \u201cIf you are one of the people who believe this about my proposition, you are wrong.\u201d On the other hand, you could say that the reservations are \u201cmisconceptions,\u201d \u201cmyths,\u201d or \u201cmistaken ideas\u201d that are commonly held about the proposition.\r\n\r\nGenerally, strong persuasive speeches offer the audience what are called <\/span>two-tailed arguments<\/strong>, which bring up a valid issue against your argument which you, as the speaker, must then refute. After acknowledging them and seeking to refute or rebut the reservations, you must also provide evidence for your refutation. Ultimately, this will show your audience that you are aware of both sides of the issue you are presenting and make you a more credible speaker. However, you cannot just say something like this:<\/span>\r\n
\r\n\r\nOne common misconception about wearing seatbelts is that if the car goes off a bridge and is sinking in water, you would not be able to release the belt and get out. First, that rarely happens.<\/em>\r\n\r\nSecond, if it did, getting the seat belt unbuckled would be the least of your worries. You would have to know how to get out of the car, not just the seat belt. Third, the seat belt would have protected you from any head injuries in such a crash, therefore keeping you conscious and able to help anyone else in the car.<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThis is a good start, but there are some assertions in here that would need support from a reliable source, such as the argument that the \u201csubmerging in water\u201d scenario is rare. If it has happened to someone you know, you probably would not think it is rare.\r\n
\r\n\r\nTwo-tailed arguments<\/strong>\r\n\r\na persuasive technique in which a speaker brings up a counter-argument to their own topic and then directly refutes the claim\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe third strategy is to keep in mind that since you are asking the audience to change something, they must view the benefits of the change as worth the stress of the change. If you do good audience analysis, you know they are asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d What benefit or advantage or improvement would happen for the audience members?\r\n\r\nIf the audience is being persuaded to sign an organ donor card, which is an altruistic action that cannot benefit them in any way because they will be dead, what would be the benefit? Knowing others would have better lives, feeling a sense of contribution to the good of humanity, and helping medical science might be examples. The point is that a speaker should be able to engage the audience at the level of needs, wants, and values as well as logic and evidence.","rendered":"

Persuasion is hard mainly because we have a bias against change. As much as we hear statements like \u201cThe only constant is change\u201d or \u201cVariety is the spice of life,\u201d the evidence from research and from our personal experience shows that, in reality, we do not like change. Recent research, for example, in risk aversion, points to how we are more concerned about keeping from losing something than with gaining something. Change is often seen as a loss of something rather than a gain of something else. Change is a step into the unknown, a gamble (Vedantam & Greene, 2013).<\/p>\n

In the 1960s psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe wanted to investigate the effect of stress on life and health. As explained on the Mindtools website:<\/p>\n

They surveyed more than 5,000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experienced any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years. Each event, called a Life Change Unit (LCU), had a different \u201cweight\u201d for stress. The more events the patient added up, the higher the score. The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill. (The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, 2015)<\/div>\n
\n

You can find the Holmes-Rahe stress scale on many websites. What you will find is that the stressful events almost all have to do with change in some life situations\u2014death of a close family member (which might rate 100 LCUs), loss of a job, even some good changes like the Christmas holidays (12 LCUs). Change is stressful. We do not generally embrace things that bring us stress.<\/span><\/p>\n

Additionally, psychologists have pointed to how we go out of our way to protect our beliefs, attitudes, and values. First, we selectively expose our- selves to messages that we already agree with, rather than those that confront or challenge us. This selective exposure <\/strong>is especially seen in choices of mass media that individuals listen to and read, whether TV, radio, or Internet sites. Not only do we selectively expose ourselves to information, we selectively attend to, perceive, and recall information that supports our existing viewpoints (referred to as selective attention, selective perception, and selective recall).<\/p>\n

\n

Selective exposure<\/strong><\/p>\n

the decision to expose ourselves to messages that we already agree with, rather than those that confront or challenge us<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This principle led Leon Festinger (1957) to form the theory of cognitive dissonance<\/strong>, which states, among other ideas, that when we are confronted with conflicting information or viewpoints, we reach a state of dissonance. This state can be very uncomfortable, and we will do things to get rid of the dissonance and maintain \u201cconsonance.\u201d Ideally, at least for a public speaker, the dissonance is relieved or resolved by being persuaded (changed) to a new belief, attitude, or behavior. However, the easiest way to avoid dissonance is to not expose oneself to conflicting messages in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Cognitive dissonance<\/strong><\/p>\n

a psychological phenomenon where people confronted with conflicting information or viewpoints reach a state of dissonance (generally the disagreement between conflicting thoughts and\/or actions), which can be very uncomfortable, and results in actions to get rid of the dissonance and maintain consonance<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Additionally, as mentioned before, during a persuasive speech the audience members are holding a mental dialogue with the speaker or at least the speaker\u2019s content. They are putting up rebuttals or counter-arguments. These have been called reservations <\/em>(as in the audience member would like to believe the speaker but has reservations about doing so). They could be called the \u201cyeah-buts\u201d\u2014the audience members are saying in their minds, \u201cYeah, I see what you are arguing, but\u2014\u201d. Reservations can be very strong, since, again, the bias is to be loss averse and not <\/em>to change our actions or beliefs.<\/p>\n

\n

In a sense, the reasons not <\/em>to change can be stronger than even very logical reasons to <\/em>change. For example, you probably know a friend who will not wear a seatbelt in a car. You can say to your friend, \u201cDon\u2019t you know that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2009) says, and I quote, \u20181,652 lives could be saved and 22,372 serious injuries avoided each year on America\u2019s roadways if seat belt use rates rose to 90 percent in every state\u2019?\u201d What will your friend probably say, even though you have cited a credible source?<\/p>\n

They will come up with some reason for not wearing it, even something as dramatic as \u201cI knew a guy who had a cousin who was in an accident and the cop said he died because he was wearing his seatbelt.\u201d You may have had this conversation, or one like it. Their arguments may be less dramatic, such as \u201cI don\u2019t like how it feels\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t like the government telling me what to do in my car.\u201d For your friend, the argument for wearing a seatbelt is not as strong as the argument against it, at least at this moment. If they are open-minded and can listen to evidence, they might experience cognitive dissonance and then be persuaded.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Solutions to the Difficulty of Persuasion<\/h2>\n

With these reasons for the resistance audience members would have to persuasion, what is a speaker to do? Here are some strategies.<\/p>\n

Since change is resisted, we do not make many large or major changes in our lives. We do, however, make smaller, concrete, step-by-step or incremental changes in our lives every day. Going back to our scale in Figure 13.1, trying to move an audience from -3 to +2 or +3 is too big a move.<\/p>\n

Having reasonable persuasive goals is the first way to meet resistance. Even moving someone from -3 to -2 is progress, and over time these small shifts can eventually result in a significant amount of persuasion.<\/p>\n

Secondly, a speaker must \u201cdeal with the reservations.\u201d First, the speaker must acknowledge they exist, which shows audience awareness, but then the speaker must attempt to rebut or refute them. In reality, since persuasion involves a mental dialogue, your audience is more than likely thinking of counter-arguments in their minds. Therefore, including a refutation section in your speech, usually after your presentation of arguments in favor of your proposition, is a required and important strategy.<\/p>\n

However, there are some techniques for rebuttal or refutation that work better than others. You would not want to say, \u201cOne argument against my proposition is . . . , and that is wrong\u201d or \u201cIf you are one of the people who believe this about my proposition, you are wrong.\u201d On the other hand, you could say that the reservations are \u201cmisconceptions,\u201d \u201cmyths,\u201d or \u201cmistaken ideas\u201d that are commonly held about the proposition.<\/p>\n

Generally, strong persuasive speeches offer the audience what are called <\/span>two-tailed arguments<\/strong>, which bring up a valid issue against your argument which you, as the speaker, must then refute. After acknowledging them and seeking to refute or rebut the reservations, you must also provide evidence for your refutation. Ultimately, this will show your audience that you are aware of both sides of the issue you are presenting and make you a more credible speaker. However, you cannot just say something like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

One common misconception about wearing seatbelts is that if the car goes off a bridge and is sinking in water, you would not be able to release the belt and get out. First, that rarely happens.<\/em><\/p>\n

Second, if it did, getting the seat belt unbuckled would be the least of your worries. You would have to know how to get out of the car, not just the seat belt. Third, the seat belt would have protected you from any head injuries in such a crash, therefore keeping you conscious and able to help anyone else in the car.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This is a good start, but there are some assertions in here that would need support from a reliable source, such as the argument that the \u201csubmerging in water\u201d scenario is rare. If it has happened to someone you know, you probably would not think it is rare.<\/p>\n

\n

Two-tailed arguments<\/strong><\/p>\n

a persuasive technique in which a speaker brings up a counter-argument to their own topic and then directly refutes the claim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The third strategy is to keep in mind that since you are asking the audience to change something, they must view the benefits of the change as worth the stress of the change. If you do good audience analysis, you know they are asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d What benefit or advantage or improvement would happen for the audience members?<\/p>\n

If the audience is being persuaded to sign an organ donor card, which is an altruistic action that cannot benefit them in any way because they will be dead, what would be the benefit? Knowing others would have better lives, feeling a sense of contribution to the good of humanity, and helping medical science might be examples. The point is that a speaker should be able to engage the audience at the level of needs, wants, and values as well as logic and evidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"menu_order":3,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-574","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":565,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/574\/revisions\/848"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/565"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/574\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppsccom1150publicspeaking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}