Communication modality as a determinant of persuasion: The role of communicator salience.

Shelly Chaiken · Alice H. Eagly

532 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Personality and Social Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Psychology of Social Influence Media Studies and Communication Media Influence and Health

Abstract

In two experiments, a likable or unlikable communicator delivered a persuasive message via the written, audiotaped, or videotaped modality. In both studies, the likable communicator was more persuasive in videotaped and audiotaped (vs. written) conditions, whereas the unlikable communicator was more persuasive in the written modality. Because of these opposing effects of modality on the persuasiveness of likable and unlikable communicators, communicator likability was a significant determinant of persuasion only in the two broadcast modalities. Additional findings suggested that subjects engaged in more processing of com-municator cues when exposed to videotaped or audiotaped, compared to written, messages and that communicator-based (vs. message-based) cognitions predicted opinion change primarily within videotape and audiotape (vs. written) conditions. It was concluded that the videotaped and audiotaped modalities enhance the salience of communicator-related information with the consequence that com-municator characteristics exert a disproportionate impact on persuasion when messages are transmitted in videotaped or audiotaped (vs. written) form. The relevance of the findings to understanding "vividness " phenomena is also dis-cussed. Previous research on media effects in per-suasion has proven largely inconsistent. Al-though the modal finding in this literature appears to be that live or videotaped messages induce greater opinion change than do au-diotaped messages (Frandsen, 1963), which, in turn, induce greater change than do writ-ten communications (Cantril & Allport, 1935; Haugh, 1952; Knower, 1935, 1936; Wilke, 1934), a number of studies have obtained either no differences in persuasiveness as a function of communication modality or greater opinion change with written messages

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 532 citations exist upstream.

References

1980Heuristic versus systematic information processing and the use of source versus message cues in persuasion.1983Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment.1981Personal involvement as a determinant of argument-based persuasion.1974The Relation of Cognitive and Memorial Processes to Persuasion in a Simulated Jury Trial 1937The Psychology of Radio 1978Effects of Media, Communicator, and Message Position on Attitude Change

Cited by

1984Source factors and the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion 1996Getting at the truth or getting along: Accuracy- versus impression-motivated heuristic and systematic processing.1984Cognitive Theories of Persuasion 2021On the stress potential of videoconferencing: definition and root causes of Zoom fatigue 2019Fake News on Social Media: People Believe What They Want to Believe When it Makes No Sense At All1 1997Changing Minds: Political Arguments and Political Persuasion 1999Heuristic‐Systematic Information Processing and Risk Judgment

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.