Pragmatic Influences on Judgments and Decisions
Final Report Abstract
In sum, we believe that looking at persuasion from a conversational logic perspective enabled novel hypotheses which to a large extent were supported in the present studies. Over many studies with different material, the main assumption of the pragmatic persuasion perspective proved robust. When recipients are aware of a persuasive intent they interpret ambiguous information as potentially supportive of the persuasion goal. Consequently, they may become persuaded by information that a priori holds no relevant implications. There was also support that information that is on first glance counter to the persuasion goal may be reinterpreted. This view enriches the persuasion literature where awareness of a persuasive intent is usually seen as possibly triggering resistance to persuasion. The present research shed light on how recipients make sense of the information. Knowing that the information is presented with the goal to persuade is not enough. In order to interpret the information recipients have to rely on their judgment what might be potentially persuasive. In case of mass communication they can draw on their knowledge or assumption, what other recipients would find persuasive and interpret the information accordingly. We did not find evidence that having persuasion targets self-generate persuasive information based on ambiguous information would provide an advantage over presenting explicit arguments. This was because contrary to expectations recipients did not react negatively to explicit persuasion. On average, they drew the same inferences from explicit information when it was presented with or without persuasive intent. This does not rule out that with stronger resistance to explicit persuasion ambiguous information may become more effective than explicit information but it limits the practical value of pragmatic persuasion. However, there was support for another possible advantage. When communicating one explicit benefit, the Gricean maxim of quantity implies that other not communicated benefits are unlikely. Thus, communicating a specific benefit undermines the inference of other noncommunicated benefits. In sum, while communicating an explicit benefit may strengthen the belief in this benefit more than communicating ambiguous information the inference of other benefits may be stronger for ambiguous information. Overall, persuasion may benefit more from ambiguous information allowing different inferences than from communicating one specific benefit. Unfortunately, we did not make progress on understanding the role of trust or scepticism in pragmatic persuasion. This remains an open issue. So far, scepticism towards advertising or general scepticism did not moderate the results but we were unable to manipulate distrust without affecting other prerequisites.
Publications
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(2017, August). How consumers make sense of meaningless information. 19th ESCON Transfer of Knowledge Conference, Gdansk
Adam, K.
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(2017, March). 76% Fairtrade chocolate? Feature vs. dimension framing in a persuasive context. In A. Bröder, Contextualized Decision Making: Mediators and Moderators, Symposium at the Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (TeaP), Dresden
Adam, K.
