Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion

Journalism critics have argued that transparency about the reporting process is an ethical imperative. Convergence offers news organizations opportunities for changed writing styles that may foster more transparency, especially as they embrace video storytelling. This project used two experiments to investigate the impact of transparent language on the way online news consumers perceive the credibility of video news reports. The study operationalized transparency in narrative as the use of first-person statements and references to the newsgathering process. Subjects noticed transparency statements but this had no significant effect on their assessment of the credibility of a story or reporter. The results suggest that transparency is a distinct variable with a complicated relationship to other audience effects.

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Audience effects on food calls in captive brown capuchin monkeys, Cebus apella

Animal Behaviour ◽

10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.03.007 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 70 (6) ◽

pp. 1273-1281 ◽

Cited By ~ 39

Author(s):

Amy S. Pollick ◽

Harold Gouzoules ◽

Frans B.M. de Waal

Keyword(s):

Cebus Apella ◽

Capuchin Monkeys ◽

Audience Effects

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Mood State, Issue Involvement, and Argument Strength on Responses to Persuasive Appeals

Psychological Reports ◽

10.2466/pr0.101.3.739-753 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 101 (3) ◽

pp. 739-753 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Robert C. Sinclair ◽

Tanya K. Lovsin ◽

Sean E. Moore

Keyword(s):

Mood State ◽

Psychology Students ◽

Introductory Psychology ◽

Cognitive Responses ◽

High Involvement ◽

Argument Strength ◽

Induction Condition ◽

Issue Involvement ◽

Thought Listing ◽

Sad Mood

This study investigated the effects of mood state, issue involvement, and argument strength on responses to persuasive appeals. Through an unrelated second study paradigm, 144 introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to High or Low Issue Involvement, Happy or Sad Mood Inductions, and Strong or Weak Argument conditions. Attitudes, measured on 9-point Likert-type scales, and cognitive responses, measured through a thought listing, were assessed. On attitudes, people in the Happy Induction condition were equally persuaded by Strong and Weak Arguments, whereas people in the Sad Induction condition were persuaded by Strong, but not Weak, Arguments. Involvement had no effect. On the thought-listing measures, people in the Happy Induction condition showed modest elaboration. A stronger pattern of effects, consistent with high elaboration, was noted on the thought listings of people in the Sad Induction condition and who were in the High Involvement group. Interestingly, people in the Sad Induction condition who were in the Low Involvement group showed mood-congruency on thoughts. The data suggest that the effects of mood state are not moderated by the effects of issue Involvement on this measure of attitudes but that there may be some moderation on measures of elaboration. Implications and directions for research are discussed.

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Mass Media Abundance: Selected Developments and Audience Effects in the United States of America

Communications ◽

10.1515/comm.1979.5.2-3.213 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 5 (2-3) ◽

Author(s):

Rolf T. Wigand

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Mass Media ◽

United States Of America ◽

The United States ◽

Audience Effects

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Leaping to conclusions: Why premise relevance affects argument strength

10.31234/osf.io/wm3xg ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Keith Ransom ◽

Amy Perfors ◽

Danielle Navarro

Keyword(s):

Bayesian Model ◽

Raw Data ◽

Argument Strength ◽

Everyday Reasoning

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.

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