Communication Theories by Werner Joseph Severin

Werner Joseph Severin explored communication theories on a wide range through this book, and as our lives are based entirely on communication persuasion is used daily in different forms, based on different theories, aiming at changing our attitudes and directing them towards the desired outcome, therefore chapter 8 "theories of persuasion" focused on persuasion. As being exposed to new information every day and changing our attitudes accordingly persuasion has reached its goal, for example, if you like something and new information you have been exposed to changed your attitude towards it, then this is a successful persuasion communication. Persuasion can affect our beliefs as will, as what you believe to be true can be altered by a persuasion communication. This chapter aims to explain how persuasion communication can change attitudes.

Attitudes are made up of three components feelings, beliefs, and actions, which are affective, cognitive, and behavioral respectively. And have two structures which are inter-attitudinal structure, and intra-attitudinal structure. While inter-attitudinal structure refers to the grouping of attitudes together to come up with an ideology, intra-attitudinal structure refers to how attitudes components of attitudes correlate. Furthermore, the concept of attitude is one of the most indispensable and distinctive concepts in contemporary American social psychology as described by psychologist Gordon Allport. He also reveals that the term "attitude" replaced vague terms such as custom, sentiment, instinct, and social force in psychology.

In addition, researches had been conducted on the years to understand attitude change. Starting with the first ever attitude change study in 1923 by rice and Willy that t...

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...than support was. It also showed that the active (writing) condition had a lower effect in making beliefs resistant to persuasion than passive (reading) condition. Another experiment examined whether refuting a set of attacks would prevent getting influenced by other attacks. The results were as predicted, the refuting of some attacks made other attacks less credible and the pre exposure to attacks may make the person realize that his beliefs are vulnerable and have to add support to it.

Recent studies revealed that in inoculation threat plays an important part as people tend to protect their beliefs when attacked, therefore threat evoke people's desire to make their attitude resistant to change . Besides if the issue is not a salient one inoculation would not probably take place. Furthermore inoculation has been very successful in health communication campaigns.