The goal when it comes to persuasion is to, you guessed it, persuade someone. When we try to persuade someone, we want to change someone's attitude towards a certain event/object. For example subliminal messaging is a common used tool to persuade people unconsciously by showing symbols without explicitly showing it to the conscious mind. This goes hand in hand with mere-exposure theory. This theory shows that the amount of exposure to something correlates positively with one's positive attitude towards it.
But, there is a catch. Attitudes can be distinguished in two kinds of attitudes, strong attitudes and weak attitudes. Most, if not all, of the persuasion tools are constructed around the weak attitudes, because they are easy to manipulate. Strong attitudes are, however, very resistant to most, if not all, persuasion methods. This should be addressed or should it? Because, do we want to be persuaded? Or do we just want to know more about real sustainable persuasion. If we want to persuade someone, we want people to change their attitude for the long run and not be some kind of lane changer whenever someone from the other lane is opening their mound.
What are your thoughts around this subject? Let me know in the comments!
Naichingeru Hano
