This advertisement by Act on CO2 uses the
storytelling technique of persuasion. The facts of climate change, followed
logically by the steps needing to be taken to combat it are laid out in a
bedtime story told by a father to his young daughter.
Hastie and Pennington (1992) found that presenting jurors with
biased case facts in a story format encouraged the jurors to reach the verdict
implied in the given story.
The father/ daughter
scene uses a similarity altercast as they are “just plain folks”; Berscheid (1966)
found that similarity is relevant if it is directly relevant to the given
issue, which it is here when the father claims 40% of CO2 emissions
are from everyday activity.
The way in which the viewer is told the story along with the
child also establishes the father as an authority figure, authority figures
induce compliance; as Bickman (1974) found by getting participants to do tasks
given by a man dressed as a guard.
References:
Berscheid, E. (1966). Opinion change and communicator-communicatee
similarity and dissimilarity. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 4(6), 670-680.
Bickman, L. (1974). The social power of a uniform. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 4(1),
47-61.
Hastie, R., & Pennington, N. (1992). Explaining the
evidence: Tests of the story model for juror decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
62(2), 189-206.
Nice. Importantly, in Pennington and Hastie (1992), they show that presenting evidence in a story form (as opposed to organized by issue) had a greater impact on the participants' (undergraduates) decision making.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Pennington and Hastie call it The Story Model of decision making.
ReplyDelete