ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on open influence, when the target understands that someone is trying to change their attitudes or behavior. Social influence leads to a variety of outcomes. The chapter evaluates whether a communication will likely be successful in persuading a target to change their beliefs or attitudes by considering characteristics of the source, target, and the message itself. It describes the conditions under which threats and promises prove most successful in gaining compliance and the conditions under which targets are likely to obey an order from someone in authority. The chapter identifies how individuals might resist persuasion attempts and explores their original attitudes. It also describes various facets of message-based persuasion, including the communication-persuasion paradigm and the characteristics of sources, messages, and targets that affect the persuasiveness of a message. A popular dual-process theory of persuasion is the Elaboration Likelihood Model.
