Dispelling the Illusion of Invulnerability: The Motivations and Mechanisms of Resistance to Persuasion

/in , , , , , /by

Authors: Brad J. Sagarin, Northern Illinois University; Robert B. Cialdini and William E. Rice, Arizona State University; Sherman B. Serna, Northern Illinois University

Publication: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Year: 2002

Focus Area: Prevention, Education, Profile

Relevance: Reducing the incidence of fraud depends in part upon reducing the public’s susceptibility to the tactics of fraudsters.  People are more vulnerable when they deny their own vulnerability.

Summary: This article describes three experiments that explore how to increase people’s resistance to illegitimate forms of persuasion.  The authors note that a great deal of attention has been spent understanding persuasion methods, but little on how to protect against persuasion that seeks to deceive.  Effective persuasion resistance training was found to consist of two parts:

  1. Demonstrating personal vulnerability to persuasion – not just the vulnerability of people in general (an outline of how to achieve this is provided as a three-step process)
  2. Educating individuals on how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate forms of persuasion

The focus of the experiments was not to increase resistance to all forms of persuasion, only to reinforce resistance against those that use illegitimate methods to manipulate consumers.  By combining the two principles above, participants consistently demonstrated:

  • Increased preference for ads that used legitimate (or “fair”) persuasion methods
  • Increased resistance to ads that used illegitimate (or “unfair”) methods
  • Sustained improvement over time

The authors note that these results were obtained using brief, written formats, and that significantly greater results might be achieved through interactive and longer-lasting interventions.  Further work on this topic has been published by Professors Coutinho and Sagarin of Northern Illinois University (2007).

Author Abstract: Three studies examined the impact of a treatment designed to instill resistance to deceptive persuasive messages. Study 1 demonstrated that after the resistance treatment, ads using illegitimate authority-based appeals became less persuasive, and ads using legitimate appeals became more persuasive. In Study 2, this resistance generalized to novel exemplars, persevered over time, and appeared outside of the laboratory context. In Study 3, a procedure that dispelled participants’ illusions of invulnerability to deceptive persuasion maximized resistance to such persuasion. Overall, the present studies demonstrate that attempts to confer resistance to appeals will likely be successful to the extent that they install 2 conceptual features: perceived undue manipulative intent of the source of the appeal and perceived personal vulnerability to such manipulation.

Full Article

Consumer Fraud and the Aging Mind

/in , , /by

Authors: Denise C. Park, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Publication: Scientific Testimony Presented to The Senate Special Committee on Aging

Year: 2005

Focus Area: Prevention, Decision Making

Relevance: The author outlines the vulnerabilities associated with a gradually degenerating mind and some of the communication strategies that can help marketers, public policy makers, and advocacy groups overcome them.

Summary: Cognitive systems begin to deteriorate in one’s 20’s, and continue to worsen over time.

  • Information is processed more slowly
  • Memory becomes less effective
  • The ability to process large quantities of information simultaneously decreases

Stored knowledge is used as a buffer against this increasing “cognitive frailty”.  When unexpectedly approach by a fraudster, older adults are more likely to be overwhelmed, increasing their vulnerability.

  • Older adults focus on the positive and ignore the negative aspects of a message, and are thus more likely to overlook warning signs of fraud.
  • Older adults tend to remember the gist of information rather than the specifics, and that vague familiarity increases their susceptibility.
  • Older consumers who are warned about the falseness of a particular fraudulent offer are more likely to believe the offer is true at a later date, due to the familiarity of the claim.  Familiarity trumps fact.

Author Abstract: Good afternoon, Chairman Smith, Senator Kohl, and other members of the Committee. My name is Denise Park. I am a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at the Beckman Institute, which is part of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I direct the Roybal Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Illinois, a Center funded by the National Institute on Aging that is designed to take the results of basic laboratory research on aging and determine how these results can be used to improve function in older adults in their every day lives. I have also been involved with the NIH by just completing a stint chairing an NIH Review Panel for the past several years and I also just completed a term on the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Society.

Full Article

Consumer decision making and aging: Current knowledge and future directions

/in , , /by

Authors: Carolyn Yoon, University of Michigan; Catherine A. Cole, University of Iowa; Michelle P. Lee, Singapore Management University

Publication: Journal of Consumer Psychology

Year: 2009

Focus Area: Decision making, Aging

Relevance: Understanding of the effects of age on consumer decision making is necessary to understand what leads older consumers to accept fraud and what methods can be used to aid their fraud resistance.

Summary: This article serves as a survey of research on decision making and aging, outlining a range of conclusions, their pragmatic implications, and questions for future research.  Older consumers are not well understood, and are often oversimplified.  Understanding the effects of age must be longitudinal; one group of people in their 70s will have different tendencies than another, later generation in its 70s, in part due to different sets of shared defining experiences (e.g., Baby Boomers vs. Depression era).

Older consumers are more likely than younger consumers to:

  • respond to emotional material, personal information, familiar names and big brands
  • forget the source of information (and thus misremember a fact as true, for example)
  • use rules of thumb, intuition, or “common sense” to make decisions
  • make poor decisions under time pressure, later in the day, or when accompanied by references to negative elder stereotypes
  • delegate decision making to others (either younger consumers or by using default options)

The article also contains many practical tips for marketers interested in targeting an older audience, as well as recommendations for further areas of research.

Author Abstract: We review existing knowledge about older consumers and decision making.  We develop a conceptual framework that incorporates the notion of fit between individual characteristics, task demands and the contextual environment.  When the fit is high, older consumers use their considerable knowledge and experience to compensate for the impact of any age-related changes in abilities and resources.  When the fit relatively low, older consumers feel increased need to adapt their decision making processes.  We discuss these consumer adaptations and propose a number of research questions related to the processes underlying them in order to contribute to a better understanding of how they can lead to more effective consumer decision making for older adults.  We further consider some pragmatic implications of the adaptations for marketing management and public policy.

Full Article

Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and Younger Adults

/in , , /by

Authors: Mara Mather, University of California, Santa Cruz; Turhan Canli, State University of New York, Stony Brook; Tammy English, Sue Whitfield, Peter Wais, Kevin Ochsner, John D.E. Gabreli, and Laura Carstensen, Stanford University

Publication: Psychological Science

Year: 2003

Focus Area: Aging, Emotion, Memory

Relevance: Focusing on the positive and forgetting the negative emotional content of a sales pitch or public service announcement may impact whether a potential fraud victim is vulnerable or informed. Successful messages (fraudulent or educational) would account for a shift in mental priorities with age.

Summary: This article argues that increases in age lead to a redistribution – as opposed to a decrease – in cognitive functioning when processing emotional information.  This is evaluated by measuring the activity of the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with memory and emotional attention.

  • Previous studies showed that older adults tend to retain less negative emotional information than do younger adults.  There is a tendency for this reduction to be interpreted as cognitive decline with age.
  • This article demonstrates that the activity of the amygdala decreases with age only for negative emotional images, and maintains or increases in response to positive images.
  • The changes in emotional memory with age may be the result of a reallocation of cognitive processes, with greater energy devoted to positive emotional content.
  • Both younger and older adults show greater amygdala activation for emotional than for neutral images, corresponding with our knowledge that all ages’ are better able to remember emotionally significant information.

Author Abstract: As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.

Full Article

Aging and Emotional Memory: The Forgettable Nature of Negative Images for Older Adults

/in , , /by

Authors: Susan Turk Charles, University of California, Irvine; Mara Mather, University of California, Santa Cruz; Laura Carstensen, Stanford University

Publication: Journal of Experimental Psychology

Year: 2003

Focus Area: Emotion, Memory, Aging

Relevance: Understanding what information is most likely to be retained by different population segments helps explain why older adults may be more likely to fall for a fraud ploy and helps maximize the preventative education of potential fraud victims.

Summary: Older adults are more likely to forget information with a negative emotional impact, in part because older adults have a different mental focus.  Their emphasis is more on emotional meaningfulness rather than monetary rewards or “goal striving.”  Thanks to this shift in focus with age, they improve their control of emotions and increasingly avoid (or fail to encode) negative emotional content.  As a result, information with positive emotional relevance continues to be retained, while information with negative emotional relevance is more likely to be forgotten.

  • Educational materials and other information targeting older adults are more likely to be remembered if they contain imagery with a positive emotional impact.
  • There is evidence of correlation between the mood of an individual and that person’s ability to recall emotionally charged information; for example, a person in a negative emotional state is more likely to recall negative information.
  • Both younger and older adults spend greater amounts of time examining images with negative emotional impact, yet older adults’ memory performance does not benefit from this extra time.  This may relate to (and further research needs to explore) greater activation of the amygdala in younger adults than in older adults when processing negative information.

Author Abstract: Two studies examined age differences in recall and recognition memory for positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. In Study 1, younger, middle-aged, and older adults were shown images on a computer screen and, after a distraction task, were asked first to recall as many as they could and then to identify previously shown images from a set of old and new ones. The relative number of negative images compared with positive and neutral images recalled decreased with each successively older age group. Recognition memory showed a similar decrease with age in the relative memory advantage for negative pictures. In Study 2, the largest age differences in recall and recognition accuracy were also for the negative images. Findings are consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory, which posits greater investment in emotion regulation with age.

Full Article

Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want

/in , , , /by

Authors: Timothy D. Wilson, University of Virginia; Daniel T. Gilbert, Harvard University

Publication: Current Directions in Psychological Science

Year: 2005

Focus Area: Decision Making, Emotion, Prevention

Relevance: Poor financial decisions, such as falling for a scam, may in part result from a person’s inability to accurately forecast what will make them happy.  If we first understand what causes faulty emotional predictions, and then encourage a more accurate analysis, we may be able to facilitate safer and more appropriate decision making.

Summary: “[P]eople routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring and, as a result, sometimes work to bring about events that do not maximize their happiness” (p. 131).  This tendency is explained in part by impact bias, or an inability to infer the severity or duration of the emotional consequences of an event – positive or negative, partly due to:

  • focalism, or the tendency to disregard all but one aspect of the future when predicting it, and
  • immune neglect, or the tendency to ignore how we explain away negative experiences

These tendencies may in part explain why people:

  • attribute their own resiliency to a higher power
  • prefer reversible decisions to irreversible ones (though the latter usually make them happier),
  • may be impacted more significantly by minor events than major ones, and
  • mistakenly predict that losing something will have a greater impact than gaining its equivalent.

Encouraging the following behaviors may help create a more informed perspective and facilitate more balanced decision making:

  • Considering a range of things that make one happy and unhappy (“Many different things, not just the one thing I’m worried about, will influence how I feel in the future.”)
  • Improving one’s awareness of natural coping mechanisms (“Positive events won’t be as good and negative ones won’t be as bad as I anticipate thanks to my psychological immune system.”)

Author Abstract: People base many decisions on affective forecasts, predictions about their emotional reactions to future events. They often display an impact bias, overestimating the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to such events. One cause of the impact bias is focalism, the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings. Another is people’s failure to anticipate how quickly they will make sense of things that happen to them in a way that speeds emotional recovery. This is especially true when predicting reactions to negative events: People fail to anticipate how quickly they will cope psychologically with such events in ways that speed their recovery from them. Several implications are discussed, such as the tendency for people to attribute their unexpected resilience to external agents.

Full Article

Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences

/in , , , /by

Authors: R.B. Zajonc, University of Michigan

Publication: American Psychologist

Year: 1980

Focus Area: Decision making, Persuasion, Prevention

Relevance: Emotions are difficult to untangle from decision making processes, so it is essential to understand their influences, both conscious and subconscious. For example, people make rapid decisions about whether they like or trust a new acquaintance using emotional cues rather than cognitive facts. This can help explain why people trust a charming and well-spoken fraudster, even if their cognitive judgment would tell them to be suspicious.

Summary: Emotional responses to stimuli occur quickly – often before sufficient time has passed to think about the stimuli – but can evolve as more information is learned. Rarely are initial impressions changed altogether. In conversation with other people, emotional cues like tone of voice may carry more valuable information than the actual words being spoken.

  • Immediate emotional responses, or affect, is a basic reaction and is unavoidable – everyone has emotional reactions to events and stimuli (although the emotions may not be particularly strong). These emotions are based in the individual’s self definition and are difficult to explain to others.
  • There are decisions that people make that benefit from more cognitive and less emotional influence – but it can be difficult to extract emotional feelings from decision-making precisely because these feelings are unavoidable and difficult to articulate.

Author Abstract: Affect is considered by most contemporary theories to be postcognitive, that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have been accomplished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and decision making, as well as some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be fairly independent of, and precede in time, the sorts of perceptual and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these affective judgments. Affective reactions to stimuli are often the very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater confidence than cognitive judgments, and can be made sooner. Experimental evidence is presented demonstrating that reliable affective discriminations (like-dislike ratings) can be made in the total absence of recognition memory (old-new judgments). Various differences between judgments based on affect and those based on perceptual and cognitive processes are examined. It is concluded that affect and cognition are under the control of separate and partially independent systems that can influence each other in a variety of ways, and that both constitute independent sources of effects in information processing.

Full Article

Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying

/in , , , /by

Authors: Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota; Ronald J. Faber, University of Minnesota

Publication: Journal of Consumer Research

Year: 2007

Focus Area: Persuasion, Prevention, Decision Making

Relevance: If victimization by fraud is seen as a type of impulse purchase, people who tend to make impulse purchases may be uniquely vulnerable to scams. The concept of self-control as a limited resource can also inform profiling and prevention efforts.

Summary: This paper presents a theory of impulse buying in which people have a renewable, but limited, resource of self control. If they use up some of that self control in one situation, they have less self control available in the next situation. It takes time to replenish one’s reserves of self-control.

  • People who were asked to control their attention – a test of self-control – in the first part of an experiment were willing to pay more for a product in the second part of the experiment.
  • People who already have a tendency to make impulse purchases were especially vulnerable to reductions in their self-control.
  • The researchers tested whether people were more likely to buy products that appealed to their emotions, like junk food, or to their rational minds, like healthy foods. Participants didn’t prefer one type of product over the other, which was unexpected.

Author Abstract: This research investigated impulse buying as resulting from the depletion of a common—but limited—resource that governs self-control. In three investigations, participants’ self-regulatory resources were depleted or not; later, impulsive spending responses were measured. Participants whose resources were depleted, relative to participants whose resources were not depleted, felt stronger urges to buy, were willing to spend more, and actually did spend more money in unanticipated buying situations. Participants having depleted resources reported being influenced equally by affective and cognitive factors and purchased products that were high on each factor at equal rates. Hence, self-regulatory resource availability predicts whether people can resist impulse buying temptations.

Full Article

The Affect Heuristic

/in , , /by

Authors: Paul Slovic, Decision Research; Melissa Finucane, Decision Research; Ellen Peters, Decision Research; Donald G. MacGregor, Decision Research

Publication: T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman, (Eds.), Intuitive Judgment: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge University Press

Year: 2003

Focus Area: Decision making, Emotion

Relevance: Affective preferences guide decision making and can be deeply entrenched. The reliance upon emotions to aid decision making can also make people vulnerable to making bad decisions in certain circumstances.

Summary: The paper suggests a theory of an “affect heuristic” in which people attach emotions (affects) to their mental representations of objects and actions. They are then able to make faster, more efficient decisions by referring to these affective tags rather than working through the benefits and consequences of each decision every time they make a choice.

  • Familiarity to an object prompts people to rate it positively.
  • Induced preferences – preferences for otherwise neutral images as a result of subliminal exposure to a smiling face – retained their association even when a second component of the experiment attempted to re-prime the images with frowning faces. The first association, with a smiling face, remained despite the re-priming efforts.
  • The way in which a gamble is framed changes its attractiveness. People can understand probabilities well and use them to determine risk (i.e. winning 7 out of 36 times is not very attractive) but have trouble doing the same with a dollar amount (winning gets $9), unless that amount can be compared to the potential loss (winning gets $9, but losing costs 5 cents).
  • People have trouble evaluating values – potential winnings, amounts of ice cream – unless they can judge them in comparison to another value.

Author Abstract: This chapter introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically – note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate.” We shall argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic.” In this chapter we will trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths followed by ourselves and many others. We will also discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.

Full Article

Rational Actors or Rational Fools? Implications of the Affect Heuristic for Behavioral Economics

/in , , , /by

Authors: Paul Slovic, Decision Research; Melissa L. Finucane, Center for Health Research, Hawaii; Ellen Peters, Decision Research; Donald G. MacGregor, Decision Research

Publication: American Institute for Economic Research (symposium paper)

Year: 2002

Focus Area: Decision Making, Prevention, Emotion

Relevance: This article presents a readable and comprehensive review of the affect heuristic – the tendency to rely upon positive or negative emotions to guide decision making – with many experimental examples. The section on judging risk may be especially useful in the fraud prevention field, as people tend to assume that low risk situations have high benefits, and vice versa.

Summary: “Using an overall, readily available affective impression can be far easier — more efficient — than weighing the pros and cons or retrieving from memory many relevant examples, especially when the required judgment or decision is complex or mental resources are limited.”

  • In most cases, people perceive high risk situations as having low potential benefit, and low risk situations as having high potential benefit. When time is limited, this relationship becomes even stronger.
  • Well-known and dreaded hazards (i.e. cancer) are seen as riskier than less dreaded hazards (i.e. accidents).

Author Abstract: This paper introduces a theoretical framework that describes the importance of affect in guiding judgments and decisions. As used here, “affect” means the specific quality of “goodness” or “badness” (i) experienced as a feeling state (with or without consciousness) and (ii) demarcating a positive or negative quality of a stimulus. Affective responses occur rapidly and automatically — note how quickly you sense the feelings associated with the stimulus word “treasure” or the word “hate.” We shall argue that reliance on such feelings can be characterized as “the affect heuristic.” We will trace the development of the affect heuristic across a variety of research paths and discuss some of the important practical implications resulting from ways that this heuristic impacts our daily lives.

Full Article