How Cognitions Shape Social Judgments and how to Use this Knowledge for Persuasion

If you want to understand how to persuade someone, you need to understand what kinds of thoughts they might have when they hear your message. This chapter discusses the role of negative thoughts, positive thoughts, thoughts about thoughts (metacognition), and their roles in the persuasive process. This chapter reviews how a variety of issues affect cognitive responses to persuasive attempts, including argument quality, insults, forewarning, reactance, motivated reasoning, distraction, narratives, Spinozan processing, attitude functions, source credibility, feelings-as-information theory, the meta-cognitive model of attitudes, message complexity, and perceptual difficulty. The breadth of issues explored illustrates the wide variety of ways that cognition plays a central role in persuasion.