This updated and expanded edition of Persuasive Communication provides a comprehensive introduction to persuasion and real-world decision-making. A detailed analysis of the emotions and biases involved in decision-making provides students with perceptive insights into human behavior and helps them apply this understanding with a variety of decision-making tools. Davida Charney, University of Texas, USA Richard Young's new edition of Persuasive Communication will be the standard reference for rhetorical choices in decision-making for years to come.
Decision Schemas: An Audience Decision Framework 19 Decision Schemas as Guides in the Decision Process 20 Limitations of Decision Schemas 21 .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a widely held belief that knowing your audience—your readers, listeners, viewers, and conversational partners—is the key to persuasive communication. This book shows that if you want to be persuasive, the most important thing you need to know about your audience is how your audience makes decisions. Whether you're asking your audience to try a new product, vote for a political candidate, approve a loan, pick up a prescription drug, convict a criminal, buy a new company, or respond to an ad in personal columns, many members of your audience will already know what kind of information they need to make a good decision.
If the audience were purely logical, understanding how they make rational decisions would be sufficient.
INTRODUCTION
Together, all three parts of the book give a complete picture of the audience as a decision-maker. Most of the book's chapters include think-aloud protocols of real audience members using real documents to make decisions. The subcontractor needed to be able to design an essential hardware component for one of the company's multimillion-dollar network projects.
The procurement manager refused to tell them more and spent the rest of the hour repeating his initial questions.
AUDIENCE DECISION-MAKING EXPERTISE
Even members of the public use decision criteria regarding the economy, international relations, and the environment when asked to evaluate the United States. An important function of management consultants is to inform clients about the decision criteria for the clients' expert audience. Note that the author of the review explicitly addressed each of the investor's decision criteria and used section headings to highlight them.
It does not require much capital.] The sale of these partnership interests will not dilute the partnership interests of the limited partners.
Executive Summary
What is the venture?
Who is doing this?
How much can I invest?
What is the projected return?
Audiences not only use decision criteria to ask relevant questions about the person, product, proposition or performance under consideration, they also use decision criteria to ask relevant questions about their alternatives or options, as well as about averages and the relevant rates. Audiences then use this comparative information to evaluate the relative benefits of the recommended alternative.
How will this affect my taxes?
What if I want out?
Is this investment right for me?
A Request for Competitive Benchmarks
171 Even when information relevant to an expert's decision criteria is provided to them in advertisements (for example, the fact that a computer has 8 GB of SDRAM), novice consumers cannot process it. 172 Unless they are given incentives, novices will only process the benefits that come with advertisements (for example, the computer is "great for gamers"). The main takeaway for communicators in Chapter 1 is that knowledgeable audiences already know what information they want from professionals—the values that will populate their decision trees.
I know what you want to know': Effects of interviewees' ability to identify criteria on interview performance and construct-related validity.
TYPES OF AUDIENCE DECISIONS
One of the best known types of decisions – political decisions – will be discussed at the end of this chapter. Principals make supervisory decisions to protect the interests of the projects, organizations or even countries for which they are responsible. All the comments from each expert are numbered in the order they were made.
Note that the review writer explicitly addresses each of the decision criteria that are typically relevant to compliance decisions. Good.] The answers to the auditor's questions should be included in your group's standard operating procedures. The following list of questions summarizes many of the decision criteria used to make personnel decisions, particularly those used within organizations, and provides a starting point for predicting a director's decision criteria for a particular personnel decision.
Both experts question the qualifications of the potential employees and their fit with the company's culture. In addition, the MIS director complained about the lack of specificity in the action plan of the consultancy's proposal. Where is the structural approach in how they are going to conduct this research and what the impact will be on these functional areas.
Although the writer claims to have knowledge of the firm's objectives and requirements, he obviously does not. Note that the writer of the second cover letter demonstrates genuine knowledge of the firm's objectives and argues that she can meet the firm's requirements.
Patty R. Speakman
The following list of questions summarizes many of the previously identified criteria and provides a starting point for predicting agents' decision criteria for a given employment decision. The following list of questions summarizes many of the previously identified criteria and provides a starting point for predicting a director's decision criteria for a given exonerative decision. The following list of questions generalizes many of the investor-specific decision criteria previously identified and provides a starting point for predicting an investor's decision criteria for any given investment decision.
I want to see what are the sources and uses of the transaction, on the other side. Both expert investors found information about the nature of the investment in the documents they read. Notice also how the revised letter highlights what was probably the audience's most important decision-making criterion—the price of the seminar.
What is missing from the salary request is information that addresses the audience's decision-making criteria about the cost of the. Initially, the Bureau neglected to solicit either the decision-making criteria of the interest groups or their ratings of alternative steam sites. And as we saw in the Ormedam case, allowing external stakeholders to have a say in an organization's policy decision can dramatically affect the decision-making criteria and the choice of the best alternative.
Organizational communication to corporate constituencies: The role of the corporate annual report (Doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas, 1988). Consumer product evaluation: An investigation of the primary evaluation criteria in the UK fine jewelery market.
COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN
As for our mid-market soap bar, there really isn't a better product to copy in our country. We're looking around the world to see if there's no one that we can copy, come in and have great productivity or whatever, then we can use that [sic. Otherwise, we either have to improve one of the product's properties, meaning washing power and gentleness, or try to lower costs and compete on that basis.
Our improvement research brought our 7.5 product in washing power from a 1.5 to a 4.5 as indicated here [in the slide presentation]. Chairman of the Board: Would we be fair if we accept that what you are telling us is that we can spend our research money to get an expected result. Well from a policy statement point of view, the board still has questions on that topic.
AUDIENCE DECISION MAKING
2 In the first step of the model, perception, the audience perceives, that is, sees or hears, the information being presented. In the third step, sentence-level comprehension, the audience begins to understand the meaning of the information presented sentence by sentence. The customer would then want to know the price of the recommended laptop (say $999) as well as the prices of comparable laptops (which might be $1,499 and $1,599).
37 The more letters in the word, the more fixations are made on the word and the longer the fixations last. Scene perception occurs in the parahippocampal region located in the middle region of the temporal lobe below the hippocampus (see Figure 3-5 , p. 108). The right IFJ is located in the center of the frontal lobe of the right hemisphere.
It draws out the conceptual relationships, or case roles, of words and phrases in sentences. On the other hand, "home buyers" remembered information about the quality of the home. 166 Half of the students in the study categorized the problems after hearing less than one fifth of the stated problem.
The locus of viewers' eye fixations varied greatly depending on the question Yarbus asked. Instead, they target their search to the elements of the graph to answer their specific question. Consequently, the audience tends to search first for the values of the most important decision criteria or attributes.
A model of the neural basis of predetermination processes: The fronto-limbic information acquisition network (Doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 2012).
AIDS TO AUDIENCE DECISION MAKING
The Bank's remedies hereunder are cumulative and may be exercised concurrently or separately. The size of the type also affects how easily the audience can perceive letters and words. When readers read the long, unbroken prose of the short story, they preferred serif fonts.
Such limited testing should not make a final judgment as to the acceptability of the device. 201 Pictures on warning labels, for example, attract both the attention 202 and the reader's understanding of the warnings. The revised mailing is titled with the label of the genre of the mailing: Invoice.
Those who read the story in the coded order remembered only 32% of the facts in it. All three experts express frustration with the organization of the documents they read. The other two experts simply followed the organization of the scheme as they read and interpreted it.
The two versions of the instructions on the following pages illustrate the difference between topic-based and task-based organization. All three experts express their disappointment with the content of the documents they are reading.
