FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Resistance is futile, says a University of Arkansas psychologist. Or it soon will be, if his research on persuasive tactics has anything to do with it.

With a $163,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Eric Knowles, professor of psychology, has been experimenting with ways to make persuasive offers, messages and appeals more successful — not by enhancing their attractiveness but by whittling away people’s natural resistance to them.

He calls his tactics "omega strategies" — a play on the Greek symbol for resistance — and he presents his findings this Friday at the Symposium on Resistance and Persuasion.

In studying social influence, Knowles examines a phenomenon called the approach-avoidance conflict — the opposing positive and negative reactions people feel when presented with a persuasive argument or offer.

"In any appeal, some aspects are attractive and push for acceptance, but other aspects are displeasing and create resistance. The decision to accept the offer or to reject it depends on which aspects are dominant," Knowles explained. "If the attractive features outweigh the unattractive features, the person will accept the offer but with some trepidation. If the negative aspects prevail, the offer will be rejected but with some regret."

Until now, much of social influence scholarship has focused on the approach side of this phenomenon, aiming to win people over by heightening the attractive features of an offer — attaching celebrity endorsements, compelling arguments or additional bargains.

But Knowles believes that addressing the avoidance side of the conflict can yield more successful and satisfying results — both for the salesperson and the consumer. Rather than overcoming a person’s resistance to an offer by adding enticements, Knowles looks for tactics that reduce or remove resistance altogether. By minimizing a person’s resistance, you decrease the chance that they’ll experience future regrets about their decision, Knowles said.

Over the past six years, Knowles has identified numerous strategies for reducing resistance — from distracting resistance to acknowledging it directly, from using up resistance to turning it against itself. With the help of doctoral candidate Jay Linn and various other psychology students, Knowles has been devising experiments to test the efficacy of each tactic. At the Symposium on Resistance and Persuasion, Knowles will explain the various omega strategies and present results from several experiments:

DISRUPT-THEN-REFRAME:

One of Knowles’ tactics for reducing resistance is the Disrupt-then-Reframe (DTR) method. When using the DTR technique, the researcher presents an offer to subjects but inserts a minor verbal anomaly, followed by a rephrasing of the advantages of the offer. Knowles tested the technique through an experiment in which psychology students sold charity Christmas cards door to door.

The students rehearsed four different sales pitches and delivered each pitch to 20 houses, resulting in a sample of 80 households for the study. The control sales pitch stated the price of the cards as $3. The DTR sales pitch inserted a verbal disruption — stating the price in pennies (300 pennies) — followed by a reframed statement of the selling point — "It’s a bargain." The other two sales pitches offered just the disruption (300 pennies) or just the reframed selling point (it’s a bargain).

Sales lingered between 25-35 percent when students used the control pitch, the disruption-only pitch or the reframe-only pitch. But when students offered the DTR pitch, sales doubled, with 70 percent of households purchasing cards.

Knowles believes the verbal disruption may attract people’s attention to the information that immediately follows it — so that subjects in the Christmas card study honed in on "it’s a bargain." Alternatively, the DTR tactic could work by distracting consumers’ resistance from the selling point to an inconsequential detail — so that wary subjects focused their suspicion on the phrase "300 pennies" rather than on "it’s a bargain."

CONSUMING RESISTANCE

Knowles also hypothesizes that resistance may be a finite resource, capable of being used up if people resist an argument or offer too intently or too long, but also capable of being replenished over time.

To test this hypthesis, 150 students filled out questionnaires that measured their overall resistance and their general attitudes about politics and politicians. The students then watched a succession of political advertisements for seven unfamiliar candidates. The researchers varied the order of the ads so that some subjects viewed the candidate "Smith" first while others viewed the Smith advertisement last. Subjects were asked to critique each ad and report how well they liked each candidate.

But the researchers inserted an additional experimental condition. After watching six of the seven political advertisements, subjects viewed a fifteen-minute travel video for Fiji. Half the subjects were asked to think positively about the Fiji video — listing activities or sights they would enjoy on such a trip. The remaining subjects were instructed to be critical of the video and keep a list of things that could go wrong on the trip. All subjects were then allowed to view the final political advertisement.

Knowles and his assistants predicted that, if resistance truly was a limited resource, their subjects would become progressively more tolerant of the political candidates as they watched each campaign ad. Furthermore, if resistance could be replenished, the subjects who took a break from critical thinking, viewing the Fiji video in a positive frame of mind, would subsequently show greater resistance to the last political ad than did subjects who continued to exercise (and use) their resistance during the travelogue.

The results were not so clean cut, but they offered insight into how people’s predispositions influence their ability to be persuaded. Knowles’ team found that subjects who entered the experiment with an open mind about political candidates acted just as the researchers predicted — using up their resistance early in the series of political ads and showing greater dislike of the final candidate when allowed to replenish resistance during the travel video.

However, subjects who reported a chronic suspicion of political candidates before beginning the experiment showed the opposite reaction.

"We found that these naturally skeptical people became increasingly more critical and resistant as the study progressed, regardless of how they viewed the Fiji tape," Knowles said. "We had opened the floodgate to their negativity, and the more they looked at the candidates, the less they liked them. By the time they saw the last ad, they hated that candidate.

"It’s like exercise," he explained. "Those who weren’t accustomed to being resistant, who weren’t practiced at it, well their resistance muscle got tired. The others were just warming up. They started off a little cold, but then their resistance was off and running."

ACKNOWLEDGING RESISTANCE:

Finally, Knowles’ studies have shown that sometimes the best way to reduce resistance is to face it head-on. In a survey of 300 undergraduates, Knowles presented a hypothetical quote from a dean of student services.

Half of the subjects read: "If students pay a little more tuition, they get a much better education." When asked to rate their agreement with this statement on a scale of one to nine (one being "strongly disagree" and nine representing "strongly agree"), the mean rating hovered slightly above two — indicating very strong disagreement.

The remaining students read an altered quote: "I know you won’t want to agree with this, but if students pay a little more tuition, they get a much better education." Among these students, the mean rating rose more than a full point. Although the students continued to disagree with the statement, they reacted with significantly less resistance.

"Obviously, we haven’t made the message more appealing, but we’ve acknowledged the resistance directly," Knowles said. "When they see that the dean already recognizes their reservations, they feel less responsibility to actively resist, to deliberately think about the reasons they disagree."

THE SYMPOSIUM:

Sponsored by grants from the NSF and the Marie Wilson Howells Fund, the Symposium on Resistance and Persuasion takes place April 12-13 at the UA Center for Continuing Education. The event will feature 11 presentations from nationally renowned scholars in the field of social psychology and represents the first opportunity these researchers have had to share their work and plot the progress of resistance studies.

For a list of presenters or more information, visit http://www.uark.edu/~omega/symposium.html.

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