Reimer,T.
Hertwig,R.
Sipek,S.

The twentieth century boasts numerous examples of powerful political oratory. Among the most significant American political speeches of that time are Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address and "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor address to the nation, and Malcolm X's "The ballot or the bullet" speech. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the study of rhetoric had been the preserve of philosophers and historians. Possibly inspired by the twentieth century's great oratory—as well as its corrosive demagoguery—social scientists began in the 1940s and 1950s to investigate the processes underlying rhetoric and persuasion empirically. One early finding of this research—disconcerting but, from the perspective of scholars of classical rhetoric, not astounding—was what were assumed to be better arguments do not invariably carry the day. As the Kennedy-Nixon and other presidential debates demonstrated, voters' opinions can be influenced by many other factors, including the candidates' perceived or actual personality traits and demeanor. The limits of the power of argument to influence opinion gave rise to various psychological models of persuasion. Among the most influential of these psychological accounts are the heuristic-systematic model and the elaboration-likelihood model. We begin by briefly reviewing both models and how they account for the impact of arguments on attitudes. Second, we critically discuss the theories' implications for human rationality, particularly their equation of heuristic processing with irrationality. Third, we put forth an alternative account of persuasion based on a Brunswikian framework. Finally, we describe experimental evidence in support of this account. Two disclaimers are in order at the outset: We do not consider another influential psychological tradition in persuasion research, one that is more generally concerned with social influence strategies. Furthermore, we focus on key common aspects of the heuristic-systematic model and the elaboration-likelihood model, rather than, for instance, comprehensively describing all seven postulates of the elaboration-likelihood model. Let us now turn to the logic behind the two dominant psychological models of persuasion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)

Reimer, T., Hertwig, R., & Sipek, S. (2013). Probabilistic persuasion: A Brunswikian theory of argumentation. In R. Hertwig, U. Hoffrage, & the ABC Research Group, Simple heuristics in a social world (pp. 103-134). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Publication year	2013
Document type:	In book
Publication status:	Published
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Keywords:	argument qualitybounded rationalitybrunswikian lens modelcommunicationdecision makingfast and frugal heuristicspersuasionsocial influence