Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

Here’s yet another example of the twists and turns of practical persuasion plays.  Start High WATT to – get this – to increase the effectiveness of a Cue.  That’s right.  You enhance the Peripheral Route by starting on the Central Route.  This isn’t as crazy as it sounds when you understand how Depletion works.

Let me quote here:  “Similar to the functioning of a muscle, the limited-resource model of self-control . . . posits that any behavior that involves deliberate and regulated responses by the self draws on a limited resources, akin to strength or energy.  Any act of volition is posited to have a detrimental impact on any subsequent act of volition due to the fact that they must share the same limited (and dwindling) resource.”  That’s how Fennis, Janssen, and Vohs put it in their study, “Acts of Benevolence: A Limited-Resource Account of Compliance with Charitable Requests,” published in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Stated in ELM parlance:  High WATT capacity is limited and the more you engage in it, the less of it you have.  Thus, initial High WATT processing will reduce available WATTage for later processing attempts.  More simply, start them on the Central Route to make them want the Peripheral Route.

Stated in conversational terms, mental work wears you out and make bright, shiny, jiggly things even more fun!

Now, exactly how do you drain cognitive resource?  In this report, Fennis et al. did six experiments that depleted participants prior to a Cue-based persuasion play.  Here’s a brief description of the six Drano tasks.

1.  Complete 20 multiple choice question on eating habits (Control got no questions.)

2.  Respond to questions on CO2 emissions:  Are you familiar with the harmful consequences of CO2 emissions by cars and trucks?  Could you name a few of those harmful consequences and explain why you they are harmful?  How do you think car drivers can contribute to restoring the harmful effects of CO2 emissions on the environment? (Control got no questions.)

3.  Answer 10 questions about taxes that were detailed and demanding.  (Control questions were on the same topic, but less detailed and demanding.)

4.  Cross out every occurrence of the letter “e” in a page of dense text taken from a statistics text book, then do the task again, but this time cross out the letter “e” only when it follows a vowel in a new page of dense text from a statistics text book.  (Control did first task and repeated it, thus not learning the new “e” rule.)

5.  Complete a  4 minute geometric figure tracing task with your nondominant hand while looking at the figure in a mirror. (Control did this with their dominant hand without the mirror.)

6.  Take survey measuring the trait of self control (I am good at resisting temptation.  People would say that I have iron self-discipline.  I often act without thinking through all the consequences.  Rate 1-5.)  Higher score more self control with a median split for High versus Low self control.

Obviously each of these tasks (and the one measure) wear out (or measure your ability) to control your cognitive resources.  Each requires extensive thinking although no one task is brain surgery or rocket science or even climate study!  They provide a great operational definition of WATTage and how you can move the dimmer switch in a simple and direct fashion.

Now, does any of this make any difference in persuasion?

After the Drano task, participants got a wide variety of message sequence tactics like foot-in-the-door (FITD), door-in-the-face (DITF), the Liking CLARCCS Cue, and, finally, the lowball technique.  The Cue was used to get participants to volunteer, support, sign up for, etc. a variety of charitable behaviors.  Typically these message tactics produce small to medium effects (as determined by several solid meta-analytic studies, especially Dillard, Hunter, and Burgoon’s 1984 report).  Using Drano, Fennis et al. found medium to large effects for depletion on compliance.

The big news for practical persuasion is that you can increase the effectiveness of a proven Cue through Drano.  Depletion actively turns down the WATTage dimmer switch making the Cue even stronger than Standard Operating Procedure.  The big news for theoretical persuasion is the mediation analysis Fennis et al. provided.  Not only did they demonstrate the Drano effect across six different tasks, samples, and behaviors, but they also collected data (not discussed in this post) that proved that depletion actually occurred.  It’s a helluva study and you can read it here.  The report is so well written that a general reader can grasp the basics and leave the details for persuasion scientists to argue about.

Of course, there are nuances here.

First, depletion and these message tactics work best with prosocial behaviors like volunteering, signing petitions, contributing time or money to good works, etc.  These tactics tend not to work with profit making behaviors because we tend to be more alert (suspicious) when somebody is trying to make money off of us.  If you want to use Drano and FITD to make a sale, you need to do something to lower that natural alertness and suspicion first.

Second, while Fennis et al., didn’t and perhaps wouldn’t say this, I think the Drano effect is general and can be routinely applied as WATTage play to lower the dimmer switch in almost any persuasion situation.  At the most hardcore scientific level, this report only supports depletion with various message tactics for prosocial behaviors.  I’m going beyond the direct test to assume (making an ass out of U and me) that depletion would deepen a Low WATT state as a generic elaboration moderator.  (I would bet dollars to donuts there’s probably a published study that uses Drano with strong and weak arguments in a standard ELM setup; I just haven’t read it yet.)

Bottom Line:  Drano is a WATTage switch that produces deeper Low WATT processing.  Properly combined with Cues, depletion can increase the effectiveness of the Cue compared to typical outcomes.  Finally, this is an excellent example of how to scientifically study human behavior.  If all research was like this, we’d know a lot more about what really works and why.  My congrats to Fennis, Janssen, and Vohs!