Strategies and motives for resistance to persuasion: an integrative framework

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2021-10-20 16:30:07

1Amsterdam School of Communication Research, Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Persuasion is an important element of human communication. But in many situations, we resist rather than embrace persuasive attempts. Resistance to persuasion has been studied in many different disciplines, including communication science, psychology, and marketing. The present paper reviews and connects these diverse literatures, and provides an organizing framework for understanding and studying resistance. Four clusters of resistance strategies are defined (avoidance, contesting, biased processing, and empowerment), and these clusters are related to different motivations for resisting persuasion (threat to freedom, reluctance to change, and concerns of deception). We propose that, while avoidance strategies may be triggered by any of these motivations, contesting strategies are linked primarily to concerns of deception, while empowerment and biased processing strategies are most common when people are reluctant to change.

Persuasion plays a prominent role in daily life. People frequently try to convince others to change their attitudes, opinions, or behavior. Consider a manager asking one of his employees to work extra hours during the weekend, a politician convincing the public to give him their vote, a doctor encouraging his patients to take their medicines, or a television commercial persuading consumers that they need a safe car to take good care of their beloved families. However, achieving such change is not as easy as it may seem. As Miller (1965) explains, “In our daily lives we are struck not by the ease of producing attitude change but by the rarity of it” (p. 121).