Personality As A Factor In Susceptibility To Persuasion

Research Paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A, Harvard University (Harvard Business School), course: Psychology of Strategic Leadership, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction Much has been written on which types of people have more influence, are more successful negotiators and the techniques related to persuasion. However, this assumes that most people have the ability to enter a situation and accurately judge their audiences and respond accordingly to cues and effectively use numerous appropriate persuasion techniques. The ongoing hypotheses in the literature is that all people are equal when it comes to persuasion, whereas in practice we may use how much somebody cares about when it is one friend and using social pressure on another friend depending on that friend's characteristics. Very little research has been done on how the identity of the audience changes their responsiveness to different persuasion techniques. The authors of this paper examine how the responsiveness to Cialdini's six persuasion techniques varies by gender, cultural background and personality type. Each of the techniques is briefly described in the table below. Our results show that there are indeed differences in responsiveness to techniques depending on demographic and personality differences. 2. Theoretical background 2.1 Personality and persuasion 2.1.1 Five-factor model of personality Fifty years ago, Tupes and Christal (1961) established a five-factor model of personal traits (often termed the Big Five) consisting of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.2 Today, this framework is widely used to describe the most important aspects of personalities.3 Several studies showed that the five traits are stable over time and can be applied across cultures.4 Table 2 lists the most representative attributes of the extremes for each of the five factors. 2.1.2 Pe

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: A, Harvard University (Harvard Business School), course: Psychology of Strategic Leadership, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction Much has been written on which types of people have more influence, are more successful negotiators and the techniques related to persuasion. However, this assumes that most people have the ability to enter a situation and accurately judge their audiences and respond accordingly to cues and effectively use numerous appropriate persuasion techniques. The ongoing hypotheses in the literature is that all people are equal when it comes to persuasion, whereas in practice we may use how much somebody cares about when it is one friend and using social pressure on another friend depending on that friend’s characteristics. Very little research has been done on how the identity of the audience changes their responsiveness to different persuasion techniques. The authors of this paper examine how the responsiveness to Cialdini’s six persuasion techniques varies by gender, cultural background and personality type. Each of the techniques is briefly described in the table below. Our results show that there are indeed differences in responsiveness to techniques depending on demographic and personality differences. 2. Theoretical background 2.1 Personality and persuasion 2.1.1 Five-factor model of personality Fifty years ago, Tupes and Christal (1961) established a five-factor model of personal traits (often termed the Big Five) consisting of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.2 Today, this framework is widely used to describe the most important aspects of personalities.3 Several studies showed that the five traits are stable over time and can be applied across cultures.4 Table 2 lists the most representative attributes of the extremes for each of the five factors. 2.1.2 Personality and persuasibility Already before the five-factor personality model was created, Hovland et al. (1953) and Janis et al. (1959) studied personality factors related to persuasibility. In their Yale studies, the authors tested selected personal characteristics such as self esteem, richness of fantasy and interpersonal aggressiveness with regards to susceptibility to persuasion.7 These studies triggered further persuasion research which expanded to personal attributes such as anxiety, dogmatism and need for cognition.8 The following paragraphs summarize major findings regarding the five personality traits’ susceptibility to persuasion.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 7, University of Amsterdam, language: English, abstract: Over the previous decades, researches have scrutinized social influence – the methods used for changing people’s attitudes and behaviors. According to Key et. al. (2005), social influence encompasses two forms of influence: persuasion and compliance. While the former refers to alteration of attitudes, the latter denotes change in behavior. Both forms of social influence have been researched (Albarracin et. al., 2005), although the impact of personality differences has mostly been assessed in the context of persuasion, not compliance (Key et. al., 2009). Marwel and Schmitt in 1960s originally conceived compliance by producing a series of compliance-gaining tactics. Decades later, Robert Cialdini distinguished between six principles through which compliance with persuasive request can be obtained. Compliance according to Robert Cialdini (2001) is the process of getting people to conform to a request. The target complying with the persuasive request may or may not apprehend that he or she is being impelled to act in a particular way (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). Jointly Cialdini and Goldstein (2004) define compliance as a submission made in response to a persuasive request. Research on compliance is significant since it is a form of social influence that affects people’s everyday behavior (e.g. social interaction). This paper infers how responsiveness to Cialdini’s compliance principles varies by personality. Historically, researchers interested in the study of personality differences have mostly relied on the five-factor model (FFM) also referred to as Big Five personality factors (Richard et. al., 2001). Currently, this model is widely used to explain crucial features of personalities among different individuals (Judge et. al., 2002). [...]

Whether users are likely to accept the recommendations provided by a recommender system is of utmost importance to system designers and the marketers who implement them. By conceptualizing the advice seeking and giving relationship as a fundamentally social process, important avenues for understanding the persuasiveness of recommender systems open up. Specifically, research regarding influential factors in advice seeking relationships, which is abundant in the context of human-human relationships, can provide an important framework for identifying potential influence factors in recommender system context. This book reviews the existing literature on the factors in advice seeking relationships in the context of human-human, human-computer, and human-recommender system interactions. It concludes that many social cues that have been identified as influential in other contexts have yet to be implemented and tested with respect to recommender systems. Implications for recommender system research and design are discussed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2023, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, April 19–21, 2023. The 24 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Persuasive Technologies in Virtual and Augmented Reality; Persuasive Strategies; Persuasive Design and Applications; Methods for Tailoring and Personalisation; Artificial Persuasive Agents; Gamification; and Personal Factors in Persuasion.