According to research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people are more likely to be persuaded when a message reinforces their prior beliefs. While being aware of a speaker’s ulterior motives, people are motivated to trust them to preserve some self-integrity.
“Persuasion is often motivated by ulterior motives of the agent (i.e., the author of the persuasion attempt). Politicians often express opinions and make promises with the purpose of persuading the audience to support them, even when the politicians themselves do not firmly believe their own words,” said the authors.
The first study used a scenario of the Brazil’s 2018 presidential election win of a far-right candidate. Brazilians completed a survey on the new president’s economic policy. Afterward, participants read positive comments from an economist on the president’s policy, but some participants were given background information on the economist’s interest in receiving a government job.
Results showed participants did not care about the economist’s hidden agenda of gaining favor with the president as long as his opinion matched their own. In fact, despite knowing the ulterior motive, participants were more trusting if the economist’s opinion corresponded with theirs. In contrast, people were less trusting if the economist’s expert opinion differed from their opinions.
In a second scenario, participants bought Lenovo laptops from a salesperson trying to land a sale in a role-playing experiment. Participants were more likely to spot ulterior motives when a salesperson did not make any negative remarks about the laptop. However, like the first experiment, participants aware of ulterior motives but who liked Lenovo laptops reported more trust in the salesperson’s pitch compared to participants who did not like Lenovo laptops.
A third study indicated that people trust persuasive messages from a speaker with ulterior motives to preserve some self-integrity when the speaker’s opinion matches their own. “A message that antagonizes the recipients’ attitudes and is associated with ulterior motives is not only processed as a self-threat, but seems to boost the negative influence of attitudinal incongruence on such assessments,” the researchers said.
“Our findings suggest that, to preserve self-integrity, the individual disregards the part of her or his knowledge about persuasion agents that suggests that these agents are unreliable. S/he can still recognize the communicator’s persuasive intent, but avoids letting the awareness of such intent influence her/his evaluation of the agent.”
The study, “Recognizing and Trusting Persuasion Agents: Attitudes Bias Trustworthiness Judgments, but not Persuasion Detection”, was authored by Tito L. H. Grillo and Cristiane Pizzutti.
