Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 103

Chapter 3 explores the thought processes, or cognitive processes, such as schema activation, that

audiences must go through if they are to make informed decisions. Professionals who understand

their audience’s cognitive processes are in a better position to choose the best style, format, illustra-

tions, and organization for their documents, presentations, and interactions.

The chapter presents a model of audience decision making that consists of six fundamental

cognitive processes. Four processes— perception , attention , sentence-level comprehension , and schema

activation —have been studied in the context of a wide variety of reading and listening tasks.

The other two processes— information acquisition and information integration —have been studied

primarily in the context of decision making. All six processes come into play any time an

audience reads a persuasive document or listens to a persuasive presentation in order to make

a decision.

Figure 3.1 shows the model in the form of a fl ow chart. The fl ow chart is, of course, an over-

simplifi cation of a much more complex, recursive, and parallel process most of which takes place

below the level of conscious awareness.^2 In the fi rst step of the model, perception, the audience

perceives, that is sees or hears, the information being presented. The audience gets frustrated if

that information is illegible or inaudible. In the second step, attention, the audience pays attention

to the information long enough to take the third step unless something more interesting grabs

and keeps its attention. In the third step, sentence-level comprehension, the audience begins to

comprehend the meaning of the information presented sentence by sentence. If the information

is hard to comprehend, the audience may re-read it, paraphrase it, ask a question, or just give up.

As soon as the audience starts to comprehend the fi rst sentence it reads or hears, it tries to take

the fourth step.

In step four of the model, schema activation, represented as gray diamonds and boxes, the audi-

ence seeks to activate the appropriate decision schema for interpreting the information it has

received and for making a decision. Is someone asking the audience to approve a plan? To pur-

chase a product? To hire a new employee? The model suggests the audience is forced to put its

decision-making process on hold until it is successful at fi nding an answer to that question. Having

to put his decision-making process on hold in this way was the source of the chairman’s frustration

with the VP in the episode recounted previously. Once the audience understands the decision the

professional wants it to make, it decides whether it is willing and able to make that decision. At that

point, it activates the appropriate schema and takes the fi fth step.

In the fi fth step, information acquisition, the audience’s activated decision schema guides its

search for information relevant to making a good decision. Initially, the audience searches for the

slot values of the recommendation and the benchmarks relevant to the fi rst or most important deci-

sion criterion in its schema. For example, if a salesperson recommends a customer buy a particular

laptop, the customer’s fi rst decision criterion would likely be price. The customer would then want

to know the price of the recommended laptop (say $999) as well as the prices of comparable laptops

(which might be $1,499 and $1,599).

In step six of the model, information integration, the audience integrates the two sets of slot

values by comparing the slot value of the recommendation to the slot values of the benchmarks.

If the slot value of the recommendation is preferable to the values of the benchmarks, for example,

if the price of the recommended laptop is less than the prices of comparable laptops, then the

audience will continue the decision-making process and search for the slot values relevant to the

second decision criterion in its schema. However, if the slot value of the recommendation is not

preferable to the values of the benchmarks, it will likely stop the decision-making process and

reject the recommendation. If the audience cannot fi nd one or more of the slot values, then it may

ask the professional to provide those values, or it may simply not make the decision the profes-

sional desires.