Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

148 Understanding Rational Decision Making

Citibank’s experience with the new loan agreement form illustrates just a few of the benefi ts to be

gained when professionals are able to increase the speed and accuracy of the decisions they ask their

audiences to make. To realize similar benefi ts, professionals must make it easy for their audiences

to complete each of the six cognitive processes required in audience decision making—perception,

attention, sentence-level comprehension, schema activation, information acquisition, and informa-

tion integration.

Chapter 4 describes many of the stylistic choices available to professionals and explains how

each choice either helps or hinders one or more of the cognitive processes involved in audience

decision making. For example, an advertiser’s choice of typeface, type size, and background color

can determine how easily reading audiences perceive the words on a page. Similarly, a politician’s

speaking rate, volume, and prosody can determine how easily listening audiences perceive the words

being spoken.

In addition to infl uencing the speed and accuracy of audience decision making, stylistic choices

can affect how intuitively appealing and persuasive a document, presentation, or even a point made

during a meeting is to an audience. The intuitive appeal of stylistic choices is the subject of Chap-

ter 5. Other stylistic choices can affect the way the audience views the writer or speaker. Is she

polite or impolite, confi dent or uncertain, friendly or aloof, credible or untrustworthy? Chapter 6

explores these choices.

Then there are those stylistic choices that appear to have little or no effect on audience decision

making. For example, a study of employee responses to their managers’ directives fi nds no correla-

tion between the directives’ organizational plans (inductive or deductive) and the likelihood that

employees take the actions their managers request.^2 Likewise, a study of customer responses to sales

letters fi nds no correlation between either the letters’ formats (block, marginal message, or hanging

indention) or the color of the letterheads (white, pink, yellow, blue, or green) and the number of

orders customers place.^3 Similarly, a study comparing emailed versions of persuasive messages to

printed versions fi nds no difference in the effects of email or print on the behaviors and perceptions

of the message recipients.^4

Aids to Perception

The fi rst of the six cognitive processes required in audience decision making is perception. Profes-

sionals aid audience decision making when the words they write are easy for their readers to see,

when the words they speak are easy for their listeners to hear and recognize, and when the elements

of the graphs and charts they present are easy for their viewers to discern.

Legible Characters

Readers’ perception of the text in a document or on a presentation slide depends fi rst of all

on the legibility of each letter or character of type in it. The legibility of each character of

type depends on its print quality, type size, case, and typeface, as well as its contrast with the

background. Poor print quality increases the amount of time it takes the audience to recognize

letters and words.^5 The medium also infl uences legibility. For example, the legibility of text in

e-books is inferior to that in paper books. Compared to audiences reading paper books, audi-

ences reading e-books fi xate longer, make more saccades, blink more, and suffer more from

eye fatigue.^6