Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Heuristics and Biases in Audience Decision Making 211

their concerns about the management of underperforming fi rms and do not realize other board

members have similar concerns. Groups are also prone to polarize the predispositions of indi-

vidual members toward risk. Group polarization results in decisions that are either too risky or

too conservative.^34 When the pressure on members to conform overrides their need to produce a

good decision, a bias psychologist Irving Janis termed groupthink ,^35 groups tend to produce poorly

reasoned decisions. More recently, groupthink has been attributed to a shared schema or shared

mental model.^36

Note that the heuristics described in this chapter are all associated with the audience’s ease of

processing information, or what is called processing fl uency.^37 They should not be confused with the

heuristics cues identifi ed in the dual-mode persuasion literature, cues that provide audiences with

substantive information such as whether the communicator is an expert or a novice, is attractive

or unattractive, or has high status or low status.^38 Dual-mode heuristic cues, as described in Chap-

ter 6 , do not make information easier to process. Instead, they provide additional information upon

which an unmotivated or distracted audience may base its decisions.

Note too that dual-mode persuasion theory predicts even strong arguments in a message will not

be persuasive unless the audience is highly motivated to think about them. More recently, studies

show that strong arguments that are easy to process will be persuasive even if the audience is not

highly motivated to think about them. When the diffi culty of processing arguments and the use

of dual-mode heuristic cues is controlled for, the previously found interactions with the audience’s

motivation and attention levels disappear.^39

Dual-mode persuasion theory also predicts that more deliberative thought leads to fewer

biases. Yet more thought can lead to the use of more heuristics^40 and is rarely a successful anti-

dote against biases.^41 Ironically, the more motivated audience members are to deliberate about a

choice, the bigger the framing effects^42 and the greater the biasing effects of the representative-

ness heuristic.^43

Perception-Related Heuristics and Biases

The Perceptual Fluency Heuristic

Anything that impacts the speed and accuracy of perception can affect perceptual fl uency, or the

ease with which audiences perceive stimuli.^44 For example, stimuli, such as words and pictures,

presented for long durations are usually easier for audiences to perceive than stimuli presented for

short durations. Perceiving stimuli that have high clarity is easier for the audience than perceiving

stimuli with low clarity. Perceiving familiar stimuli is easier for them than perceiving novel stimuli.

Perceiving foreground stimuli or fi gures that contrast with their backgrounds is also easier.^45 In

addition, certain attributes of stimuli—such as simplicity, prototypicality, symmetry, balance, as well

as proportions such as the golden section—may facilitate the audience’s perceptual processing and

as a result give the stimuli more aesthetic appeal.^46

Audiences use the perceptual fl uency heuristic when their subjective experience of easily per-

ceiving information leads them to prefer that information more, weight it more heavily, assume

it is more true, or fi nd it more persuasive than equally relevant or more relevant information that

is diffi cult to perceive.^47 Although anything that aids perceptual processing can lead to percep-

tual fl uency, audiences rarely attribute the experience of perceptual fl uency to its true cause. For

example, audience members who have seen a particular stimulus before are likely to mistakenly

believe they viewed it for a longer time period or that it possessed a higher clarity than it actu-

ally did.^48