anthology of iadt Research and Practice 2013
than negatively framed ones; in other words, argument framing. The authors also indicated that the relevance to the audience of the message is also important as the relation to the audience determines their issue involvement and attention.
Persuasions in Advertising Persuasion techniques such as reframing (O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy, 2004) and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) are used to design persuasive advertising everyday. Advertising is seen in print, electronic or visual and audio media sources. This mass availability of publication is used to promote products and alter consumer attitudes and perceptions towards a product or issue. Advertising, whether for a product or political campaign, wishes to promote an issue or persuade the audience to take a particular action using a persuasive message which is the core of the advertisement (O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy, 2004). Brinol, Petty, Valle, Rucker and Becerra (2007) investigated the effects a message has on the recipient’s self-validation before and after the message of persuasion has been administered. The power to which Petty, Valle, Rucker and Becerra (2007) refer is the individual’s capacity to adjust their own attitudes and social judgements towards a message based on some form of a rewards system. This self-validation procedure is known as the self-validation hypothesis (Petty, Brinol & Tormala, 2002). The self-validation hypothesis is similar to the subjective norms and individual attitudes of the person in TORA in that it is used to predict an individual’s actions based upon an individual’s judgements of a particular topic and their attitudes towards them.
Persuasive Technology and Captology Advertisers have been forced to change from traditional strategies due to advancing technology. They do this by incorporating the different aspects technology can provide to persuade an audience. Persuasive technology is any interactive computing system designed to change people’s attitudes or behaviours. One of these areas is captology, in which computing technologies such as the Internet and other technological hardware is used in cooperation with persuasion methods (Fogg, 2003). The advantage of computer-mediated methods of persuasion is the factor of interactivity, which is defined as a humanlike cue in the context of human-computer interaction (HCI). Interactivity, when used correctly, may increase the persuasive appeal of an advertisement (Sundar & Kim, 2005) or increase the user’s attitudes towards a political party issue (Sundar, Kalyanaraman & Brown, 2003).
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Sundar and Kim (2005) investigated interactivity and persuasion, particularly determining if whether or not participants’ interaction with an advertisement had an effect on its persuasive appeal. To conduct this research, Sundar and Kim (2005) exposed 48 participants to low, medium or high levels of interactivity (by manipulation of the animation level and shape of the banner). They inferred on the basis of their findings that interactivity was positively associated with the advertisements and attitudes towards the product. In addition to this finding, an interesting result was that the levels of interactivity with animation and the shape of the advertisement had an influence upon the persuasion process. A traditional method of persuasion, unlike interactive methods of captology, cannot employ a tailored examination of their audience and alter their method or content of delivery to the viewer. This is where interactive methods such as online persuasion advertising have an informed advantage. These two pieces of research reinforce the argument that methods of captology may affect the population’s attitudes towards a particular issue depending on the method of interactive captology intervention.
Self-Representation using Avatars One of the most common CMCs is through the use of an avatar. Avatars are creative platforms for the representation of a person’s physical identity or depictions of their identity online (Vasalou & Joinson, 2009). Avatars are used in different online environments; Vasalou and Joinson (2009) examined the representations made by users in three online environments; dating websites, online gaming and blogging. The findings displayed that the dating condition participants highlighted one of their physical attributes more than others, blogging participants were the truest representations of users’ actual appearance and the gaming participant avatars accentuated an aspect of their avatar to suit the context of the game. Vasalou and Joinson (2009) note their own research findings regarding online dating avatars replicate the findings of Hancock, Toma and Ellison (2007). These investigations note that male participants designed their own avatars to be taller than their actual selves, whereas female participants made themselves thinner in comparison to their actual appearance. The authors of both investigations theorise that participants alter their physical appearances or accentuate one aspect of their existing physical appearance to their view of their ideal self. Furthermore the findings of Vasalou and Joinson’s (2009) dating conditions study indicates that participants did not