Re-Examining the Agentic Shift: The Sense of Agency Influences the Effectiveness of (Self)Persuasion

Tom G E Damen, Barbara C N Müller, Rick B van Baaren and Ap Dijksterhuis

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 6, 1-9

Abstract: In the present study we investigated whether differences in the sense of agency influenced the effectiveness of both direct persuasion and self-persuasion techniques. By manipulating both the delay and contingency of the outcomes of actions, participants were led to experience either a low or high sense of agency. Participants were subsequently presented with arguments as to why a clean local environment is important (direct persuasion), or were asked to generate those arguments themselves (self-persuasion). Subsequently, participants’ cleanliness attitudes and willingness to participate in a campus cleanup were measured. The results show that techniques of direct persuasion influenced attitudes and volunteering behavior under conditions of low rather than high agency, whereas techniques of self-persuasion were most effective under conditions of high rather than low agency. The present findings therefore show how recent experiences of agency, a state based experience of control, can influence the effectiveness of both external and internal persuasion techniques.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0128635 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 28635&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0128635

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128635

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).