An Experimental Study of Persuasive Social Communication

Abstract

Studies of contextual effects on political behavior are plagued by concerns about internal validity. Perhaps of greatest concern are possible selection mechanisms that appear to present statistical support for contextual influence when social communication has no real effect. This paper presents an experimental framework for testing contextual effects that ameliorates these concerns through exogenous assignment to communication networks. This experiment allows for an analysis of the factors that make discussion partners influential. These factors can be divided into two categories:(1) characteristics of the dyad and its members; (2) characteristics of the residual discussion network. The most robust findings suggest that factors in this latter category play the greatest role in the likelihood that a discussion partner is influential. 1 1 The author wishes to thank Robert Huckfeldt, Matthew Buttice, Elizabeth Simas, and Benjamin Highton for their assistance with this project. This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-0817082).It may not be polite to discuss politics, but many people constantly talk about politics at home, in their businesses, and while they have an evening out. Many people are talking, but some are more influential than others. Some individuals speak and change minds, while others speak and their arguments are rebuffed. This paper is about persuasion narrowly defined as when individuals convince others to support the same candidate they support.There are many factors that could influence whether or not an individual is persuasive. This paper evaluates the effects of the partisanship and expertise of a discussion dyad, as well as, the messages being sent by other discussion partners.There is a long and rich tradition of contextual research in political science and related fields (e.g., Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee, 1954;Finifter, 1974;MacKuen and Brown, 1987;Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995). In political science, the literature on contextual effects has been dominated by a single research strategy: the pairing of survey responses to contextual measures. Critics have pointed out that measurement error and endogeneity issues may lead researchers to find contextual effects when they do not actually exist (Achen and Shively, 1995;Johnson, Shively and Stein, 2002). These problems suggest the use of a laboratory experiment to overcome these internal validity concerns. This paper presents the results of a unique, group-based experiment in which subjects are placed in parties and contexts as they try to choose between two candidates. Subjects decide on a candidate using information provided by two sources: private information and messages from their fellow subjects. The private information is accurate on average, but any single piece of information may be inaccurate. The socially communicated information may come from subjects who are uninformed or biased in favor of one of the candidates.This means that subjects are often forced to make a choice. Do they believ...

Personality, Interpersonal Disagreement, and Electoral Information

“…Indeed, one implication of our results is that some kinds of people may make "better" choices at the ballot box when exposed to heterogeneous views, while others may make worse decisions (see also Ryan 2011;Sokhey and McClurg 2012). Future work should look more closely at heterogeneous responses to disagreement as they relate to the quality of decision making itself, along with other outcomes such as persuasion (e.g., Ryan 2013).…”

How gender affects the efficacy of discussion as an information shortcut

“…This signal is only useful, however, to non-Democrats because Democrats would have chosen their party's candidate anyway. Still, while many will ignore a self-serving recommendation, some boundedly-rational voters will mistakenly follow a discussion partner's advice and choose the “wrong” candidate (Crawford, 2003; Ryan, 2013). If women are more open to persuasion, then, it is possible that they are also more open to making this voting error.…”

Social Constraint and Self‐Doubt: Mechanisms of Social Network influence on Resistance to Persuasion

“…The role of network attitudinal heterogeneity in opening our views to change has been repeatedly established (e.g., Levitan & Visser, ; Ryan, ; Visser & Mirabile, ), but the mechanisms of this influence remain relatively obscure, despite the important normative implications. If this change arises from thoughtful consideration of information or arguments provided by others, this has positive implications for democracy (see Fishkin, ).…”