Exploring links between social learning and persuasion: The role of credibility

Abstract

Research often focuses on one of two ways in which evaluative responses can be established or changed: the effects of persuasive messages and the effects of environmental regularities. While the former depend on the symbolic meaning of words and sentences, the latter are often seen as non-symbolic (i.e., the change in liking is assumed to be driven by purely spatiotemporal properties). However, De Houwer and Hughes (2016) introduced the idea that regularities can function as symbols conveying how stimuli are related to one another. If so, there may be important similarities between regularity-based and persuasion-based effects. We applied these ideas to observational evaluative conditioning (OEC), a type of social learning that involves a change in liking that is due to a regularity between the presence of a stimulus and the behavior of a model. Specifically, we tested whether the credibility of the source – a variable known to influence persuasion – moderated OEC effects. In Experiment 1 (n = 298) we first confirmed that our manipulation of source credibility moderated the effectiveness of a verbal message describing how a model reacted to stimuli. In Experiment 2 (n = 301) we replaced this verbal message by a video that actually showed the model reacting to the stimuli. Contrary to predictions, OEC effects were not larger when the model was high in credibility than when the model was low in credibility. We discuss the lack of an impact of source credibility in light of the persuasion literature and suggest potential improvements for future research exploring similarities between social learning and persuasion.