Persuasion (Psychology)

Conflicts between groups are affected by myriad historical and situational factors. Yet
people are rarely overwhelmed by this complexity and are able to adopt a coherent
depiction of the conflict, often with an unequivocal allocation of blame to one group. A
person's final judgment tells only a fraction of the story. To uncover the whole story,
numerous factors must be considered. Two such factors are whether the person harbors
implicit prejudice toward an involved group and whether the way in which relevant
information is presented will allow for the emergence of perspective-taking and provide
insight into the conflict that will aid third-party observes in making a coherent end
judgment. This research explored the role of anti-Muslim prejudice and perspectivetaking
in allocating blame for an ambiguous conflict between two groups that differed
only on the dimension of religion (Muslim vs. Christian). Participants completed two
measures of prejudice-an anti-Muslim Implicit Association Test and an explicit antiMuslim
prejudice questionnaire. Participants then viewed one of two versions of a filmed conflict scene. While both films were identical in content, the order of their
contents was reversed (conflict first vs. history first). Participants were then asked to
allocate blame for the conflict to one group over the other. Following this judgment of
blame, participants recorded their thoughts and feelings regarding this judgment into an
audio recorder. These recordings were then played back while they used the Mouse
Paradigm to express the feelings portrayed in their recordings. Results indicated no
relationship between explicit prejudice and allocation of blame. Implicit prejudice scores
were strongly related to allocation of blame, with increases in IAT scores positively
correlating with blame of the Muslim group. Results also suggested a link between
performance on the lA T and the Mouse Paradigm. More specifically, the results suggest
that IAT performance may predict performance on the Mouse Paradigm. Additional
results provided by the Mouse Paradigm provided insight into the deliberative processes
taking place during the allocation of blame. Future research should explore the link
between lA T scores and Mouse Paradigm performance and should be extended to include
other forms of the lAT.

While tension is growing in the Middle East towards the United States due to American foreign policies, hate and anger is rising, and Middle Easterners feel threatened by the United States. It is with such a context in mind that the animosity of consumers in the Middle East is examined and whether that animosity affects the willingness to buy. In this study, the intention is to understand consumers' internal motivations behind their refusal to buy American products. Is it just to express anger, to punish the United States, or just to enhance their images, that consumers in the Middle East refuse to buy American products? In addition, the goal is to go a step further and to investigate whether animosity is expressed across different religious groups.

Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the social influence perspective, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the explicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the implicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people's mindset. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a lowlevel or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants' allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.

Despite extensive research into memory and violence, relatively little is known about the relationship between violent media and memory of advertised products. Research has yielded contradictory evidence ; some scholars have found a negative relationship, others a nonexistent one... This research investigated the role of emotion in the relationship between violent media and product placement memory. This study creates insight into inconclusive previous findings by providing evidence that violence influences product memory. Specifically, participants were significantly worse at remembering products placed within violent clips (e.g., free recall, cued recall, recognition. Participants' emotional responses to the violent clips also appeared to influence their memory for embedded products ; product recognition was significantly correlated with disgust, avoidance, and interest ratings.... Interestingly, stronger negative responses to the violent clips were correlated with decreased preference for the embedded products. Furthermore, the pattern of differences for product preference between target and non-target violent products varied according to negative emotional reaction. Therefore, this dissertation provides insight into the role emotion plays in the relationship between viewing violent media and product placement memory.

This research addresses the question of whether individuals or groups induce deeper message processing of persuasive messages. An interaction between group entitativity and whether the group is an ingroup or an outgroup is predicted, where ingroups low on entitativity and outgroups high on entitativity are expected to induce deeper message processing. Entitativity measures the extent an aggregate of people is seen as a group (D. T. Campbell, 1958). Previous research shows contradictory results. S. G. Harkins and R. E. Petty (1987) have shown that high entitativity causes more message focus than low entitativity. R. J. Rydell and A. R. McConnell (2005) have shown that low entitativity causes more message focus than high entitativity. Hypotheses were not supported by the data. Post hoc analyses suggest that motivation to process persons and messages was greatest in the high entitativity ingroup condition. Predictions were revised by adding motivation as a variable.