be from the point of view of the persuader, there is no guarantee that it will have desired effect or indeed that it will have any effect at all.
Many professional and non-professional persuaders recognize this and therefore try to gauge the probable effect of the ideas they want to transmit by putting themselves in the place of the audience and asking such questions as: „How would I react to this message it I were on the receiving end?“
The process of getting inside someone else's skin and using someone else's head is a very difficult one and is rarely completely successful. It can, however, be somewhat facilitated if the persuader tries to understand the motivation of his audience and the ways in which the ideas he is transmitting will be useful to them. To this end he may ask: „If I were a member of the audience, how could I use this message? How would it help me do things I want to do“?
In short, he should know as much as possible about the needs of the people he is addressing and how they are trying to satisfy these needs. It may therefore be helpful to explain shortly in this stage, the basic needs human beings experience and how they shape their behaviour in an effort to achieve their goals.
THE SATISFACTION OF NEEDS
Nearly all actions a person takes can ultimately be traced to an effort to satisfy some basic want or need. There is imperfect agreement as to what these basic needs are, but in general human beings seek physical and mental well-being, affection, respect, skill, knowledge, security and power. The importance attached to each of these values varies from individual to individual and from society to society, but most people seem to want all of them to a greater or lesser degree.
To satisfy his basic needs, a person must manipulate his environment or must adjust to it in some appropriate way. Some needs can be satisfied by the physical environment, which can provide many of the things needed for well-being and security, but others depend largely on the social environment – that is on other people. The degree to which anyone achieves affection, respect and most form of power depends on those around him. Anyone sets certain intermediate goals and prescribes actions that are likely to help him reaches these goals. For reaching these goals, an individual must behave in certain ways with respect to both his physical and his social environment.
Already – formed attitudes govern much of what we say to peoples and how we respond to the varied situations with which we are confronted. Much of our past experience is thus stored in the form of attitudes and habits and they provide a convenient guidance mechanism.
An important characteristic of the habits and attitudes of any single individual is that they must be reasonably harmonious. If a person has to attitudes toward two different types of actions he finds himself in a comfortable position. The man who cannot decide whether to fight or to run away is likely to achieve neither honour nor safety. People therefore try to avoid learning incompatible habits and attitudes.
INFORMATION AND ENVIRONMENT
If our physical and social environments were completely stable, it is theoretically possible that we could learn all that was necessary during our early years and then require very little in the way of new information. That is, once having acquired appropriate habits, attitudes and facts and having shaped these into a harmonious whole, we could then act in such a way as to satisfy our needs without further learning. This, however, is impossible because the environment never is completely stable.
In our complex society, a prodigious amount of new information about both people and things has to be learned every day if we are to guide our actions appropriately. Much of this information we gain from direct observation and more from person-to-person conversation. But most people rely on the mass media, directly or indirectly, to inform themselves many aspects of the social and physical environment that are important to them. Businessmen keep in touch with political and economic developments through the press, radio and TV in order to guide their day-to-day decision; others may inform themselves about the world of sports and use this information in conservation with their friends. And so that the mass media cater to so many needs and serve so many functions that is difficult to disentangle the various uses that different people make of them.
To maintain satisfactory relationship with other people we require a great many fact about the environment, some of which are received through the mass media. We need not only information about other people but information that may be useful in conservation, even though the subject matter itself has little relevance to our actions. Experiments have indicated that a reader will remember more of the content of a report if he knows or thinks he knows the author. Information can thus affect behaviour in social relationship even if it deals with a subject-matter that is quite extraneous.
Providing reassurance as to the correctness of stabilized attitudes and action patterns is also an important function of information and here again the mass media play a role. In a constantly changing environment people require assurance that they are actually doing the things that will help to satisfy their needs. Consequently, they welcome persuasion that tend to agree with their own attitudes or indicate the correctness of their actions. In many cases a person who has just bought a car will read the advertising for that make of car more closely than before, apparently to reassure himself that he made a good choice. In such cases persuasions do not change the direction of attitudes and behaviour but are likely to intensify and confirm them.
As a result of cultural and individual selective mechanism, each person gives his attention to different portions of the stream of information. He pays close attention to information about aspects of environment what are important to him and learn that certain sources are more likely to provide this information than others. If, for example, a group made up of people with varying interests and from a number of countries is given 15 minutes to read a newspaper and each individual is than asked to write down headlines of the stories he remembers, it is usually found that every person recalls a different list. Each will be likely to remember items dealing with his own country and most will recall items dealing with their own professional or non-professional interests. All may remember those stories that concern matters which have previously been prominent in the news and about which everybody is talking. (Stevens A., The Persuasion Explosion; Washington 1985)
Experiments indicate, each person develops certain habits perception, based on his needs and the way has undertaken so satisfy these needs.
People are far from passive audiences for persuasions. Instead, they are highly selective users, their choices depending in part on their individual characteristics and in part on the society in which they live. From the stream of information they select those, which are going to satisfy their needs adequately. INFLUENCING BEHAVIOR OF OTHER PERSONS
Since most individuals exercise a high degree of control over the information they receive, through such mechanisms as selective attention, distortion, interpretation and so on, it is sometimes concluded that efforts of persuaders to affect behaviour are doomed to failure. According to this way of thinking, persuasive information can only confirm a person in his existing patterns of action or will be used by him in doing something he wants to do anyway. If that were the case it would be futile to try to bring about changes in behaviour through propaganda, advertising or education. On the other hand there is a different view is supported by historians that persuasive information can bring about very substantial behavioural effects and changes in knowledge and attitudes. There seem to be several good reasons why, in spite of the powerful tendency to maintain stable behaviour patterns, a persuader can influence people’s actions and attitudes under certain conditions.
The most important of these reasons, which overlap somewhat with each other, are the following: Most people are on the look-out for changes in those aspects of their environment that are relevant to them. If they are informed of such a change they may adjust their behaviour or
