Attending to individual recipients' knowledge when generating persuasive analogies

OLGUÍN, MARIA VALERIA; MÁXIMO TRENCH; MINERVINO, RICARDO

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2017

When addressing the general population, experts and novices ground analogicalarguments on culturally shared situations. No studies, however, have assessed theextent to which the analogies used in person-to-person exchanges relate to thebackground knowledge of their intended recipient. In Experiment 1, two groups ofpsychology students received a description of a patient seeking psychologicalassistance. They were tasked with generating analogies to dissuade her fromembarking on a short therapy, on the grounds that such therapies leave theunderlying causes unchanged. While one of the groups was asked to analogise to theknowledge background of the patient, the other group was not given such indication.Results showed that even though participants can adjust their analogies to theiraddressees upon explicit request, they rarely do it spontaneously. Experiment 2 yieldedsimilar results despite a more vivid presentation of the critical information about therecipient. A final study showed that a sample of the same population regards tailoredanalogies as being more persuasive than non-tailored analogies, thus confirming thatparticipants of the first two experiments selected analogies that were less appropriatethan other types of analogies that they are capable of generating.