Attitude Change and Persuasion Persuasion is a process through which an individual or groups of individuals purposely changes in behavior or the way they act, way of thinking or any other aspect of another through the employing of intellect as well as feelings. This is a very important process because through persuasion people are affected and they also affect others. In most cases persuasion focuses mainly on attitude as the main target to be changed with the belief that if one can change a person's attitude then other changes such as how a person acts, feels or thinks will automatically change. The process of trying to change the attitudes of people can be a very challenging process that requires a lot of skill to achieve the desired results. This paper is an application of a person's knowledge and understanding of effortful persuasion process .it will further look at how factors such as attribution, processing of message and active thought processes can act as moderators of attitude change.

Attribution

This is a concept in social psychology that addresses the processes through which a person gives an explanation of their cause of behavior and actions. Attribution theory is an overall term for various models that have tried to explain these processes. When one is trying to give an issue they can give an explanation on the matter in two forms. This can be through an external attribution or an internal attribution. External attribution assigns gives reason for a particular act to an external force while an internal...

Therefore attribution is seen to be very crucial when it comes to trying to change people's attitudes. When someone is trying to persuade another on a certain thing then the attributions they will give will be determinates of whether or not they will be convinced and change their minds or not.
For instance .if I am trying to persuade a student to work hard in school and give an attribution of performing well to working hard. Then that particular individual will relate the working hard and good performance and will be convinced. This is because, the attribution is quite convincing and hence the student will be persuaded and change their attitude towards working hard. In other words the student can make internal attributions, if they believe that working hard will make them perform better then they will work hard since they have the belief that this is what will make them perform better. Some factors behind the concept of attribution include the way people perceive things, misattributions and casual attributions. On the other hand the concept behind attitude change is the arousal of attitude fears. Therefore if one uses the right attributions in the process of persuasion then they will be very convincing in what they want and hence achieve their goal however hard it was in the first place.

Processing of message content

In persuasion, the message content can act as a moderator of attitude change in that,…