Persuasion - Culture

Culture

It is through a basic cultural personal definition of persuasion that everyday people understand how others are attempting to influence them and then how they influence others. The dialogue surrounding persuasion is constantly evolving because of the necessity to use persuasion in everyday life. Persuasion tactics traded in society have influences from researchers, which may sometimes be misinterpreted. It is evolutionary advantageous, in the sense of wealth and survival, to persuade and not be persuaded. In order to understand persuasion, members of a culture will gather knowledge from domains such as “buying, selling, advertising, and shopping, as well as parenting and courting.”

Because people who studied persuasion in scholarly departments such as marketing and psychology, also brought with them their folk knowledge of persuasion, the scientific knowledge became intertwined with folk knowledge.

The Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) was created by Friestad and Wright in 1994. This framework allows the researchers to analyze the process of gaining and using everyday persuasion knowledge. The researchers suggest the necessity of including “the relationship and interplay between everyday folk knowledge and scientific knowledge on persuasion, advertising, selling, and marketing in general.”

In order to educate the general population about research findings and new knowledge about persuasion, teacher must draw on their preexisting beliefs from folk persuasion in order to make the research relevant and informative to lay people, which creates “mingling of their scientific insights and commonsense beliefs.”

As a result of this constant mingling, the issue of persuasion expertise becomes messy. Expertise status can be interpreted from a variety of sources like job titles, celebrity, or published scholarship.

It is through this multimodal process that we create concepts like ‘stay away from car salesman, they will try to trick you.” The kind of persuasion techniques blatantly employed by care salesman creates an innate distrust of them in popular culture. According to Psychology Today, they employ tactics raging from making personal life ties with the customer to altering reality by handing the customer the new car keys before the purchase.

The fact that this article was written in a secondary source, alludes to a primary source is the way in which culture and persuasion are interconnected.