In a world of competing messages and disinformation, wouldn’t it be great if you could protect your audience against the influence of conflicting or unhealthy information they may encounter – almost the way a vaccination protects your body from diseases it encounters? The good news is, you can: Inoculation Theory supports the idea that being upfront and honest about the downsides or potential objections to a behavior can actually make people better able to resist those objections.
In this episode, we talk about how to pair a negative with a positive in ways that not only make your message stronger, but increase its perceived credibility, too.
Resources:
Compton, J. (2013). Inoculation theory. In J. P. Dillard & L. Shen (Eds.), The Sage handbook of persuasion: Developments in theory and practice (2nd ed.) (pp. 220-236). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Compton, J.; Pfau, M. (2005). “Inoculation theory of resistance to influence at maturity: Recent progress in theory development and application and suggestions for future research“. Annals of the International Communication Association. 29 (1): 97–146. doi:10.1080/23808985.2005.11679045.
McGuire, W. J. (1961). “Resistance to persuasion conferred by active and passive prior refutation of same and alternative counterarguments”. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 63 (2): 326–332. doi:10.1037/h0048344.
Okuno H, Arai S, Suzuki M, Kikkawa T. Impact of Refutational Two-Sided Messages on Attitudes Toward Novel Vaccines Against Emerging Infectious Diseases During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Public Health. 2022;10.
The most famous two-sided message ever: Hertz vs. Avis advertising wars: How an ad firm made a virtue out of second place. (slate.com)
Remember, Inoculation Theory is NOT this unrelated (and totally debunked) mass comm theory: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/the-hypodermic-needle/
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