Barbara Müller, Radboud University, will be visiting us this week and giving a talk in our colloquium. Please see below for the title and abstract of her talk (Thursday, Dec 15th, 2016, 13:00).

How and when self-persuasion works

Direct persuasion techniques (that is, providing people with information about the risks and consequences of certain unhealthy or dangerous behaviours) has been proven to be relatively ineffective when it comes to changing these behaviours. As a consequence, it can lead to psychological reactance; people start avoiding the message, or even engage in more of the unhealthy behaviour, so called boomerang effects. Given these negative possibilities, in the past years researchers focussed on more indirect techniques to change people’s behaviour and help them to adopt a healthier lifestyle (for a review see Aronson, 1999). One of these indirect techniques I focus on in my work, and which I will talk about in this presentation, is self-persuasion. Self-persuasion means that people are encouraged to generate own arguments against certain behaviours instead of presented with arguments. I will explain why self-persuasion is more efficient then direct persuasion when it comes to change behaviour more permanently, present evidence on how it is most useful to apply, and which boundary conditions influence its effectiveness.