Do Adults Change their Minds after Reading Persuasive Text?

Abstract

To change the mind of a reader, authors compose written persuasion according to a set of rhetorical features. This article describes the features of persuasive texts and reviews research results to explore whether adults indeed change their minds after reading persuasion. Toulmin's (1958) model of argument and Aristotle's model of persuasive content characterize the structure and content of well-written persuasion. Research in social psychology and text comprehension shows that adults typically build a case for their own prereading belief rather than process a persuasive text mindfully, weigh evidence, and change their beliefs. An important contract between author and reader is typically broken. Research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to encourage readers to read persuasion mindfully.

Exploring the Role Performance of Corporate Ethics Officers

“…The literature on persuasion provides some insight on how this may be accomplished (see, e.g. Chambliss and Garner, 1996;Murphy and Alexander, 2004). Persuasion is the process of altering an individual's perspective by changing the knowledge, beliefs or interests that underlie that perspective (Miller, 1980).…”

“…Persuasion is the process of altering an individual's perspective by changing the knowledge, beliefs or interests that underlie that perspective (Miller, 1980). Persuasion seeks to counter current beliefs and present new ones (Chambliss and Garner, 1996). As a relatively new phenomenon, qualitative approaches may prove useful for developing theory on the phenomenon.…”

Developing Critical Reading of Argumentative Text: Effects of a Comprehension Strategy Intervention

“…Previous studies (cf. Chambliss, 1994) show that when students are emotionally engaged in the content of the text, they often show signs of biased processing in that they fail to remember arguments correctly or are less able to accurately identify claims that contradict their own opinions. In this study, we tried to make this aspect an object of analysis in the classroom and to have teachers discuss their own levels of engagement in order to raise students' awareness of their processing of emotionally engaging content.…”

“…Research demonstrates that critical reading of argumentative text is important for a rich involvement in modern social and cultural life and for many concrete real-life decisions, but also immediately important for students in the large variety of text-based assignments awaiting them across the curriculum (Larson, Britt,& Larson, 2004;Knudsen, 1992). However, empirical research on the reading of argumentative texts indicates that explicit classroom instruction is rare, that students at both secondary and tertiary level are generally not very skilled at identifying key components of argumentative structures in texts, and that students often conflate provided arguments with cases they build themselves while reading, especially when reading arguments of controversial content (Chambliss, 1994(Chambliss, , 1995 (2011) also argue that although research programs emphasize argumentative reasoning and modeling of argumentative reading, future research should pay more attention to the instructional activities that facilitate a development of critical reading behaviors. A particular focus in that line of research, they argue, would be to investigate in what way instructional discourses influence students' reasoning about written argumentation.…”

Navigating between disorder and control: Challenges and choices when teaching reading strategies in the L1 classroom

“…Overall, studies show that explicit teaching the reading of argumentative texts critically is quite rare, and that students on secondary and tertiary levels have difficulties reading argumentative texts critically, i.e. in identifying key components of argumentative structure in texts (Chambliss, 1994;Newell, Beach, Smith & VanDerHeide, 2011). In this article we are interested in how teaching the reading of argumentative texts takes shape in classroom interaction, as a teacher tries to implement teaching methods of dialogic strategy instruction (Tengberg & OlinScheller, 2016).…”