What influences influence?

Abstract

This special issue addresses how aspects of the communicative situation influence how influential persuasive utterances (or other strategies of influence) are in their contexts of use. Specifically, we study the effects of interactional, speaker-, addressee- and channel-related factors and of the interpersonal relationship between speaker and hearer, as well as the effects of referring to the shared context itself. The papers combined in this special issue provide evidence for the considerable impact of the here and now of the interactional context on the persuasiveness of strategies of influence and contribute to our understanding of mechanisms of persuasion.

Does Active or Informative Messaging Result in Greater Conservation Engagement?

“…Due to the lockdown post-COVID-19, sampling was limited to online, and adjustments were made in sample size and experimental comparisons to improve the rigor of the study. If this study had been able to focus on the target community rather than the large, national-level sample, this context for direct interactions between speakers and target audiences would have been found to effectively encourage action in a certain direction [62,63]. Additionally, the messages could not be fully personalized to follow best practices in communications, which were found to be more effective in influencing audiences [64].…”