Works
- Experiments on Mass Communication, 1949
- The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness, Public Opinion Quarterly, 1951
- Communication and Persuasion: Psychological Studies of Opinion Change, 1953
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Source credibility and the sleeper effect. Hovland and Weiss gave subjects identical articles attributed to trustworthy or untrustworthy sources. Right after reading, the trustworthy source produced far more opinion change; a few weeks later the difference had largely disappeared, because people kept the content but stopped connecting it to the source, which they called the sleeper effect. Caveat: A meta-analysis (Kumkale and Albarracín, Psychological Bulletin, 2004) found that a sleeper effect appears only under particular conditions, such as strong initial impact of both message and discounting cue, so it should not be presented as a general rule.
The communicator's credibility. The Yale program led by Hovland studied persuasion as a matter of who says what to whom. One of its central findings is that the same message is judged differently depending on the perceived expertise and trustworthiness of the person delivering it.
One-sided and two-sided messages. In an Army experiment on a controversial question, a presentation that also gave the arguments on the other side was more effective for men initially opposed to its conclusion and for better educated men, while a one-sided presentation was more effective for men who already agreed and for the less educated. The authors offered the pattern as a hypothesis deserving further study, since some subgroups were small.
What it explains
Hovland explains why attacking the messenger can defeat a message, and why who presents a proposal matters as much as what it says. The sleeper effect adds that a discredited source's claims can still take hold later, once people forget where they came from.
Tactics that draw on Carl I. Hovland (29)
- Celebrity Hire
- Challenging Inconvenient Data
- Credit Poisoning
- Crisis Manufacturing
- Damning with Faint Praise
- Data Desert
- Disinheriting the Past
- Disqualifying the Critic
- False Alarm Fatigue
- Founding Purpose Appeal
- Halo Figurehead
- Having Your Expertise Introduced
- Insider as Outsider
- Internal Disinformation Campaign
- Leading With the Weaknesses
- Nixon Goes to China
- Organizational Gaslighting
- Outside Proxy Criticism
- Outsider Advantage
- Paper Tiger Opponent
- Poisoning the Well
- Promise Fatigue
- Proxy Messenger
- Reputation Assassination
- Reputational Discount
- Sacrificial Idea
- Single Source of Truth
- Unwitting Advocate
- Visionary Praise Sideline