You need to consider this research from Wesley Moons and Diane Mackie.  They did what appears to be the first real dual process experiments on angry people.  Instead of relying upon the common sense from my first paragraph and earlier anger and persuasion research that did not do a Full Monte ELM analysis, Moons and Mackie just got busy in the lab and did what your supposed to do.  And their results surprised me.  To do the Full Monte ELM, you need three things, WATTage, Arguments, and Cues.

First, you have to make people (university students) angry.  Here are two ways these researchers employed:  1) a peer gives harsh criticism of your life experience and goals, or 2) recall a prior event where you got really angry and now write a detailed account of it.  These manipulations turn the dimmer switch of WATTage from a neutral emotional state (didn’t get the angry treatment) to the angry emotional state (did get the anger treatment).  Both approaches have a long citation path in the research lit as manipulations that reliably make people seriously mad.

Second, we need both strong and weak Arguments and it would be nice if we used different topics to push generalizability.  So the researchers developed and pretested strong and weak Arguments on the topic of Financial Responsibility and also employed a common, familiar, and widely used topic of Comprehensive Exams.  The researchers thus had and delivered proven Arguments on different topics.

Third, prior research indicates that angry people are Cue-driven, but these earlier studies did not include the Argument comparison.  We’re handling that Argument problem, but we need to connect back to that earlier research and see if we can produce Cue effects along with (any) Argument processing effects.  Moons and Mackie handled this with an expertise Cue.

You see the ELM template here right?  We’ve got the Elaboration Moderator of emotion (and I call an Elaboration Moderator the “dimmer switch”) which affects Elaboration Likelihood (which I call WATTage).  We’ve got Argument quality with both strong and weak versions on different topics.  And, we’ve got Cues.  You cannot understand what’s going on if you don’t have at least WATTage and Arguments or WATTage and Cues and it’s even nicer when you’ve got all three.

And, of course, you do this in a lab where you can get seriously scientific with randomization, control, comparison, and counting.  This is good stuff.  When Moons and Mackie made people mad in the lab (or not), then had them consider Arguments (strong or weak), and then sometimes added a Cue to the mix, what happened?

Angry people ran screaming down the Central Route as the followed Argument quality to change while the emotionally Neutral folks ambled along the Peripheral Route, missing the difference between a strong Arg and a weak Arg.  And, the effect sizes were at least medium (36/64) for these attitude differences.  In all three experiments, situationally angry participants clearly responded to Argument quality with strong Arguments producing considerably more change than weak Arguments.  And, Moon and Mackie replicated the Cue effect (using expertise) found in prior research.  The key, as they demonstrated, was running a Full Monte ELM experiment and not just a study that varied emotion but kept Argument and Cue constant.

Of course, we’ve got the Usual Criticism here:  hey, the science of the college sophomore play acting in a computer lab.  Okay, the internal validity is pretty good (really?), but the external validity, I mean who does this generalize too beyond spoiled wealthy frat boys and sorority girls, and ecological validity, like sure, this is a Real World Test of Anger!  The reply is easy:  The literature, baby, read the literature.

When you read widely in persuasion you see how the weaknesses and limitations of one study are mitigated in another study.  You understand that one study, even a great one like this, never Proves the Point, but as a thread in the fabric of the great quilt of knowledge, it connects, binds, and holds this piece with that piece and that one over there, and then you’ve got a Research Literature, a Body of Knowledge that makes sense (even if I’m mixing more metaphors than a bartender mixes drinks in a hip bar).

Let’s get to the Outro.

First, this research establishes that anger can easily function as a dimmer switch that engages High WATT processing and propels people done the Central Route.  This is news in the persuasion literature and for common sense.

Second, this research is a great demonstration of the importance of the Full Monte with dual process studies.  If you want to understand persuasion, you need to always have at least two categories of WATTage and at least two categories of Argument quality (or two categories of Cues).  If you vary only one element of the WAC without including the others, your results will be ambiguous, incomplete, and potentially misleading.

Third, as always, I’m not reporting all of the details.  Moons and Mackie also ran manipulation checks and path models that buttress the conclusions you can draw from their work.  Lots of data, statistics, tables, and graphs that only a propeller head like me enjoys – like that triple WAC interaction in Experiment 3.  Wow!  And they played it smart by having a large sample of over 200 people participant in this to increase the power.  Just great work.

Fourth, realize that in all three experiments, the anger and the persuasion topic were not closely related.  In the real world this research is akin to a situation where you get ready to walk in the boss’s office to present a new idea and you hear your boss hollering into the telephone.  Common sense would suggest that you should find a way to reschedule that presentation, but this research advises that if your boss’s anger is not relevant to you or your idea (she’s mad at her husband, for example, and not your last job evaluation), you should march into the office – if you have strong Arguments.

As a related, but tricky persuasion play, you might bring up topics with a persuasion targets that you know will make the targets angry, then deliver your strong Arguments.  But, you’d better have the strong Arguments, right?

My hat’s off to Moons and Mackie.  This was fun to read and think about.

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Tags: anger, citation, common sense, cue, cues, diane mackie, dimmer switch, emotion, emotional state, harsh criticism, lame explanation, life experience, manipulations, moons, nbsp, paragraph, persuasion, two ways, umpire, university students