| Action research | The simultaneous activities of undertaking social science research, involving participants in the process and addressing a social problem. |
| Attitude change | Any significant modification of an individual's attitude. In the persuasion process this involves the communicator, the communication, the medium used, and the characterisation of the audience. |
| Cognitive consistency theories | A group of attitude theories stressing that people try to maintain internal consistency, order and agreement among their carious cognitions. |
| Cognitive dissonance | State of psychological tension, produced by simultaneously having two opposing cognitions. People are motivated to reduce the tension, often by changing or rejecting one of the cognitions. |
| Compliance | Superficial, public and transitory change in behaviour and expressed attitudes in response to requests, coercion or group pressure. |
| Disconfirmation bias | The tendency to notice, refute and regard as weak, arguments that contradict our prior beliefs. |
| Door-in-the-face tactic | Multiple request technique to gain compliance, in which the focal request is preceded by a larger request that is bound to be refused. |
| Effort justification | A special case of cognitive dissonance: inconsistency is experienced when a person makes a considerable effort to achieve a modest goal. |
| Elaboration-likelihood model | Petty and Cacioppo's model of attitude change: when people attend to a message carefully, they use a central route to process it; otherwise they use a peripheral route. This model competes with the heuristic-systematic model. |
| Foot-in-the-door tactic | Multiple request technique to gain compliance, in which the focal request is preceded by a smaller request that is bound to be accepted. |
| Forewarning | Advanced knowledge that one is to be the target of a persuasion attempt. Forewarning often produces a resistance to persuasion. |
| Heuristic-systematic model | Chaiken's model of attitude change: when people attend to a message carefully, they use systematic processing; otherwise they process information by using heuristics. This model competes with the elaboration-likelihood model. |
| Induced compliance | A special case of cognitive dissonance: inconsistency is experienced when a person is persuaded to behave in a way that is contrary to an attitude. |
| Ingratiation | Strategic attempt to get someone to like you in order to obtain compliance with a request. |
| Inoculation | A way of making people resistance to persuasion. By providing them with a diluted counter-argument, they can build up an effective refutations to a layer, stronger argument. |
| Low-ball tactic | Technique for inducing compliance in which a person who agrees to a request still feels committed after finding out that their are hidden costs. |
| Mindlessness | The act of agreeing to a request without giving it a thought. A small request is likely to be agreed to, even if a spurious reason is provided. |
| Moderator variable | A variable that qualifies an otherwise simple hypothesis with a view to improve predicative power. |
| Multiple requests | Tactic for gaining compliance using a two step procedure: the first request functions as a set-up for the second, real request. |
| Post-decisional conflict | The dissonance associated with behaving in a counter-attitudinal way. Dissonance can be reduced by bringing the attitude into line with their behaviour. |
| Reactance | Brehm's theory that people try to protect their freedom to act. when they perceive that this freedom has been curtailed, they will act to regain it. |
| Reciprocity principle | The law of 'doing unto others as they do unto you'. It can refer to an attempt to gain compliance by first doing someone a favour, or to mutual aggression or attraction. |
| Representativeness heuristic | A cognitive short-cut in which instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to the category. |
| Selective-exposure hypothesis | People tend to avoid potentially dissonant information. |
| Self-affirmation theory | The theory that people reduce the impact of threat to their self-concept by focusing on and affirming their competence in some other area. |
| Self-perception theory | Bem's idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves by making self-attributions: we infer our own attitudes from our behaviour. |
| Sleeper effect | The impact of a persuasive message can increase over time when a discounting cue, such as an invalidating source, can no longer be recalled. |
| Terror management theory | The notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce the terror of the inevitability of death. Self-esteem may be centrally implicated in effective terror management. |
| Third person effect | Most people think that they are less influenced than others by advertisements. |
