On increasing the persuasiveness of a low prestige communicator

Abstract It has often been demonstrated that subjects will assume that a high prestige communicator is a more expert and honest person than is a low prestige communicator. Consequently, a high prestige communicator is usually assumed to be more effective in convincing others of any opinion he advocates than is a low prestige communicator. In this paper we proposed that the abstract credibility of a communicator is not the sole determinant of potential effectiveness. We proposed that any communicator, regardless of his prestige, will be more effective and will be seen as more credible when he is arguing for a position opposed to his own best interest. than when arguing for changes obviously in his own best interest. (Thus, in some cases, a low prestige source could be extremely effective—in fact, even more effective than a high prestige communicator.) Two experiments were conducted. Both experiments supported the above hypothesis.