This continues in the vein of the previous post. The primary question base was derived from a Social Psychology Chapter of an old General Psychology text book. I found the question worth pondering and the result worth posting.
Changing Attitude: Through reviewing various methods of behavioral modification, there are certain criterion that need to be met in order to change someone's attitude about something.
1) Get the person's attention
2) Explain your source of information and its credibility
3) Make your subject comprehend the situation at hand. Face to face is best, video presentation is good for subjects who are generally knowledgeable about the situation being discussed, and written messages are best for those who are being newly introduced to the situation.
4) Deliver the message of both/all sides of the argument/situation
5) Deconstruct your subject's security in his/her own answer via cognitive dissonance (create emotions and opinions that conflict)
6) Persuade your subject to develop their own independent opinion
7) Repeat the side of the argument/situation you want to persuade them to
The above bullet points are a summary of what the text book discussed. The critical thinking question then asked was "if you wanted someone to quit smoking, how would you go about persuading them to discontinue smoking?" While this may be a common question to ask, I'm afraid that there is much more to the argument than meets the eye. Humans are not always rational creatures, in fact, emotions and freedom often explicitly betray reason. The longer someone has been smoking, the less likely you or anyone else will convince them to quit. The same is true of the severity of their addiction to nicotine. The longer they have been smoking and the heavier they have been smoking increase their dependency and reinforce their habitual nature.
The moral of the story is that if someone does not want to quit, you are probably just going to piss them off by spewing statistics in their face and in all likelihood make them smoke more since you've just just agitated them and thus they turn to their crutch for support. What you see in the previously stated process is not that you are trying to persuade them to quit smoking like it was a high school speech class. You are trying to ignite a subconscious debate within their own rationality. Once the stage of doubt is set, its never empty or forgotten. If someone has it set into their mind that they're going to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and don't give a damn if they die of cancer then they are hopeless in that case. However, when a relative dies of cancer and the young smoker witnesses their suffering there may be a change of heart. Or perhaps a much more tragic change of event would be if someone is a heavy smoker and one of their loved one's (say a child or spouse) develops cancer as a result of second hand smoke and subsequently dies. Such tragic events often put us back in our place, level the emotional playing field, and make us question every decision we have ever made.
If you want to change someone's behavior permanently then there is precious little you can do. Humans are stubborn creatures. No matter how irrational our actions may be, we will someone try to justify them; sometimes out of nothing more than spite. If a person does not want to change his or her self, then there is no way for anyone else to alter their behavior whilst allowing them to maintain their will. You can however, plant a seed of doubt that grows and flourishes and maybe, if you and they are lucky, their minds will choose the most righteous side without bias, without hypnotism, without drugs, and without the sorrows that accompany the death of a beloved.
