Sleeper effect

The Sleeper Effect comes from social psychology and is a phenomenon of interpersonal communication. The Sleeper Effect in 1953 emerged along with the forgetting effect and is part of the Yale approach to attitude change. ( Kunčík / Tip 2005, pp. 294ff ) has been explored, inter alia, by Carl I. Hovland and Walter Weiss and describes the long-term effects of a message on the recipient if the message associated with the attitudes towards the transmitter " forgotten". This means for instance that the effectiveness of content from a very credible spokesperson increases with time and that of an untrustworthy communicator. After four weeks, the effectiveness of the two releases of credible and untrustworthiness transmitter has been adjusted.

The effect

Often people (sender) try through their message setting change at the receiver of the message to generate (see persuasive communication). The success of this attitude change depends inter alia on the following factors:

  • Attractiveness and credibility of the sender
  • Contents of this announcement

The Sleeper Effect now describes the Revalidierungsvorgang which the recipient performs after a period of time compared to the message. Did he forget namely the origin of the message, the evaluation of the communication depends only on its content and not additionally on the attitude towards the original sender of the message. This has the consequence that the recipient either feels confirmed " revised " his attitude change or the change of attitude now only performs ( since, for example, although the message but not the sender was credible ). This statement is also known as discounting cue hypothesis.

The following boundary conditions must be present in order to measure the Sleeper effect can:

  • The content of the message must be able to bring about a change in attitude.
  • The credibility / incredibility of the transmitter must be large enough to bring about a change in attitude or prevent
  • In the measurement of attitude change, the recipient must have forgotten the origin of the message
  • In the measurement of attitude change the message must still have an effect on the recipients have

Empiricism

In one experiment, subjects listened to a speech about youth crime. One group of subjects were the information of a juvenile judge, the other lectures of an alleged drug dealer (they were, however, in both cases, absolutely the same). Shortly after the performance, kept the subjects the information for a lot more credible if they were from the juvenile court judge (effect of perceived competence). Where information has been read from the drug dealers, they were considered rather implausible. After some time, the subjects were re-interviewed on the topic of juvenile delinquency. They were given no further instructions beforehand, so it was found that even the " drug dealer group," now considered the majority of the information that they had previously thought implausible to be credible. This speaks for the Sleeper Effect: the subjects had the association between communicator and information largely "forgotten". Some of the subjects were reminded before this second survey shortly to the respective speakers ( drug dealers or juvenile court ). With them you can hardly observed a change in the perceived credibility of the information in comparison to the poll immediately after the speech. The memory of the communicator had apparently reactivated the association between this and the information.

The effect in advertising

The advertising effectiveness of a message usually depends heavily on the person who delivers it. If the sender of the advertising message implausible, so the message is perceived to be as untrustworthy. The Sleeper effect causes but now that over time a credible transmitter is forgotten and only sticks to the advertising message.

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