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Attitudinal Change in Social Psychology

This research will examine the processes of attitudinal change in terms of strategies of persuasion that have been identified in the discourse of social psychology and rhetoric. The research will set forth the background and context in which attitudinal change emerges as a key component of social psychology and then discuss, with reference to the classical and contemporary literature, whether and to what extent attitudes can be changed according as people's thoughts, feelings, and behavior or action are or can be changed.

Although in recent years the constituents of effective persuasion have been refined and analyzed in ways that appear meant to clarify the means by which behavior and attitudes can be influenced and facilitate socially optimal beliefs and behavior, it is difficult to reach meaning in any discussion of strategies and tactics of persuasion without reference to classical discourse of the subject. Much contemporary discussion of persuasion begins by mentioning Aristotle in this regard (e.g., Shelby, 1998; Hamilton, 1999). Aristotle's teacher Plato, too, deals with rhetoric and the art of persuasion, but chiefly to distinguish it from philosophy, which Plato, through the Socratic dialogues Phaedrus and the Gorgias, concludes is the higher intellectual pursuit.

Aristotle's treatment of rhetoric as persuasion does not make a moral judgment about its superiority or inferiority to philosophy but instead starts from the premise that the audience of the Rhetoric will be the young men being groomed for civic and professional leadership of Athenian Greece. Readers of Aristotle's Rhetoric are to be distinguished by what they are not--unthinking or nonthinking man, the primitive, or what Aristotle might have called the barbarian (or the woman, though that is an issue outside the scope of this research). Corbett observes that Aristotle views rhetoric, like ethics, as one of the practical arts (Corbett, 1984, p. 24), i.e., not me...

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Attitudinal Change in Social Psychology. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:23, March 19, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712834.html