Academic English 
Writing, 1


    The Sleeper Effect


The course of the 1930's saw an emergence of various mass communication and persuasion theories rooted in a political context, characterized by a ubiquitous propaganda aimed at controlling and influencing attitudes of the population during the Second World War. Research and studies that gave birth to theories centered on media communication tools and their effects, persisted throughout the years with some of them being rejected, others accepted and to this day, the existence of some are still being debated; the Sleeper Effect is one of them.
  According to various research conducted to explain the phenomenon, the sleeper-effect designates the fact that subjects who have been exposed to a persuasive message followed by a discounting cue, a statement impairing the credibility of the message and /or its source, will initially not be persuaded, but over time will interestingly enough show signs of an increased persuasion.  After extensive research about the phenomenon, a consensus was reached on the fact that certain requirements are crucial in order to observe a sleeper effect (Kumkale & Albaracin, 2004). These sine qua non conditions can be reconciled with the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a model developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986), according to which subjects who are being exposed to a persuasive message will process the information in one of two different ways. On the one hand, there are those who will be highly motivated and able to thoroughly process the message and the arguments that it is composed of, evaluating them systematically and meticulously. Their attitudes will be changed in line with those thoughts. This is referred to as the central route processing. On the other hand, when the motivation and ability to process a persuasive message are low, the subject will tend to use superficial cues in order to form an opinion about the message. One of these cues could be the source of the message, for example. This is referred to as the peripheral route processing. 
However, not all scientists share this optimistic view regarding the existence of the effect. Some researchers such as Gillig and Greenwald (1974) went as far as to suggest that it might be better to accept the null hypothesis and conclude that the sleeper effect does not exist after they failed to reproduce the effect several times.
If the fact of the matter is that the Sleeper Effect does not exist, and it was perpetually falsely sustained due to  "prejudice towards the null hypothesis" (Gillig & Greenwald, 1974), then instead of being laid to rest, the cold case should be reopened in order to establish what really led to the manifestations of an increased attitude after exposure to a persuasive communication followed by a discounting cue. This could very well lead to an all new theory coming to enrich the extensive body of work that lay as groundwork for rising and advanced communication research.



References


Gillig, P.M., & Greenwald, A.G. (1974). Is it Time to Lay the Sleeper Effect to Rest? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (1), 132-139.

Kumkale, G. & Albarracin, D. (2004). The sleeper effect in persuasion: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 130 (1), 143-172.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986a). The Elaboration likelihood model of persusasion.  Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 123-205.

Petty, R.E. & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986). Communication and persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.