Academic English 
Writing, 1


    The Sleeper Effect

The late 1930s saw the emergence of various mass communication and persuasion theories rooted in a political context. This was characterized by a ubiquitous propaganda aimed at controlling and influencing the people's attitudes during the Second World War. Studies that gave birth to theories centred 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.
   The following part explains the origins of the phenomenon. In the wake of the 1950's, the term Sleeper Effect was coined by Hovland et al. (1949) to designate the situation in which attitudes become stronger with the passage of time. This is a peculiarity considering that the usual pattern referred to as "normal", shows a decrease in persuasion rather than an augmentation. In other words, being exposed to an ad for example, would have a significant effect at first, but as time goes by, that amount of persuasion would just decay or even vanish completely as if the subject had never been exposed to the persuasive message.  The sleeper effect phenomenon has been a recurrent subject of interest for different disciplines ranging from psychology to communication theories, as it centers on a crucial occurrence: attitude change. According to 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 will show signs of an increased persuasion over time.  Following extensive research about the phenomenon, a consensus was reached claiming 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 (further designated as ELM), which basically explains the way attitudes are formed either through processing a message thoroughly, or by doing so superficially.
  The following paper discusses a study we conducted aimed at reproducing some of the experiments that set out to determine whether a sleeper-effect would emerge under specific conditions. The decision to conduct the study in the Netherlands was two-fold. On the one hand, prior research involving the phenomenon had never been conducted in this country before; it would thus be interesting to see whether the phenomenon transcends cultures i.e. whether Dutch respondents would react or be affected differently. In her research on the effects of media campaigns on different cultures, B. Al Jenaibi (2008) found that persuasive media communications, such as advertising and campaigns affected the public opinion differently based on their cultures. On the other hand, the decision to conduct the research in The Netherlands was due to media always having played a pivotal role in the transmission of persuasive messages through different channels, promoting psychological conditioning, which in turn influences beliefs and attitudes. News, information on current events that is presented by print broadcast or more recently on the Internet, is a form of persuasive communication in the sense that its recipients almost instinctively believe that the facts stated are true and are a good representation of reality. In the Netherlands, newspapers are still a dominant form of news. In approximately 75% of all Dutch households, a newspaper is read (Bakker & Scholten, 1997). The persuasive messages that were chosen for this research are articles that relay the results of scientific findings that were published on news websites or digital newspapers.
  In order to fully understand the sleeper effect, it is important that one gets familiar with the "discounting cue hypothesis". This hypothesis theorises that, if there is some aspect of a message that causes it to be initially discounted i.e. resisted, the passage of time may lead to a dissociation of the inhibiting cue from the original message, so that the potential attitude change impact of the persuasive content may gradually take effect (Gruder, et al., 1978). 
  Different hypotheses have been stated to explain the sleeper effect. According to an early one, subjects forget the discounting cue over time, consequently increasing their persuasion. This conclusion was drawn from a study conducted by Hovland, Lumsdaine & Sheffield (1949) during which subjects had been exposed to a World War II propaganda film. It revealed an increase of their persuasion after a certain amount of time, despite their initial distrust towards the source. It was thus hypothesized that the subjects had forgotten the discounting cue and that this was the cause of the emergence of the for- the-first- time-stated, sleeper effect. However, the hypothesis was radically refuted when it turned out that during cue-recall tasks, the subjects still remembered the discounting cue (i.e. the source of the text that was deemed unreliable) so Hovland and Weiss (1951) decided to lean towards an alternative hypothesis: Dissociation. According to it, subjects do not judge the source based on the content of the message and vice-versa. 
  As stated earlier in this paper, the sleeper effect can be reconciled with the ELM, a model developed by Petty and Cacioppo (1986). It sustains that subjects who have been exposed to a persuasive message will process the information in one of two different ways. Subjects will either be highly motivated and able to thoroughly process the message and the arguments that it is composed of, evaluating them meticulously with their attitudes being changed in line with those thoughts (central route processing), or they will have a low motivation and ability to process a persuasive message and will thus tend to use superficial cues, e.g. the source, in order to form an opinion about the message (peripheral route processing). It is the amount of elaboration that determines the amount of central or peripheral processing.
     The following part aims at explaining the method. We designed a field experiment where participants belonging to the experimental groups were exposed to a persuasive communication, and all groups were asked questions to evaluate their attitudes. Two hundred thirty-one respondents participated in this study. It was presented as an investigation dealing with the evaluation of informative journalistic texts, regarding scientific findings. 
   Being an assiduous newspaper reader was preferable but not a requirement to be eligible for the survey; 32.4% of the participants indicated that they seldom or never read newspapers as opposed to 67.5% who stated that they read the paper often or everyday. We inferred that participants who did not read the paper probably read the news digitally. The participants were randomly assigned to an experimental or the control group (no text, text-only, and text plus discounting cue); their attitude was measured twice: immediately after reading a persuasive message, and after being exposed to 27 different statements each pertaining to the different sustained standpoints in the various articles, then 2.5 weeks later. The control group only received statements they had to either agree or disagree with. Twenty-seven different journalistic articles were randomly assigned to each of the different participants of the text-only-group, who then had to answer questions about how much they agreed with the statement and how much they felt that the source and its message were credible. The discounting-cue-group completed the same tasks, but was exposed to a discounting cue first, placed after the message. Two and a half weeks later, each participant was contacted again and reassigned a questionnaire accordingly, based on the group and text version they had at the time of the first measurement.
  Based on the theoretical framework our research rested on, we had hypothesized that should the necessary theoretical conditions for the occurrence of the effect be met, an absolute sleeper-effect would occur within the discounting-cue group. The differences between the groups were not statistically significant at both initial measurement and the delayed one. However we could not conclude that the null hypothesis was true. What we could do was conclude that we did not have sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
   The aim of this study was to determine whether a sleeper effect would be detectable within the discounting cue group. The results that were found stated that there was no statistically significant difference between attitudes noted initially and after 2.5 weeks. Potential weaknesses could be identified in text quality; it could be possible that as much as the arguments used in the different texts were well constructed, the respondents did not view them as persuasive texts but merely as informative ones. This could explain the lack of differences between the groups and the closeness in scores of attitudes at time one and two.  Maybe the issue of culture, raised in the beginning of this account, could be applicable. There is a possibility that the texts were of persuasive character but that the majority of Dutch newsreaders do not build strong attitudes towards the sustained advocacy, even when the arguments are thoroughly processed and the source is deemed credible. 
  Future research in the form of a cross-cultural study focusing on the emergence of a sleeper effect based on group cultural background could be interesting.  Another suggestion for future research would be to conduct the same study, again in the Netherlands with Dutch respondents, and to use political themed texts, as it is a constant burning issue in the Netherlands and strong statements as well as advocacies, are perpetuated in the media.


References

Al-Jenaibi, B. (2008). The effects of media campaigns on different cultures. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, 46,49-52.

Bakker,P., & Scholten, O. (1997). Communicatiekaart van Nederland. Houten/Diegem: Bohn Stafleu Van Loghum.

Gruder,C.L., Cook, T.D., Hennigan, K.M., Flay,B.R.,  Alessis, C., Halamaj,J. (1978). Empirical tests of the absolute sleeper effect predicted from the discounting cue hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 (10), 1061-1074.

Hovland, C.I., Lumsdale, A.A. & Sheffield, F.D. (1949). Experiments on Mass Communication: Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: Volume III, Princeton University Press Princeton.

Hovland, I. C. & Weiss, W. (1951). The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness. Public opinion quarterly, 15 (4), 635-650.

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.