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Everyday Persuasion
Knowledge
Marian Friestad and Peter Wright
University of Oregon

ABSTRACT

Laypeople’s everyday persuasion knowledge is one of their most

valuable sociocognitive resources. People draw on their beliefs about
persuasion to cope with other people’s attempts to influence them
and to fashion their own persuasion attempts. Because persuasion-
related tasks are so important in everyday life, the acquiring and
sharing of persuasion expertise is an ongoing sociocultural process.
In this article we discuss how beliefs about persuasion tactics get
diffused within a culture, the role of researchers in that diffusion
process, and the murky meaning of expertise in the domain of
persuasion. 䉷 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Persuasion has been examined from different theoretical perspectives

over the years. Friestad and Wright (1994) argued that people’s every-
day persuasion knowledge is an important determinant of how they cope
with other people’s attempts to persuade them, and of how they create
and execute their own persuasion attempts. They noted, however, that
the role of laypeople’s persuasion knowledge in the persuasion process
had not been analyzed in prior conceptual models. To stimulate research
on this topic, the authors proposed a conceptual model of a persuasion
target’s and persuasion agent’s views of each other as each performs
their tasks in a persuasion encounter. For the target, these are the tasks
required to effectively cope with someone else’s persuasion attempt. For
an agent, these are the tasks required to effectively create and execute
a persuasion attempt. In order to gain perspective on the likely nature
of and uses of everyday persuasion knowledge, the authors analyzed
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Psychology & Marketing Vol. 16(2):185–194 (March 1999)

䉷 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0742-6046/99/020185-10
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these tasks in terms of the types of knowledge they required. Friestad Base of text
and Wright (1994) called this framework the persuasion knowledge
model, or PKM. The intent in emphasizing the working knowledge of
the players engaged in persuasion games was to suggest a construct
(everyday persuasion knowledge) that, although complex, might ulti-
mately help in reconciling the varied findings that typify research on
persuasion topics.
The other articles in this issue represent attempts to reconcile past
research findings by offering new perspectives on them, some of which
relate more or less closely to the PKM’s perspective. For example, dis-
tinguishing between program material and advertising material on TV
seems to require accessing and using one’s persuasion knowledge. As
another example, among the autobiographical memories consumers
might recall during ad processing could be ones related to past persua-
sion-related experiences, in addition to past product-related experi-
ences. As a third example, repeated ad exposure opportunities may pro-
vide consumers with opportunities to access and use their persuasion
tactic knowledge differently than in their first ad exposure. Finally, ad-
vertising schemas are an interesting example of a context-specific sub-
domain of people’s general persuasion knowledge.
As researchers begin to grapple with how to integrate the concept of
laypeople’s everyday persuasion knowledge into their research, it is im-
portant that they appreciate the relationship and interplay between ev-
eryday folk knowledge and scientific knowledge on persuasion, adver-
tising, selling, and marketing in general. It is also useful for consumer
behavior researchers to gain perspective on how their personal persua-
sion knowledge relates to the collective beliefs of the culture and sub-
culture to which they belong.

THE CREATION AND DIFFUSION OF EVERYDAY

PERSUASION KNOWLEDGE

Persuasion knowledge is one of the more important knowledge domains

of everyday life. It is an especially important interpretive belief system
because it tells people about situations where an intelligent purposeful
outside agent is skillfully trying to alter their inner self (their beliefs,
their emotions, their attitudes, their decisions, their thought processes)
and thereby alter the course of their lives. Some such alterations within
a person are valuable and desirable, others are not. The resources that
enable someone to competently manage the numerous influence at-
tempts that other people direct their way are their personal persuasion-
related beliefs. Individuals who allow unnoticed or uncontrolled inva-
sions of their internal psychological world, and consequent changes in
their behaviors, do not survive and prosper. Further, individuals who short
cannot comprehend other people’s influence goals and methods in social standard

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encounters, and understand how their own responses will service mu- Base of text
tual goals and influence other people’s feelings for them, do not maintain
important relationships.
So one goal in developing and learning to skillfully use persuasion
knowledge is to exert self-control over the effects of other people’s at-
tempted interventions into one’s private self and public life. Another
important goal is to effectively build and maintain relationships with
others who periodically try to persuade a person in certain directions
and who that same person periodically tries to persuade.
Because persuasion-related tasks are so important in everyday life,
the acquiring and sharing of persuasion expertise is an ongoing socio-
cultural process in which laypeople have actively participated for cen-
turies. It is too important a knowledge domain to be left solely to be-
havioral scientists.
It is likely that much of what laypeople in a culture believe about
persuasion during any time period reflects cultural folk knowledge. This
is a socially constructed set of beliefs created over the years from the
pooling of private perceptions and social communications about persua-
sion (e.g., D’Andrade & Strauss, 1992; Greenwood, 1991). Folk knowl-
edge strongly influences people’s conceptions of ambiguous complex phe-
nomena (Carugatti, 1990; Churchland, 1991; Gergen, 1988; Heider,
1958; Sternberg, 1985). Persuasion is one such phenomenon; other ex-
amples are intelligence and creativity.
Folk knowledge does not provide people with specific beliefs in mem-
ory about all aspects of what happens in every conceivable persuasion
situation they encounter. Instead, folk knowledge about persuasion con-
sists of a core set of widely shared beliefs about fundamental aspects of
the persuasion process as it occurs across the persuasion contexts that
are prominent in the lives of a culture’s members (Friestad & Wright,
1995). Folk knowledge about persuasion provides people with an im-
plicit conception or model that resides (deeply) in memory. They can
access this model to generate situationally relevant beliefs about agents
and messages they encounter. People reference this commonsense con-
ception of persuasion to interpret everyday interpersonal and media
communications about which they may or may not have highly specific
beliefs already in memory.
Individuals will also develop context-specific persuasion knowledge
because that knowledge applies to situations they frequently encounter.
For example, trial lawyers who argue cases in the unique environment
of a courtroom develop persuasion beliefs tailored to that venue, and
judges who repeatedly act as the targets of lawyers’ influence attempts
also develop persuasion-coping knowledge keyed to the courtroom. How-
ever, persuasion knowledge specific to the methods, rituals, and goals
of the lawyer and judge will not get encoded into the cultural folk knowl-
edge, because the general population does not often face the lawyer’s short
advocacy tasks or the judge’s and jury’s tasks as persuasion targets. standard

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On the other hand, there are types of persuasion domains and tasks Base of text
that the general population does encounter quite often, and folk knowl-
edge keyed to those should develop and diffuse. Examples of these fre-
quently encountered domains are buying, selling, advertising, and shop-
ping, as well as parenting and courting.
When members of a culture encounter a new and different persuasion
context, they will initially deal with it by drawing on core beliefs about
persuasion as it occurs across familiar contexts, not beliefs specific to
that new context. However, cultural folk knowledge specifically keyed
to the new context may develop and diffuse fairly rapidly, depending on
how central that context becomes in people’s lives. For example, when
people first encountered television advertising in the 1950s, it must
have seemed like a realm of advocacy unlike those people had experi-
enced throughout history — an electronically transmitted black-and-
white motion picture experienced in one’s home that contained carefully
designed motion picture advertisements that used all sorts of audiovi-
sual devices people had never seen used, at least in that form, in per-
suasion attempts. But as these first cohorts of people gained what they
believed were insights about how TV advertisers operated and how TV
advertising worked, from private perceptions, shared conversations, or
accounts by advertising professionals touting their ingenuity and meth-
ods, this knowledge got transmitted from parents to children in every-
day conversations, between peers in the next generations, via the mass
media, and so forth. As a result, at the end of the 20th century, folk
knowledge specific to the domain of television advertising exists in
abundance.

HOW CONSUMER BEHAVIOR RESEARCHERS

BOTH USE AND DIFFUSE EVERYDAY
PERSUASION KNOWLEDGE

No one is immune to the folk knowledge of their culture. Consumer-

behavior researchers may initially have difficulty gaining perspective
on how their own persuasion knowledge fits into the rubric of folk –
everyday – commonsense knowledge about persuasion. This can be an
especially confusing issue for budding researchers and doctoral stu-
dents.
Each individual who has become a consumer-behavior researcher,
marketing scholar, or social psychologist was first trained in their think-
ing about persuasion by the prevailing cultural folk knowledge of their
childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. This knowledge acquisi-
tion occurs via the soft whisperings of Mother Culture, not via any for-
malized classroom teachings. Each individual who became a researcher
relied on that commonsense knowledge for the first two-plus decades of short
their lives to the same degree as did their cohort of other laypeople. As standard

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with other cultural folk beliefs, that everyday folk knowledge on per- Base of text
suasion became deeply embedded in their memory, and its influence on
their conception of how and why persuasion occurs became automatized.
Folk knowledge about persuasion and related marketplace phenomena
is considered commonsense. Virtually all members of a culture take for
granted that its contents and implications are well known and obvious
to all other members. Indeed, convergence across people in their collec-
tive beliefs about persuasion or marketplace psychology is an indicator
of the existence of folk knowledge.
People who began training to become marketing scholars and behav-
ioral scientists then encountered certain fashionable and prominent sci-
entific conceptions of persuasion in their studies, and tried to assimilate
these into their working knowledge. However, these individuals did not,
and indeed could not, keep the deeply entrenched folk beliefs separated
from the scientific knowledge within their belief systems. The two min-
gled. This mingling was eased (and scientific clarity was clouded, per-
haps) by their discovery that the scientific discussions of persuasion by
consumer and social psychologists relied heavily on many of the same
psychological terms they had learned in childhood that are familiar
parts of everyday discourse and commonsense psychology. (See Kelley,
1992, for an excellent treatment of this issue in the context of scientific
vs. commonsense psychology.)
Further, a researcher/teacher repeatedly tries to alter laypeople’s
working beliefs about persuasion by teaching them (persuading them)
about the researcher/teacher’s current hypotheses or latest interpreta-
tions of research findings. To make these teachings relevant to laypeo-
ple, the researcher/teacher offers them his or her reasoned speculations
about how persuasion happens in various everyday contexts that are
different from those actually studied; in doing this a researcher/teacher
inevitably is drawing quite a bit on her own preexisting beliefs (from
personal observation and folk knowledge) about events in those specific
real-world contexts. So, what scholars believe, teach, or preach about
persuasion at any moment reflects a mingling of their scientific insights
and commonsense beliefs. This knowledge diffusion process assures a
continual smoothing over time of differences between researcher beliefs
and the beliefs of laypeople acting as consumers and as marketing pro-
fessionals (Friestad & Wright, 1995).
This knowledge diffusion process is obviously not instantaneous. It is
a matter of years and decades, not weeks and months. However, in the
domain of persuasion knowledge, folk beliefs and expert beliefs probably
track each other more closely than in many other knowledge domains.
This is because persuasion is a sociocultural knowledge domain that
historically and in recent times has all of the following characteristics.
The topic of persuasion (a) concerns common but important everyday
human tasks that are ambiguous and complicated; (b) is a topic of great short
interest to laypeople and scientists alike; (c) is a topic on which scientific standard

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research is in its infancy, and is often still done with the use of a vocab- Base of text
ulary of concepts familiar in lay parlance; (d) is a research topic exam-
ined by researchers with different points of view on what the interesting
questions are, who have different disciplinary training, whose collective
work therefore is of variable quality, and whose ideas are as yet hard
to synthesize into general, complete research-based models or theories;
and (e) is a knowledge domain where the meaning of expertise is a murky
issue.

EXPERTISE IN THE DOMAIN OF PERSUASION

KNOWLEDGE

Because the meaning of expertise in the persuasion domain is murky,

its examination becomes an interesting research issue. Individuals in a
culture claim or are attributed expertise on persuasion for a variety of
reasons. Expertise may be claimed or attributed because of a person’s
seemingly relevant scholarly background, work experience, job title, or
record as a productive persuasion agent. There is no shortage of indi-
viduals who are willing to don the mantle of expert on marketplace
persuasion and influence, and share or rent their persuasion-related
beliefs. The expertise that gets disseminated into lay knowledge in this
way represents some unknown mixture of research-based ideas and re-
cycled folk knowledge.
The way transformations in cultural persuasion knowledge occur re-
lates to how long and how deeply behavioral scientists have been ex-
ploring certain persuasion principles. Ideas on persuasion derived from
research may be (a) well known, if they emerged decades ago from sci-
entific analysis; (b) under study, if they are only quite recently the sub-
ject of behavioral scientists’ formal investigations; and (c) unstudied, if
they simply represent age-old folk beliefs that have not been subjected
to scientific scrutiny (Friestad & Wright, 1995). At any moment in time,
lay beliefs and researchers’ beliefs about persuasion will differ mainly
with respect to the particular aspects that are currently under study.
On these aspects of persuasion the lay population remains reliant on
age-old folk knowledge, while the researcher enclave is reformulating
their thinking and mulling over insights that may differ from the ac-
cepted folk knowledge. Laypeople and researchers will hold similar be-
liefs, however, regarding well-known persuasion-related ideas that had
emerged from decades-old research, because those ideas will have al-
ready diffused into the current folk knowledge and thereby will have
become equally accessible to all. And, of course, laypeople and research-
ers will retain similar beliefs about the many aspects of persuasion pro-
cesses that have not yet been subjected to behavioral scientists’ formal
scrutiny, because under those circumstances both groups are drawing short
on the same body of cultural folk knowledge (Friestad & Wright, 1995). standard

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The measurement, attribution, and claiming of expertise in persua- Base of text
sion are interesting research issues. Establishing the validity of one
person’s, or enclave’s, persuasion knowledge relative to that of another
person’s, or enclave’s, is complex. As in other knowledge domains where
expertise is supposedly assessable, we need a defensible criterion. If we
seek a criterion in terms of declarative knowledge about persuasion,
then whose declarative beliefs about persuasion should we deem as
valid? Or, if we seek a behavioral criterion, that is, a criterion tied to
the effective use of persuasion knowledge in social give-and-take, then
what behaviors in the realm of persuasion coping or persuasion produc-
ing do we deem as clear evidence of greater expertise on persuasion?

Expertise as Declarative Knowledge. One viewpoint is that persua-

sion expertise can be indexed in terms of one’s absorption of the pre-
vailing wisdom about persuasion expressed by scholars in the disci-
plines in which persuasion-related issues are formally studied. If
consumer researchers adopt that viewpoint, indicators of persuasion ex-
pertise might include the extent and recency of someone’s formal edu-
cation in the persuasion-focused parts of social psychology, marketing,
sociology, communication, education, rhetoric, and law. Of course the
content of each of these fields includes much material that is not per-
suasion focused, and each discipline has its own perspective on the per-
suasion phenomenon. Perhaps the criterion should be a cross-discipli-
nary mastery of the teachings of each discipline. Perhaps this should be
modified by a weighting of some fields’ knowledge bases as more
grounded than others in science rather than folk knowledge, but reach-
ing agreement on that would be challenging.
The degree of convergence in the persuasion beliefs of persuasion
scholars in the same field or in different fields is an interesting empirical
question. Further, the degree of divergence between any such enclave
of scholars’ beliefs and the persuasion-related beliefs of laypeople also
must be examined. Unless an enclave of scholars demonstrates high
within-group convergence and adequate divergence from prevailing folk
beliefs, granting the enclave of scholars special status as persuasion
experts seems questionable.

Expertise as Knowledge in Use. As an added complication, there is

a logic that views knowledge in use, not declarative knowledge, as the
appropriate or relevant criterion for assessing persuasion expertise.
This criterion places emphasis on procedural knowledge, that is, some-
one’s demonstrated effectiveness in persuading other people, in coping
with other people’s attempts to persuade them, or (ideally) in both. This
is the type of criterion people seem to use most often with respect to
other skills that have a gamelike quality to them, for example, chess.
Chess masters do not just score high on exams on other people’s chess short
knowledge and strategies; they display head-to-head success against standard

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other expertise — pretenders playing on an explicit playing field where Base of text
the performance goal for each player — the standard for discriminating
among levels of expertise — is explicitly specified in advance.
Does any comparable basis exist in the realm of so-called persuasion
games for assessing relative expertise in persuasion-related tasks? If so,
it is not apparent. For one thing, there is a strong tendency to over-
weight the role of a persuasion agent and to neglect the role of a per-
suasion target. For example, people can be identified whose professional
livelihoods seem to depend on their being effective persuasion agents,
such as salespeople, courtroom advocates, advertising executives, and
so on. But it is more difficult to identify convenient parallel professions
where effectiveness in coping with other people’s persuasion attempts
is a singular competence.
Further, even with respect to professional advocates, it is not imme-
diately obvious what about them we can rely on as evidence of expertise
in persuasion. Do we rely on experience or longevity in a persuasion-
agent profession, dollar productivity as a salesperson, job title in the
advertising field? Many of these indices confound persuasion-related
expertise with personal attributes such as personal appearance, inter-
personal charm, energy levels, budgetary resources, situational coinci-
dence, and luck; the skills and resources of an agent’s chosen target
audience members relative to those of the agent; the topics on which an
agent’s advocacy is attempted, and so on.
For example, a sales agent’s sales productivity is well known by mar-
keting scholars to be jointly caused by many factors, only one of which
is persuasion knowledgeability and skill (e.g., Sujan & Weitz, 1994;
Weitz, 1981). Similarly, the effectiveness of any ad campaign is often
jointly determined by situational factors in addition to the campaign’s
actual persuasive effectiveness. As an example of the mismatch con-
founding, in the popular press and even in some professional marketing
marketing circles the creators of certain ad campaigns are attributed
considerable persuasion expertise because they have, by spending mil-
lions, successfully influenced 12 – 14-year-olds to experiment with a par-
ticular brand of cigarettes.

OTHER ISSUES IN DEVELOPING A COMPLETE MODEL

OF EVERYDAY PERSUASION KNOWLEDGE AND
PERSUASION GAMES

A complete theoretical analysis of persuasion knowledge’s role will even-

tually deal with the persuasion target, the persuasion agent, the process
by which agents and targets play out everyday persuasion games, and
the way in which a single individual develops and uses persuasion
knowledge in moving between the roles of target and agent. However, short
these initial discussions have concentrated on the target’s role, that is, standard

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how consumers try to cope with marketers’ attempts to influence them. Base of text
Researchers have not yet tried to lay out a parallel discussion of how
persuasion agents (e.g., individual marketing professionals) draw on
personal persuasion beliefs to create advertising, sales, and marketing
campaigns. Although some of the propositions stated in the PKM to date
(Friestad & Wright, 1994) do relate to the persuasion agent’s use of
persuasion knowledge, developing a complete set of propositions per-
taining to the agent’s role is a task for the future.
A useful metaphor during initial research may be that of persuasion
games that are being played out by agents and targets. In everyday
persuasion games, tactics and strategies are of central concern, and each
player realizes that understanding “the player on the other side” is es-
sential. Everyday persuasion knowledge is therefore likely to be reflex-
ive to some degree. That is, targets will hypothesize about an agent’s
thinking, and agents will hypothesize about a target’s thinking (“If I do
X, I think that she will think that I think that . . . ”; “if he does Y, I
think it means he thinks that I will think that . . . ”). As in other
games, one way in which expertise and strategic advantage is gained is
by developing one’s capacity to accurately engage in reflexive thinking.
While analyzing and studying persuasion knowledge in its reflexive
form is of ultimate interest, work on this problem has only just begun.
Although provocative, the game metaphor must be used cautiously.
It may wrongly connote the inevitable presence in everyday social ex-
changes of an endpoint (i.e., the game’s end), along with a winner and
a loser. However, recent research suggests the importance of under-
standing how targets and agents use each other’s persuasion-related
behaviors in pursuing the long-term social goal of managing, maintain-
ing, growing, or limiting the relationship between the two parties. That
perspective challenges the conception of what winning a persuasion
game means. It implies that in many instances the goal of continuing
to play more such games in the future with the same target or agent is
the most important outcome for both parties.

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Correspondence regarding this article should be sent to: Marian Friestad,
Lundquist College of Business Administration, University of Oregon, Eugene,
OR 97403.

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