Self-Confidence and Persuasibility: One More Time

Abstract

probably appreciate a brief replay of what is at stake. Of the half-dozen propositions which Schuchman and Perry consider, I will concentrate on the one which concerns the most important and novel of the findings first presented in the article by Donald Cox and myself-the relationship of and self-confidence. Over a considerable period of time, a number of researchers have found that persuasibility (the disposition to shift one's attitude or judgment after being exposed to a persuasive communication) was related, in males only, to a psychological construct which has been variously labeled as or self-esteem. As used by Cox and myself, refers to a person's perception of his ability to perform the particular task of judgment with which he is confronted. More to the point is the concept of self-confidence, presumably an enduring trait of personality, which was the construct which had interested most of the earlier researchers and was found generally to be negatively related to persuasibility. Men who were lower in generalized self-confidence were generally more persuasible. Conversely, men who were high on generalized self-confidence were more difficult to persuade. The relationship was linear. It also made sense. In most psychological experiments, women were generally more persuasible than men. We found, in an experiment with judging nylon hosiery, that women low in specific self-confidence were more likely to shift their judgment of these stockings when confronted with a taped message from an alleged sales person. However, no one had previously found any relationship between generalized self-confidence and in women. Cox, in his Doctoral thesis (which was the basis for our article), was the first to find such a relationship. He discovered, in the hosiery experiment, that women of medium self-confidence shifted most in their judgments. Cox's findings suggested first that a relationship between generalized self-confidence and in women existed, and second that it was curvilinear. In our article, this hypothesis of a curvilinear relationship was particularly questioned by Schuchman and Perry. They appear to have had little difficulty with our data and our analyses,' but they conclude: