Brad Sagarin

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

A published summary of the paper lists him at Northern Illinois University at the time, with Cialdini and Rice at Arizona State University and Serna at Northern Illinois. His current position and wider career were not checked for this page.

Key papers

Sagarin, B. J., Cialdini, R. B., Rice, W. E., & Serna, S. B. (2002). 'Dispelling the illusion of invulnerability: The motivations and mechanisms of resistance to persuasion.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(3), 526-541. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.3.526.

Read through a bibliographic record and a summary of the abstract. His other papers were not surveyed.

Key ideas

The paper reports three studies of a treatment meant to build resistance to deceptive persuasion. After the treatment, advertisements using illegitimate appeals to authority were less persuasive and advertisements using legitimate appeals were more persuasive. The resistance applied to new examples and lasted over time. Dispelling participants' belief that they were immune to persuasion produced the greatest resistance.

The authors conclude that resistance training works best when it establishes two things: that the persuader has manipulative intent, and that the person is personally vulnerable to being manipulated.

Cialdini's chapter on reciprocation offers a defence based on recognising a tactic and redefining the favour. This paper is a later experiment, and Cialdini is its second author. See The Illusion of Invulnerability and Forewarning.

What the 2002 studies asked

Cialdini's chapter on reciprocation argues that the defence against a tactic is to recognise it, and supports the argument with two personal accounts, not an experiment. Sagarin and colleagues supplied one. Their paper reports three studies of a treatment meant to build resistance to deceptive persuasion, and asks what the treatment has to establish for the resistance to hold.

The pattern in the results

After the treatment, advertisements using illegitimate appeals to authority were less persuasive, and advertisements using legitimate appeals were more persuasive. The second half matters: the treatment did not make people suspicious of everything. The resistance applied to new examples and lasted over time. It was strongest when the treatment established two things, that the persuader had manipulative intent and that the person was personally open to being manipulated. Dispelling participants' belief that they were immune to persuasion, which the authors call the illusion of invulnerability, produced the greatest resistance.

A worked example

A guest who knows how home-party pressure works, but believes it works only on other people, has half of the defence. The paper's finding is that the other half, accepting that she is the kind of person it works on, did the most. This is an illustration of the finding and not a result from the study, whose advertisements were not home parties.

What the result does not say

The paper does not show that recognising a tactic is enough. It does not say what happens when a seller has already admitted a drawback, which no study read for this site tested. The advice built on it here is a reading of the studies and not a tested method.

What this page leaves out

The paper was read through a bibliographic record and a summary of its abstract, so no sample sizes or effect sizes are stated. His other papers were not surveyed and his current position was not checked. Nothing here claims that the finding holds beyond the advertisements the studies used.

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