What Is the Sleeper Effect?

Sleeper effect. After a period of time, the positive effect brought by the high credibility source is decreasing, while the negative effect brought by the low credibility source is transformed toward the positive effect. In other words, the phenomenon that the propagation effect under the credibility of the source will change over time, some people also call this phenomenon the information amplitude effect theorem.

Sleep effect

Sleeper effect. After a period of time, the positive effect brought by the high credibility source is decreasing, while the negative effect brought by the low credibility source is transformed toward the positive effect. That is, in the source

Sleep effect

What is the sleep effect

Sleep effect refers to the phenomenon that the transmission effect under the credibility of the source will change over time. In other words, after a period of time, the credibility is high.

Sleep effect

In communication

Sleep effect

Carl Hofland and

The "sleep effect" can make bad impressions disappear over time. Development of technology will promote continuous advertising

The phenomenon of sleep effects in advertising

Sleep effect

(2) Sometimes industry insiders criticize some ads after they are released

The sleep effect shows the complex relationship between advertising and audience behavior, and product sales performance. Its complexity is difficult to grasp by empirical methods in market research. Although from the above analysis, there are various reasons for the sleep effect, but it looks like a passive advertising effect in the final analysis.

The "sleep effect" makes bad impressions disappear over time. There is such a system to protect consumers in postal sales or door-to-door sales. Even if the sales contract has been signed, it will automatically be invalidated if it exceeds a certain period. This system is called "Cooling off". "Cooling" here refers to the cooling period from the beginning that is considered "good" to what may be considered bad later.

Conversely, the bad impression that was initially thought to be "not good" may also disappear with the passage of time, which in turn will produce a good impression. Psychology calls this phenomenon the "sleep effect". For example, when the impasse in the negotiations is about to break down, he proposes "Lunch first, and then make a decision after eating", so that both parties can have a calm time to think. When the negotiations are resumed, progress will be exceptionally smooth. When the negotiation reaches its climax or just after persuasion, giving the other party a period of time for reflection will have a good effect. Because the temporary separation of persuasive content and persuasive content will increase the credibility of the information and make the other party make a calm judgment.

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(1) Advertising preferences do not equal product brand preferences. Although there has been a positive correlation between advertising preferences and the brand preferences of the products they promote, it is not the only correlation. Advertising preferences are just the evaluations and emotional reactions that people produce when they watch advertisements. It obviously affects product brand preferences. It is common to like products and have a favorable impression on products. However, in addition to advertising preferences, there are many other factors in the formation of product brand preferences. Such as buying experience, oral recommendations from others, group influence, product characteristics, sales methods, etc. To put it simply, consumers may only judge whether the advertisement is good or bad when they see the advertisement, but make a trade-off of the pros and cons when making a purchase decision. Annoying ads at least indicate that they have been noticed, and ads that have been accused in unison have a high brand recall, which is conducive to entering the domain of choice when people make purchase decisions. When the actual benefit of the product is greater than the emotional likes and dislikes caused by advertising, the sleep effect may occur. It contains two parts: one is the direct emotion evoked by the advertisement, and the other is the cognitive evaluation of the advertisement information. The former is the likes and dislikes of the advertisement itself, which may involve the beauty of the advertisement picture, the cuteness, pleasantness of the image, and even the gorgeous color. In short, it is all the pleasing factors in the advertisement. The advertising preferences in cognitive evaluation mainly point to the credibility of advertising information, and generate support or opposition to the information in advertising display. Such as: "That star's performance is contrived" (emotional reaction) and "said that this thing can make people grow up immediately is purely deceiving" (cognitive induction), the two are different. If the audience hates advertisements and only negates some of the factors connected to emotional reactions, and cognitive reactions are not objections, then the occurrence of sleep effects makes sense. The ads that caused cognitive opposition were not so lucky. This explains why not all nasty ads have a sleep effect.

(2) Time pair

The sleeper effect, as an interesting and anomalous phenomenon, has aroused great interest of some social psychologists. They discuss the nature of sleeper effects and try to explain why they occur.

1 Media Novelty Peterson and Thurstone believe that the cause of the sleeper effect is the novelty of the media. They believe that in the survey, movies are new to the students surveyed, so movies have become the object of their careful thinking and talking, so that their attitude towards the characters in the movie will continue to change. But this hypothesis cannot explain why the other four films did not show sleeper effects.

2 Information Source-Information Memory Hypothesis (Memory of the Source Versus Message) Hovland et al. Believe that the reason for the sleeper effect is that individuals have different memories of persuasion information and information sources. Information sources are easier to forget than information content. When an individual has just watched a movie and conducted an attitude survey, he was affected by both the positive attributes of the movie (persuasion information) and the negative attributes of the information source (discount clues), so that the content of the movie was discounted. They expected that if the source of the movie's information is forgotten faster than the content of the movie, the subsequent attitude survey will only be affected by the movie content that can be remembered, and not by the source of the movie information, and sleep will occur. The effect. Their explanation of the sleeper effect is that individuals forget the source of the information, but still remember the content of the persuasion information. Hovland and Weiss then performed an experiment to verify their hypothesis. It was found that the group with discounted clues had a sleeper effect, but did not forget the source of the information. The research hypothesis has not been tested.

3 Dissociative Cue Hypothesis Hovland and Weiss revised the original hypothesis on the basis of experiments and proposed a new hypothesis [8]. They believe that the basis for attitude formation has also changed over time. In the immediate test, the individual's attitude is affected by both the source and the information content. After a period of time, the attitude is mainly affected by the information content and not by the source, although the individual still remembers the source of the information. In other words, the separation of content and information source over time is the root of the sleeper effect, not whether it can be remembered. Kelman, Hovland tested the clue separation hypothesis. The experiment first showed the participants some review articles, which required extreme forgiveness of the juvenile offenders, and then tested the participants' attitudes to the review articles at that time and three weeks later. Participants were divided into three groups: the group with high credibility of the source, the group with low credibility of the source and emphasized the connection between the source and the information, and the group with low credibility and did not emphasize the relationship between the source and the information. Contact group. It was found that only the third group had a sleeper effect, and the null hypothesis was supported.

4 Differential Decay Hypothesis The Differential Decay Hypothesis proposes that when encoding persuasion information and discount cues, the two are programmed into different memory systems, the former into the semantic memory system and the latter into the episodic memory system. Semantic memory is based on general knowledge, which can have a formal structure, is relatively stable, is not disturbed, and is relatively easy to extract. The episodic memory is based on personal experience and is based on time and space. It is susceptible to interference. The stored information is often converted and difficult to extract. Due to the nature of semantic memory and episodic memory, episodic memory declines faster. When the effects of discount cues decay faster than the effects of persuasion, the sleeper effect occurs.

5 The availability-validity hypothesis (Availability-Valence Hypothesis) The usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis is based on the long-term memory's Spreading Activation Model, which explains the role of information coding in attitude changes in more detail. This hypothesis holds that individuals are active information processors, and their attitude judgment is determined by when and how they process information. The usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis proposes some new concepts in explaining the effects of sleepers: association sets, usefulness, and effectiveness. Association network (association network) is a collection of related information inspired by external information to individuals. The availability of information is determined by the amount of related information that the information can activate. The more information that can be activated, the more useful the information is. The factors that affect the usefulness of information include the fineness of information processing and the freshness of information.

The validity of information (valence) is the degree to which an individual believes that some useful information can be relied upon when making attitude judgments. The concept of usefulness effectively describes what information is more likely to be the basis of attitude judgment, but it is not enough to predict the direction of attitude change, so the validity of the information needs to be understood. Validity is a relatively subjective concept. It is a piece of information relative to other information. Because of the limited nature of cognitive resources, it is impossible that all useful information is valid and can be used as a basis for attitude change. The usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis states that the sleeper effect is based on two factors: two association sets formed by persuasion information and discount clues when the information is encoded; determined by the connection between the two association sets Attitude judgment. After accepting discount clues, due to the recency of discount clues, their usefulness is relatively high, and their effectiveness is also relatively high; but over time, the recency of discount clues and persuasion information have decreased, and the discount clues have decreased. The connection between the persuasion information set and the persuasion information set is weakened, and the connection within the association set of persuasion information may be strengthened. If the connection within the persuasion information exceeds the connection with the discount clue set, the usefulness of the persuasion information will increase, which will affect the change of attitude The sleeper effect occurs.

The clue separation hypothesis, the differential decay hypothesis, and the usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis are three theoretical explanations that have a greater impact on the interpretation of sleeper effects. The cue separation hypothesis only emphasizes separation, that is, the connection between persuasion information and discount clues. It is believed that the weakening of the connection between the two is the root cause of the sleeper effect. The usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis focuses not only on the connection between the two association sets, but also on the internal connection of the persuasion information set. When the connection within the persuasion information is greater than the connection between the persuasion information set and the discount clue set, That is, when persuasion information is no longer affected by discount clues, the sleeper effect occurs. Both the differential decline hypothesis and the usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis are related to factors such as memory and cognition. They explore the internal mechanism more deeply, but the differential decline hypothesis emphasizes the coding of memory, while the usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis emphasizes the connection with long-term memory. . It is also worth noting that the persuasion information and discount clues in the clue separation hypothesis and differential decay hypothesis are single isolated information, while in the usefulness-effectiveness hypothesis, the information appears in the form of a network.