The Center for Social Data Analytics Colloquium speaker: Shannon Cruz

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Insights from cognitive structure about learning and persuasion

Several theoretical approaches to attitudes and attitude change suggest that a promising approach to designing effective, tailored persuasive messages may be to draw on insights from an audience’s cognitive structure. Parallel approaches in education also suggest that cognitive structures can offer unique insights about knowledge and learning. However, existing literature provides only limited guidance on how measures of cognitive structure can be translated into actionable recommendations about the design of persuasive and educational interventions. How can this structure best be measured? How does this structure differ between important audience segments? And can these insights actually make accurate predictions about intervention effectiveness among different groups? This talk presents a series of studies designed to begin to explore these questions, along with reflections on the potential utility of a structure-focused approach to message design.
 

Shannon Cruz is a College of the Liberal Arts Endowed Fellow and Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. Her research focuses on the determinants, processes, and outcomes of social influence, particularly in environmental contexts. More specifically, she is interested in how environmental attitudes are shaped by ideological factors, change dynamically as the result of social interaction in groups and networks, and can be altered by persuasive messages. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Climatic Change, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and Human Communication Research.