Persuasive Appeals and Responses to Appeals among Friends and Acquaintances

Abstract

JONES, DIANE CARLSON. Persuasive Appeals and Responses to Appeals among Friends and Acquaintances. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 757-763. This study examined persuasive appeals and responses to appeals among kindergarten, second-, and fourth-grade friends and acquaintances. It also evaluated social perspective-taking, friendship, and self-interest reasoning as predictors of appeals and responses to them. Based on sociometric ratings, children were paired with a friend or an acquaintance and participated in a task designed to examine sharing under competitive conditions. Results indicate that appeals to friends and acquaintances did not differ in kind or rate of success. Children of all ages and in all conditions tended to use simple requests most frequently. Friendship status had its most noticeable effect on responses to appeals. Grants were more likely to occur among friends and, when an appeal was rejected, refusals to friends were more extended. Multiple regression analyses revealed that different predictor variables were linked to different appeal and response measures. Further, the behavioral explanations, friendship, and self-interest reasoning, were more frequently related to the appeal and response measures than was hypothetical reasoning. These results document the need for a comprehensive approach in order to describe persuasion among friends and acquaintances.