an almost continual state of war since 1945. Ho's statement appeared to present opportunities to opponents of North Vietnam to mount a psychological campaign against the North Vietnamese. Indeed this seemingly demoralizing pronouncement on the possible duration of the Vietnam War has been seized upon by U.S. and allied propagandists in efforts to weaken the fighting spirit of VC and NVA troops in South Vietnam as well as civilian support of the war effort in North Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh has been labeled many things by his opponents throughout his long political career, but never a fool. Both the message and the vehicle that conveyed his last admonition were selected for the greatest impact on the North Vietnamese people. Ho Chi Minh was loved and truly venerated by his people almost to the point of being considered a god. The last will and testament was his final formal communication to his people, an expression of what he wanted to be carried out after his death. This testament is constantly referred to in North Vietnamese mass media. The Hanoi leadership effectively invokes the memory of Ho in attempts to motivate the population to greater efforts in all aspects of national life.

In making such a last statement, Ho Chi Minh was drawing heavily upon the Vietnamese past. He was reminding people of the tactics by which the Vietnamese people have won wars throughout history. Usually faced with an enemy vastly superior in strength and arms, as the Chinese or more recently the French, the Vietnamese have traditionally employed the only resources available to them: terrain suitable to their tactics; a brave determined people; and time.

To the Vietnamese the most important of these was time. The Vietnamese have won wars throughout their history by fighting for a longer time than their opponents thought possible. Seven Chinese invasions. were successfully repulsed. The Vietnamese struggle with the Mongol hordes lasted 31 years before the Vietnamese drove them from their territory. Wars lasting 30 to 40 years are not uncommon in Vietnamese history. The ability to wage such protracted wars, the tenacity with which the Vietnamese continue to fight, regardless of the time required to defeat the enemy, is the quality with which the Vietnamese people have won their wars.

The Vietnamese people, both North and South, are intensely proud of their history. Until modern times, and with the exception of brief periods of Chinese domination, the Vietnamese have maintained their national independence. They have always maintained their identity as a people regardless of the political situation. Pride in history and military achievements is shown by the manner in which streets in both Vietnams are named. Almost without exception streets are named honoring military and political heroes who have led the people against foreign invaders, usually the Chinese.

Given this apparent ability to outlast the opponent, it is of interest to note Hanoi's thinking about the American people in this regard. A basic

tenet on which Hanoi strategists have based their present war tactics, protracted warfare, is the conviction that the American people are psychologically incapable of staying with a long-term war. The North Vietnamese predicted early in the conflict that the American people would soon tire of the war. The U.S. public would eventually react against rising casualties and rising war costs and force the U.S. government to end the war, thought North Vietnamese strategists.

Accurately gauging the present state of morale in North Vietnam is a difficult task. Government control of the communication media, the small number of vistors permitted in the country, restriction on the travel of the visitors, and particularly the complete absence of unsupervised contacts with ordinary citizens are factors contributing to the scarcity of information.

*

A French reporter, who traveled extensively in North Vietnam on two different occasions stated that his most vivid impression on the second trip, six weeks after Ho's death, was the absence of change throughout the country. Everywhere he traveled he saw again the same posters seen during the bombing period urging the population to remain warconscious, warning against any relaxation while the enemy still threatens. Bomb shelters were much in evidence, as were antiaircraft sites, which were constantly manned. Almost no effort had been made to reconstruct destroyed or damaged buildings although main arteries of transportation were restored or under repair.

The draft in North Vietnam is not popular. However, there is no indication of efforts to avoid conscription. Correspondence from troops outside the country is infrequent, although exploits and resounding victories of Peoples' Liberation Armed Foreces of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are continually related to the population through the mass media.

There is no question that the vast majority of North Vietnamese people want peace. They have suffered much as a result of two decades or more of war. An entire generation has never known peace. Notwithstanding the desire for peace and relief from the hardships borne by the people as a result of the war, there is little evidence to indicate that popular resolve to support the North Vietnamese Government's war policy has been appreciably lessened.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH, AND PSYOP, INTRODUCTION

PERSUASION*

BY IRVING L. JANIS

An overview of recent research and conceptualization in the field of persuasive communication, a major area of PSYOP.

The art of "winning men's minds by words" has occupied the attention of philosophers since long before the time of Plato's and Aristotle's commentaries on rhetoric. But not until the twentieth century has there been any concerted effort of empirically oriented scholars to describe objectively the conditions under which persuasion succeeds or fails.

Pioneering contributions. In a recent survey of current knowlege about persuasive communication, four social scientists who made pioneering contributions during the first half of this century have been singled out as the founding fathers of the new field of research on persuasive communication (Schramm 1963). One is the political scientist Harold D. Lasswell, who carried out the first detailed descriptive studies of major propaganda campaigns, focusing on the communications issued by national elites during World War I and by totalitarian movements that tried to influence the masses during the period of the great depression. Lasswell formulated a set of theoretical categories for analyzing the effects of persuasive communications and initiated the development of systematic techniques of content analysis (Lasswell et al. 1949).

A second major figure is the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, who worked out new methods for investigating the impact of mass media on voting behavior and on the beliefs, judgments, and values of the mass audience. Using poll data from U.S. election campaigns and panel surveys of public reactions to a wide variety of radio programs, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues have described the complex communication networks and cross pressures that exist in modern communities. Their studies (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955) highlight the influential role of local opinion leaders, who function as "gatekeepers" by promoting or rejecting the evaluative judgments transmitted in the mass media by political parties, business organizations, public welfare authorities, and intellectuals.

A third outstanding contributor to scientific research on social influence is the psychologist Kurt Lewin, whose studies emphasized the powerful barriers to change that are created by the primary and secondary groups with which the individual is affiliated. One of his major

*Excerpts from "Persuasion," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12, The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, New York, 1968, pp. 55–63. “Persuasion” by Irving L. Janis. Reprinted with permission of the Publisher from THE INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, David L. Sills, Editor-in Chief. Volume 12, pages 53 to 63. Copyright © 1968 by Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc.

explanatory concepts to account for resistance to new sources of social pressure is the counterpressure arising from the existence of group norms, in which attitudes are anchored. When attempting to understand why a person accepts or rejects a persuasive message, according to Lewin (1947), the investigator should examine the person's anticipations about whether or not he will be diverging from the norms of his reference groups, such as his family, his work group, and the social organizations with which he identifies.

Another psychologist, Carl I. Hovland, is the fourth contributor to have helped build up systematic knowledge about communication effects and the processes of persuasion. Hovland initiated broad programs of experimental research designed to test general hypotheses concerning the factors that determine whether or not the recipients of a persuasive message will be influenced. Some of the studies by Hovland and his collaborators (see, e.g., Personality and Persuasibility 1959) bear directly on the hypotheses put forth by Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, and Lewin, while others have led to unexpected discoveries and new theoretical analyses of the psychological processes underlying successful persuasion. . . .

The sections that follow present some of the main generalizations drawn from these and other studies in order to indicate representative hypotheses and empirical findings. . .

...

Resistance to persuasion. During recent decades many self-styled experts in propaganda, journalism, advertising, and public relations have promoted an image of modern man as highly gullible. The new field of mass-communications research, which developed from the work of these four pioneering social scientists, has shattered this image along with other popular preconceptions concering the alleged power of the mass media to manipulate, exploit, or "brainwash" the public. A review of the evidence accumulated from relevant research studies indicates that mass communications generally fail to produce any marked changes in social attitudes or actions (see Klapper 1960). The slight effects produced by the press, films, radio, and television are usually limited to a reinforcement of the pre-existing beliefs and values of the audience. Campaigns designed to persuade people to change their values, to modify social stereotypes, or to foster a new political ideology generally mobilize powerful resitances in the public. So pervasive are these resistances, according to the documented accounts of numerous investigators, that one could characterize "successful persuasion" by the mass media as a relatively rare social phenomenon.

Hovland, Janis, and Kelley (1953), in their analysis of factors that influence attention, comprehension, and acceptance of persuasive messages, call attention to essential differences between educational instruction and persuasion. Most of the differences pertain to the audience's initial expectations, which have a marked influence on motivation to accept or reject the communicator's conclusions. In the case of instruc

tional communications, where high acceptance is readily elicited, the educational setting is typically one in which the members of the audience anticipate that the communicator is trying to help them, that his conclusions are incontrovertible, and that they will be socially rewarded rather than punished for adhering to his conclusions. In persuasive situations, on the other hand, interfering expectations are aroused, and these operate as resistances. The authors point out that the findings from experiments on communication effects seem to converge upon three types of interfering expectations that operate to decrease the degree of acceptance: (1) expectations of being manipulated by the communicator (e.g., being made a "sucker" by an untrustworthy source, who has ulterior economic or political motives for trying to persuade others to support his position); (2) expectations of being "wrong" (e.g., making incorrect judgments on a controversial political issue or overlooking antithetical evidence that would be grounds for a more cautious or compromise position); and (3) expectations of social disapproval (e.g., from the local community or from a primary group whose norms are not in accord with the communicator's position).

This third type of resistance, which reflects Lewin's "social anchorage" concept, has been most extensively investigated. Many studies indicate that when the members of an audience are exposed to a communication advocating a position that goes counter to the norms of one or more of their reference groups, their resistance will vary directly with the strength of the formal and informal sanctions put forth by the normsetting group. Quite aside from any special sanctions applied to those who violate the group norms, the mere perception that the vast majority of other members accept a given norm operates as a powerful force on the individual to conform to that norm (Lewin 1947; Asch 1952; Kiesler & Corbin 1965).

DETERMINANTS OF SUCCESSFUL PERSUASION

Most of the substantiated propositions about successful persuasion designate factors that help to decrease psychological resistances when the recipients are exposed to a persuasive communication (see Janis & Smith 1965). Exposure requires not only adequate physical transmission. of the message but also audience attention, which will not be elicited if the communication is perceived as deviating markedly from pre-existing attitudes and values or as violating the norms of an important reference group. If a persuasive communication evokes sufficient attention to surmount the exposure hurdle, its success will then depend upon comprehension (i.e., the extent to which the audience grasps the essential meanings the communicator intended to convey) and acceptance (i.e., the degree to which the audience is convinced by the arguments and/or is responsive to the motivational appeals presented in the communication).

The main types of factors that have been investigated are those specified by Lasswell's classic formula for communications analysis: Who