Communicator-recipient similarity and decision change.

Abstract

municator is perceived to have had with an object, the more likely it is that the recipient's behavior with respect to the object will be modified by the communicator's influence attempts. The second hypothesis followed the aforementioned research on communicator- recipient similarity: to the extent that the recipient perceives that he and the communicator share an attribute, that is, have a similar relationship to an object, to that extent is the recipient's behavior with respect to the object likely to be modified by the communicator's influence attempts. The two forces, perceived communicator expertise and perceived communicator similarity, were pitted against one another by conducting a field experiment in which the communicator, for half the recipients, was perceived as similar but inexperienced while for the other half, he was perceived as dissimilar but experienced. METHOD