Social Judgement Theory

To start off, let us define what the social judgement theory actually is. The social judgment theory suggests that knowing a person’s attitudes on subjects can provide you with clues about how to approach a persuasive effort. The theory goes on to propose that people make evaluations (or rather judgments) about the content of messages based on their anchors, or stance, on a particular topics. In addition to an individual’s anchor, each person’s attitudes can be placed into three categories:

Latitude of acceptance: includes all those ideas that a person finds acceptable.

Latitude of rejection: includes all those ideas that a person finds unacceptable

Latitude of non-commitment: includes ideas for which you have no opinion—you neither accept nor reject these ideas.

A person’s reaction to a persuasive message depends on his or her position on the topic. Accordingly, the first step in the social judgment process is to map receivers’ attitudes toward a topic.

Working as a marketer for UNICEF, one of the first things you would have to do is determine who your audience is, and what the audiences’ perceptions and attitudes are about your company. By determining this, you would know what kind of marketing scheme you would need (whether to rebuild brand image, awareness, or something else.) One of the first ways to use the social judgement theory in order to determine this would be through something called an ordered alternatives questionnaire. The questionnaire presents a set of statements representing different points of view on a single topic. The statements on the questionnaire are listed so that they create a continuum; that is, the first statement reflects one extreme view of an issue, and the last statement reflects the opposite extreme view. Respondents are then asked to mark the statement with which they most agree (which would be their anchor view). They are then asked to indicate statements with which they generally agree or disagree (representing the...