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The sleeper effect is a psychological phenomenon that relates to persuasion. It is a delayed increase in the effect of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue, typically being some negative connotation or lack of credibility in the message, while a positive message may evoke an immediate positive response which decays over time. The sleeper effect also refers to a delayed positive response that is maintained over time. The effect was first noticed among US Army soldiers exposed to army propaganda. It was hypothesized that over time the soldiers forgot that the message was propaganda. The effect has been widely studied but notoriously difficult to reproduce, leading to some doubt over its existence.
Over time, however, their newly formed attitudes seem to gravitate back toward the opinion held prior to receiving the message, almost as if they were never exposed to the communication. This pattern of normal decay in attitudes has been documented as the most frequently observed longitudinal pattern of persuasion research (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).
In contrast, some messages are often accompanied with a discounting cue (e.g., a message disclaimer, a low-credibility source) that would arouse a recipient’s suspicion of the validity of the message and suppress any attitude change that might occur by exposure to the message alone. Furthermore, when people are exposed to a persuasive message followed by a discounting cue, people tend to be more persuaded over time; this is referred to as the sleeper effect (Hovland & Weiss, 1951; Cook & Flay, 1978).
For example, in political campaigns during important elections, Swing vote often see negative advertisements about a party or candidate for office. At the end of the advertisement, they also might notice that the opposing candidate paid for the advertisement. Presumably, this would make voters question the truthfulness of the advertisement, and consequently, they may not be persuaded initially. However, even though the source of the advertisement lacked credibility, voters will be more likely to be persuaded later (and ultimately, vote against the candidate disfavored by the advertisement).
This pattern of attitude change has puzzled social psychologists for nearly half a century, primarily due to its counter-intuitive nature and for its potential to aid in understanding attitude processes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). It has been a very widely studied phenomenon of persuasion research (Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004; see also Cook & Flay, 1978). Despite a long history, the sleeper effect has been notoriously difficult to obtain or to replicate, with the exception of a pair of studies by Gruder et al. (1978).
The sleeper effect is controversial because the influence of persuasive communication is greater when one measures the effect closer to the presentation instead of farther from the time of the reception.
After attempting to replicate the effect and failing, some researchers suggested that it might be better to accept the null hypothesis and conclude that the sleeper effect does not exist.
The sleeper effect is involved with initial message impression so the phenomenon has implications for models of persuasion, including teaching methods, as well as more recent conceptualizations, such as the heuristic-systematic model and the elaboration likelihood model.
However, Cook and his associates responded by suggesting that previous studies failed to obtain the sleeper effect because the requirements for a strong test were not met. Specifically, they argued that the sleeper effect will occur only if:
Experimental studies conducted did, in fact, provide evidence for the sleeper effect occurring under such theoretically relevant conditions. Furthermore, the sleeper effect did not occur when any of the four requirements were not met.
According to the dissociation interpretation, a sleeper effect appears to happen when a convincing message is conferred with a discounting cue (such as a low-credible source or counterargument). A sleeper effect occurs because of an impulsive dissociation of a message and a discounting cue over time (contrasting to a simple forgetting of a source).
The first efforts to justify the effect were consistent with the understanding of persuasion processes at that time. Hovland and his colleagues introduced a program of research to study how recall of the message and the source persuaded the sleeper effect. They first hypothesized that message receivers forget the noncredible communicator as time goes by, and therefore the initial message rejection diminishes. Nevertheless, they later propositioned that message receivers may not entirely forget the cue, yet the association between the representations of the discounting cue and the message content may fade over time and produce a sleeper effect. These two formulations vary in that (a) forgetting suggests that the traces of the cue disappear or become unavailable in memory over time, while (b) dissociation suggests that cue remains available in memory but is simply less easily retrieved (less accessible) in relation to the topic of communication.
Carl Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield (1949) first discovered the effect by a well-known study that demonstrated the delayed impact of a World War II propaganda film on American soldiers.
With a subset of conditions that caused participants to question the credibility of the source in the movie, participants later reported a slight increase of persuasion (much to the researchers’ surprise). After examining the results, they initially hypothesized that forgetting of the discounting cue (in this case, the non-credible source) was causing the effect. Over time, however, the effect of the messages presented by credible sources decayed, whereas the effect of the messages presented by non-credible sources either remained the same or increased slightly. Despite evidence for the sleeper effect from this series of studies, the recall measures indicated that recipients could still remember the non-credible sources of the messages at the time of the delayed follow-up.
This is when the forgetting hypothesis was replaced by the dissociation hypothesis. Now according to the dissociation hypothesis the sleeper effect does not need to imply that the discounting cue becomes permanently unavailable in memory. A weakened association between the cue and the message may be sufficient for the sleeper effect to occur. As the association weakens over time, rendering the cue less accessible in relation to the communication topic, there may be a delayed increase in persuasion as long as the message arguments are still memorable. To this extent, factors that facilitate retention of the message content should create settings conducive to the sleeper effect.
According to this reasoning, the sleeper effect occurs because the association between the discounting cue and the message in one’s memory becomes weakened over time; hence, when the message is recalled for purposes of producing an attitude, the source is not readily associated.
They argued that the conditions under which the sleeper effect is more likely to occur were not emphasized by the dissociation hypothesis. Additionally, the requirements for a sleeper effect specified by Gruder et al. (1978) did not detail the empirical conditions necessary to observe the sleeper effect.
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