Skip to main content

Search from vocabulary

Content language

Concept information

Preferred term

political inoculation  

Definition

  • Inoculation theory was devised by William McGuire in the early 1960s as a strategy to protect attitudes from change: to confer resistance to counter-attitudinal influences, whether such influences take the form of direct attack or sustained pressures. Inoculation consists of two elements: threat, which raises the prospect of persuasive challenges to existing attitudes and is designed to get a person to acknowledge the vulnerability of his attitudes so that he will be motivated to strengthen them; and refutational preemption, which raises and refutes specific arguments contrary to attitudes and is designed both to provide specific content a person can use to defend her attitudes and to provide her with a model or script for defending attitudes. [Source: Encyclopedia of Political Communication; Inoculation, Political]

Belongs to group

URI

https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/political_inoculation

Download this concept: