John A Banas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3770472 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John A Banas |
| GIVEN NAMES | John A |
| FAMILY NAME | Banas |
| SIGNATURE | BANAS J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oklahoma |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5641-3985 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 203 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Inoculating Against Anti-Vaccination Conspiracies
This study examined the efficacy of inoculation treatments in preventing anti-vaccination propaganda. Study predictions were tested in an independent-group experiment (N = 165), wherein participants were randomly assigned to a fact-based inoculation or a logic-based inoculation or a control message, with an excerpt from an anti-vaccination conspiracy film, Vaxxed, used as a counterattitudinal attack message. The results indicated that both inocul…
Uncertainty and inoculation
Employing inoculation theory as a theoretical framework, we conducted an independent-groups experiment (N = 150), comparing the effects of an inoculation treatment to a control condition and examining uncertainty as a mediator of inoculation effects. To test inoculation effectiveness, we used an excerpt from an anti-vaccination conspiracy film Vaxxed as a counterattitudinal attack message. The results indicated that inoculation roused motivationa…
The Social Science of QAnon
QAnon has emerged as the defining conspiracy group of our times, and its far-right conspiracies are extraordinary for their breadth and extremity. Bringing together scholars from psychology, sociology, communications, and political science, this cutting-edge volume uses social science theory to investigate aspects of QAnon. Following an introduction to the 'who, what, and why' of QAnon, Part I focuses on the psychological characteristics of QAnon…
Reducing Psychological Reactance to Health Promotion Messages
This study compared the relative efficacy of two strategies designed to mitigate psychological reactance in health campaigns by using reminders of behavioral autonomy: preemptive scripts, which appear before the appeal, and restoration postscripts, which appear after. Employing a mixed-model experiment with a 2 (threat to freedom: low vs. high) × 3 (reactance-mitigation strategy: control vs. preemptive script vs. restoration postscript) × 2 (heal…
When Machine and Bandwagon Heuristics Compete
Three experiments tested if the machine and bandwagon heuristics moderate beliefs in fact-checked claims under different conditions of human/machine (dis)agreement and of transparency of the fact-checking system. Across experiments, people were more likely to align their belief in the claim when artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing agents’ fact-checks were congruent rather than incongruent. The heuristics provided further nuance to the …
Simmering on the Back Burner or Playing with Fire? Examining the Consequences of Back-Burner Digital Communication Among Ex-Partners
Back burners are people with whom one communicates to potentially establish a future romantic or sexual relationship, and these relationships are common among college students. Using a sample of noncollege adults currently in committed relationships (N = 246) obtained via Amazon's MTurk, this study examines how a prior relationship role with a desired back burner (i.e., whether a back burner was an ex-partner or not) affects digital communication…
Evaluating classic and contemporary ideas about persuasion resistance in inoculation theory
Despite more than six decades of research, foundational arguments about mechanisms proposed in inoculation theory to bring about persuasion resistance have gone untested. We conducted an experiment to examine a classic idea about the optimal strength of counterarguments and refutations in inoculation messages as well as a contemporary notion regarding forewarning. The results were inconsistent with the idea that weak counterarguments and strong r…
Freedom-prompting reactance mitigation strategies function differently across levels of trait reactance
This study assessed the relative effects of reactance mitigation strategies specifically designed to prevent or restore threatened autonomy according to message recipients’ levels of reactance proneness. An experiment (N = 230) using a 2 (inoculation mitigation: present vs. absent) × 2 (freedom threatening language: high vs. low) × 2 (restoration postscript mitigation: present vs. absent) between-subjects design was performed in the context of a …
Meta-Analysis on Mediated Contact and Prejudice
This paper presents a meta-analysis of 79 cases (N = 21,857) testing the effectiveness of mediated intergroup contact on prejudice. Positive mediated contact decreased (r = −.23; 95% CI, −.29 to −.17), whereas negative mediated contact increased prejudicial attitudes (r = .31; 95% CI, .24 to .38) and intergroup anxiety and empathy were both significant mediators of these relationships. Furthermore, the data revealed no significant differences bet…
Apprehension or motivation to defend attitudes? Exploring the underlying threat mechanism in inoculation-induced resistance to persuasion
This study questions the traditional conceptualization of the threat component of inoculation and compares it to an alternative operationalization that was hypothesized to better capture the psychological function of threat according to inoculation theory, focusing less on an apprehensive response in favor of how inoculation treatments cognitively function to motivate resistance. Two measures of threat were contrasted by examining resistance to 9…
Scaling up to institutional entrepreneurship
This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the in…
Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda
This investigation examined the boundaries of inoculation theory by examining how inoculation can be applied to conspiracy theory propaganda as well as inoculation itself (called metainoculation). A 3-phase experiment with 312 participants compared 3 main groups: no-treatment control, inoculation, and metainoculation. Research questions explored how inoculation and metainoculation effects differ based on the argument structure of inoculation mess…
Humor use in power-differentiated interactions
Humor serves a variety of functions in interpersonal communication, including the release of tension and the diffusion of conflict. Based on Dyadic Power Theory (Dunbar 2004; Dunbar and Abra 2010), it is predicted that interactants of equal power will use more humor and different types of humor than those either relatively high or low in power as compared to their partners. The present study analyzed experimentally manipulated problem-solving int…
A Review of Humor in Educational Settings
The primary goal of this project is to provide a summary of extant research regarding humor in the classroom, with an emphasis on identifying and explaining inconsistencies in research findings and offering new directions for future studies in this area. First, the definitions, functions, and main theories of humor are reviewed. Next, the paper explains types of humorous instructional communication. Third, the empirical findings of both the sourc…
Weak-Tie Support Network Preference and Perceived Life Stress Among Participants in Health-Related, Computer-Mediated Support Groups
The study reported here examines characteristics of weak-tie support network preference among members of health-related computer-mediated support groups. Drawing on weak-tie support network theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, participants' age and health condition were assessed as predictors of weak ties support network preference. Relationships between the dimensions of weak-tie support network preference and perceived stress also were…
A Meta-Analysis of Research on Inoculation Theory
A meta-analysis of 54 cases testing the effectiveness of inoculation theory at conferring resistance and examining the mechanisms of the theory was conducted. The analyses revealed inoculation messages to be superior to both supportive messages and no-treatment controls at conferring resistance. Additionally, the results revealed refutational same and refutational different preemptions to be equally effective at reducing attitude change. However,…
Nuances about the Role and Impact of Affect in Inoculation
This study examined the role and impact of affect in resistance. A three-phase experiment was conducted. The results indicated that inoculation treatments conferred resistance and exerted nuanced outcomes involving cognitive and affective responses to counterarguments and affect. The investigation also compared the effectiveness of cognitive, affective-positive, and affective-negative treatments. The results revealed that affective-negative messa…
Tests of a Theory of Communicative Responsibility
Two studies are presented that provide the first empirical tests of a theory of communicative responsibility. The theory posits that individuals in communicative situations make systematic judgments of the extent to which each party is responsible for contributing to the process of creating understanding in a communicative event. These judgments affect the extent to which communicators engage in implicature and inference-making during the communi…
One-Tailed F -tests in communication research
Recently, communication scholars have published research using a type of significance testing that might be called a “one-tailed F-test.” The use of such tests lead authors to report as statistically significant F-values that would not be considered as statistically significant according to the critical values presented in standard F-tables. This paper documents the recent use of one-tailed F-tests in communication journals, and examines the argu…
Norms, expectations, and deception
Violations of expectations have been advanced as an explanation for how people make veracity judgments, and previous research has found that unexpected weird behavior is rated as less honest than expected normal behavior. The current experiment (N = 128) varied norms and expectations independently to test four alternative models of veracity judgments. The models included a normative expectation model, an expectancy violation sufficient model, a m…
Meta-Analysis on Mediated Contact and Prejudice
This paper presents a meta-analysis of 79 cases (N = 21,857) testing the effectiveness of mediated intergroup contact on prejudice. Positive mediated contact decreased (r = −.23; 95% CI, −.29 to −.17), whereas negative mediated contact increased prejudicial attitudes (r = .31; 95% CI, .24 to .38) and intergroup anxiety and empathy were both significant mediators of these relationships. Furthermore, the data revealed no significant differences bet…
A Meta-Analysis of Research on Inoculation Theory
A meta-analysis of 54 cases testing the effectiveness of inoculation theory at conferring resistance and examining the mechanisms of the theory was conducted. The analyses revealed inoculation messages to be superior to both supportive messages and no-treatment controls at conferring resistance. Additionally, the results revealed refutational same and refutational different preemptions to be equally effective at reducing attitude change. However,…
Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda
This investigation examined the boundaries of inoculation theory by examining how inoculation can be applied to conspiracy theory propaganda as well as inoculation itself (called metainoculation). A 3-phase experiment with 312 participants compared 3 main groups: no-treatment control, inoculation, and metainoculation. Research questions explored how inoculation and metainoculation effects differ based on the argument structure of inoculation mess…
Apprehension or motivation to defend attitudes? Exploring the underlying threat mechanism in inoculation-induced resistance to persuasion
This study questions the traditional conceptualization of the threat component of inoculation and compares it to an alternative operationalization that was hypothesized to better capture the psychological function of threat according to inoculation theory, focusing less on an apprehensive response in favor of how inoculation treatments cognitively function to motivate resistance. Two measures of threat were contrasted by examining resistance to 9…
Norms, expectations, and deception
Violations of expectations have been advanced as an explanation for how people make veracity judgments, and previous research has found that unexpected weird behavior is rated as less honest than expected normal behavior. The current experiment (N = 128) varied norms and expectations independently to test four alternative models of veracity judgments. The models included a normative expectation model, an expectancy violation sufficient model, a m…
When Machine and Bandwagon Heuristics Compete
Three experiments tested if the machine and bandwagon heuristics moderate beliefs in fact-checked claims under different conditions of human/machine (dis)agreement and of transparency of the fact-checking system. Across experiments, people were more likely to align their belief in the claim when artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing agents’ fact-checks were congruent rather than incongruent. The heuristics provided further nuance to the …
Weak-Tie Support Network Preference and Perceived Life Stress Among Participants in Health-Related, Computer-Mediated Support Groups
The study reported here examines characteristics of weak-tie support network preference among members of health-related computer-mediated support groups. Drawing on weak-tie support network theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, participants' age and health condition were assessed as predictors of weak ties support network preference. Relationships between the dimensions of weak-tie support network preference and perceived stress also were…
Nuances about the Role and Impact of Affect in Inoculation
This study examined the role and impact of affect in resistance. A three-phase experiment was conducted. The results indicated that inoculation treatments conferred resistance and exerted nuanced outcomes involving cognitive and affective responses to counterarguments and affect. The investigation also compared the effectiveness of cognitive, affective-positive, and affective-negative treatments. The results revealed that affective-negative messa…
Scaling up to institutional entrepreneurship
This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the in…
Humor use in power-differentiated interactions
Humor serves a variety of functions in interpersonal communication, including the release of tension and the diffusion of conflict. Based on Dyadic Power Theory (Dunbar 2004; Dunbar and Abra 2010), it is predicted that interactants of equal power will use more humor and different types of humor than those either relatively high or low in power as compared to their partners. The present study analyzed experimentally manipulated problem-solving int…
One-Tailed F -tests in communication research
Recently, communication scholars have published research using a type of significance testing that might be called a “one-tailed F-test.” The use of such tests lead authors to report as statistically significant F-values that would not be considered as statistically significant according to the critical values presented in standard F-tables. This paper documents the recent use of one-tailed F-tests in communication journals, and examines the argu…
Norms, expectations, and deception
Violations of expectations have been advanced as an explanation for how people make veracity judgments, and previous research has found that unexpected weird behavior is rated as less honest than expected normal behavior. The current experiment (N = 128) varied norms and expectations independently to test four alternative models of veracity judgments. The models included a normative expectation model, an expectancy violation sufficient model, a m…
One-Tailed F -tests in communication research
Recently, communication scholars have published research using a type of significance testing that might be called a “one-tailed F-test.” The use of such tests lead authors to report as statistically significant F-values that would not be considered as statistically significant according to the critical values presented in standard F-tables. This paper documents the recent use of one-tailed F-tests in communication journals, and examines the argu…
Tests of a Theory of Communicative Responsibility
Two studies are presented that provide the first empirical tests of a theory of communicative responsibility. The theory posits that individuals in communicative situations make systematic judgments of the extent to which each party is responsible for contributing to the process of creating understanding in a communicative event. These judgments affect the extent to which communicators engage in implicature and inference-making during the communi…
Nuances about the Role and Impact of Affect in Inoculation
This study examined the role and impact of affect in resistance. A three-phase experiment was conducted. The results indicated that inoculation treatments conferred resistance and exerted nuanced outcomes involving cognitive and affective responses to counterarguments and affect. The investigation also compared the effectiveness of cognitive, affective-positive, and affective-negative treatments. The results revealed that affective-negative messa…
Weak-Tie Support Network Preference and Perceived Life Stress Among Participants in Health-Related, Computer-Mediated Support Groups
The study reported here examines characteristics of weak-tie support network preference among members of health-related computer-mediated support groups. Drawing on weak-tie support network theory and socioemotional selectivity theory, participants' age and health condition were assessed as predictors of weak ties support network preference. Relationships between the dimensions of weak-tie support network preference and perceived stress also were…
A Meta-Analysis of Research on Inoculation Theory
A meta-analysis of 54 cases testing the effectiveness of inoculation theory at conferring resistance and examining the mechanisms of the theory was conducted. The analyses revealed inoculation messages to be superior to both supportive messages and no-treatment controls at conferring resistance. Additionally, the results revealed refutational same and refutational different preemptions to be equally effective at reducing attitude change. However,…
A Review of Humor in Educational Settings
The primary goal of this project is to provide a summary of extant research regarding humor in the classroom, with an emphasis on identifying and explaining inconsistencies in research findings and offering new directions for future studies in this area. First, the definitions, functions, and main theories of humor are reviewed. Next, the paper explains types of humorous instructional communication. Third, the empirical findings of both the sourc…
Humor use in power-differentiated interactions
Humor serves a variety of functions in interpersonal communication, including the release of tension and the diffusion of conflict. Based on Dyadic Power Theory (Dunbar 2004; Dunbar and Abra 2010), it is predicted that interactants of equal power will use more humor and different types of humor than those either relatively high or low in power as compared to their partners. The present study analyzed experimentally manipulated problem-solving int…
Inducing Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Propaganda
This investigation examined the boundaries of inoculation theory by examining how inoculation can be applied to conspiracy theory propaganda as well as inoculation itself (called metainoculation). A 3-phase experiment with 312 participants compared 3 main groups: no-treatment control, inoculation, and metainoculation. Research questions explored how inoculation and metainoculation effects differ based on the argument structure of inoculation mess…
Apprehension or motivation to defend attitudes? Exploring the underlying threat mechanism in inoculation-induced resistance to persuasion
This study questions the traditional conceptualization of the threat component of inoculation and compares it to an alternative operationalization that was hypothesized to better capture the psychological function of threat according to inoculation theory, focusing less on an apprehensive response in favor of how inoculation treatments cognitively function to motivate resistance. Two measures of threat were contrasted by examining resistance to 9…
Scaling up to institutional entrepreneurship
This organizational life history documents how the founder of an elite gymnastics training organization led her organizational members to resist what she deemed to be unethical institutional influences prior to working toward changing those institutional practices. The study contributes the idea that institutional resistance leadership at the team and organizational levels can precede disruptive institutional entrepreneurship activities at the in…
Meta-Analysis on Mediated Contact and Prejudice
This paper presents a meta-analysis of 79 cases (N = 21,857) testing the effectiveness of mediated intergroup contact on prejudice. Positive mediated contact decreased (r = −.23; 95% CI, −.29 to −.17), whereas negative mediated contact increased prejudicial attitudes (r = .31; 95% CI, .24 to .38) and intergroup anxiety and empathy were both significant mediators of these relationships. Furthermore, the data revealed no significant differences bet…
Simmering on the Back Burner or Playing with Fire? Examining the Consequences of Back-Burner Digital Communication Among Ex-Partners
Back burners are people with whom one communicates to potentially establish a future romantic or sexual relationship, and these relationships are common among college students. Using a sample of noncollege adults currently in committed relationships (N = 246) obtained via Amazon's MTurk, this study examines how a prior relationship role with a desired back burner (i.e., whether a back burner was an ex-partner or not) affects digital communication…
Evaluating classic and contemporary ideas about persuasion resistance in inoculation theory
Despite more than six decades of research, foundational arguments about mechanisms proposed in inoculation theory to bring about persuasion resistance have gone untested. We conducted an experiment to examine a classic idea about the optimal strength of counterarguments and refutations in inoculation messages as well as a contemporary notion regarding forewarning. The results were inconsistent with the idea that weak counterarguments and strong r…
Freedom-prompting reactance mitigation strategies function differently across levels of trait reactance
This study assessed the relative effects of reactance mitigation strategies specifically designed to prevent or restore threatened autonomy according to message recipients’ levels of reactance proneness. An experiment (N = 230) using a 2 (inoculation mitigation: present vs. absent) × 2 (freedom threatening language: high vs. low) × 2 (restoration postscript mitigation: present vs. absent) between-subjects design was performed in the context of a …
Reducing Psychological Reactance to Health Promotion Messages
This study compared the relative efficacy of two strategies designed to mitigate psychological reactance in health campaigns by using reminders of behavioral autonomy: preemptive scripts, which appear before the appeal, and restoration postscripts, which appear after. Employing a mixed-model experiment with a 2 (threat to freedom: low vs. high) × 3 (reactance-mitigation strategy: control vs. preemptive script vs. restoration postscript) × 2 (heal…
When Machine and Bandwagon Heuristics Compete
Three experiments tested if the machine and bandwagon heuristics moderate beliefs in fact-checked claims under different conditions of human/machine (dis)agreement and of transparency of the fact-checking system. Across experiments, people were more likely to align their belief in the claim when artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing agents’ fact-checks were congruent rather than incongruent. The heuristics provided further nuance to the …
The Social Science of QAnon
QAnon has emerged as the defining conspiracy group of our times, and its far-right conspiracies are extraordinary for their breadth and extremity. Bringing together scholars from psychology, sociology, communications, and political science, this cutting-edge volume uses social science theory to investigate aspects of QAnon. Following an introduction to the 'who, what, and why' of QAnon, Part I focuses on the psychological characteristics of QAnon…
Inoculating Against Anti-Vaccination Conspiracies
This study examined the efficacy of inoculation treatments in preventing anti-vaccination propaganda. Study predictions were tested in an independent-group experiment (N = 165), wherein participants were randomly assigned to a fact-based inoculation or a logic-based inoculation or a control message, with an excerpt from an anti-vaccination conspiracy film, Vaxxed, used as a counterattitudinal attack message. The results indicated that both inocul…
Uncertainty and inoculation
Employing inoculation theory as a theoretical framework, we conducted an independent-groups experiment (N = 150), comparing the effects of an inoculation treatment to a control condition and examining uncertainty as a mediator of inoculation effects. To test inoculation effectiveness, we used an excerpt from an anti-vaccination conspiracy film Vaxxed as a counterattitudinal attack message. The results indicated that inoculation roused motivationa…
Psychology (18 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Biology (9 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (8 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Immunology (5 works) · Inoculation (5 works)