فهرست مطالب vida dehnad

Persuasion, in general, is a process in which an agent by presenting a message or using some goal-oriented cognitive processes and strategies tries to change the behaviors or attitudes of others on a specific issue. The current article, with a qualitative approach, made the clarification of these cognitive processes the basis of its study. For this purpose, first, a brief background of the oldest theory of persuasion from Aristotle's point of view as well as Max Weber's classifications of social actions in modern social sciences was presented. Then, to describe the mechanisms of persuasion, four well-known models were presented with a brief explanation of their similarities and differences. These four models are respectively Cialdini's constructivist model, elaboration likelihood and heuristic systematic model which are of dual-process type, and finally the holistic persuasion knowledge model. In addition, a description of persuasive discourse devices such as textual schemas and genres along with the specific socio-cognitive goals they pursue in discourse communities was provided. In the end, the lack of local models of persuasion compatible with the emotional and cognitive components of the cultural groups of Iranian society and the necessity of field research, in this case, was pointed out to future researchers.

Self-determination, as an important concept derived from the humanistic approach, plays an important role in psychological well-being. That what internal or external factors or motivations reinforce or inhibit self-determination is an aspect favored by psychologists in different fields. The present study, giving importance to self-determination as a meta-theory, adopts an analytical approach to first examine the theories derived from it, such as the theory of basic needs, cognitive evaluation, organismic integration, and causal orientation, and then explains its external examples such as the emergence of obedient, projective and independence-oriented personality type through looking at deterrent or controlling social factors. On the other hand, considering the qualitative welfare level of goals and motivations, related to self-determination, the study takes into account the two main tendencies of goal setting in individuals, namely the orientation to mastery and to performance, and the degree of their congruence with the features of self-determination. In this analogy, the orientation to mastery in individuals calls more for self-determination than the orientation to performance because mastery helps in developing individual ability, strengthening internal and autonomous motivations, and developing a healthy relationship in a social context. Finally, the practical-consultative capacity of self-determination theory in discovering the external controlling factors that cause psychological stress in the individual has been pointed out.

In line with new findings in the interdisciplinary fields of philosophy and psychology of emotions and cognition, the use of emotional scales in assessing readers’ reactions to the texts containing moral dilemmas has attracted the attention of researchers. Likewise, this study, using the Delphi technique and the opinions of experts tried to predict the emotional-cognitive reactions of two groups of deontic and consequentialist readers to the texts containing moral dilemmas. For this purpose, a mixed-methods research was chosen and a three-phase Delphi technique was used for collecting the data, i.e., experts’ opinions. The expert group consisted of nine university English teachers and psychologists fluent in English. First, the experts were provided with six strategic questions to be able to comment. After coding and converting the qualitative data into quantitative data and preparing a concept map, first, the percentage of the pairwise agreement between the raters was calculated, and then, the formulas of Krippendorff’s alpha and Fleiss Kappa were used to determine the reliability of the 72 pairs of decisions. Accordingly, the acceptable values ​​of 0.76, 0.72, and 0.71 were obtained for the mentioned formulas. Based on the results of the two stages of the Delphi technique, a 9-point Likert scale questionnaire was developed and re-assessed by the experts. After rating the questionnaire items by the experts, the intra-class correlation coefficient with the two-way random effect model was used. A significant value of 0.872 was obtained from this calculation, which confirmed the congruence of experts’ opinions about the probable behaviors of the two groups of readers in reaction to the texts containing ethical dilemmas. This should be noted that the collection of experts’ opinions and the evaluation of the reliability of the opinions, in three consecutive rounds, took about four months.