Page 167 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

156 PETTY, PRIESTER, BRIÑOL

environmental, and educational organizations and institutions. To what
extent are media persuasion attempts effective?
The success of media campaigns depends in part on: (a) whether the
transmitted communications are effective in changing the attitudes of the
recipients in the desired direction, and (b) whether these modified atti-
tudes in turn influence people’s behaviors. Our goal in this chapter is to
present a brief overview of current psychological approaches to mass
media influence and to outline in more detail a general framework that
can be used to understand the processes responsible for mass media atti-
tude change. This framework is called the elaboration likelihood model of
persuasion (ELM; see Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986b; Petty & Wegener,
1999). Before addressing the contemporary approaches, we provide a very
brief historical overview of perspectives on mass media influence.

EARLY EXPLORATIONS OF MASS MEDIA PERSUASION

Direct Effects Model

The initial assumption about the effects of the mass media by social scien-
tists in the 1920s and 1930s was that mass communication techniques
were quite potent. For example, in an analysis of mass communication
during World War I, Lasswell (1927) concluded that “propaganda is one
of the most powerful instrumentalities in the modern world” (p. 220).
During this period, there were several salient examples of seemingly
effective mass communication effects. These included the panic following
the 1929 stock market crash; the well-publicized mass hysteria following
the radio broadcast of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1938; and the rise
in popularity of individuals such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, and the
right wing Catholic priest, Father Coughlin, and Louisiana Senator Huey
Long in the United States. The assumption of Lasswell and others was
that transmission of information via mass communication produced
direct effects on attitudes and behavior (e.g., Doob, 1935; Lippmann,
1922). In detailing the views about mass communication during this
period, Sears and colleagues noted that it was assumed that “the audience
was captive, attentive, and gullible . . . the citizenry sat glued to the radio,
helpless victims” (Sears & Kosterman, 1994, p. 254), and that “propa-
ganda could be made almost irresistible” (Sears & Whitney, 1973, p. 2).
Many analysts of the period based their startling assessments of the
power of the media on informal and anecdotal evidence rather than on
careful empirical research. For example, few attempts were made to mea-
sure the attitudes of message recipients prior to and following propa-
ganda efforts. Thus, although it could be that the great propagandists of