Page 181 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

170 PETTY, PRIESTER, BRIÑOL

processing, what should happen is the following: Over time the impact of
the peripheral discounting cue should fade, and people’s attitudes should
be governed by their initial (and more memorable) favorable thoughts to
the strong arguments (see Priester, Wegener, Petty, & Fabrigar, 1999).

Persuasion Processes in the Elaboration Likelihood Model

Variables Affecting the Amount of Thinking. Our discussion of the
central and peripheral routes to persuasion has highlighted two basic
processes of attitude change, but the depiction of the ELM in Fig. 7.2 out-
lines more-specific roles that variables can play in persuasion situations.
First, some variables affect a person’s general motivation to think about a
message. Mendelsohn (1973) noted that placing potential media recipi-
ents “along a continuum ranging from those whose initial interest in a
given subject area may be high to those who literally have no interest in
what may be communicated becomes an essential step in developing
effective public information campaigns” (p. 51). Several variables enhance
interest in media messages. Perhaps the most important determinant of
interest and motivation to process the message is the perceived personal
relevance of the communication. In one study (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979b),
for example, undergraduates were told that their own university (high
personal relevance) or a distant university (low personal relevance) was
considering implementing a policy requiring all seniors to pass an exam
in their major as a prerequisite to graduation. The students then listened
to a radio editorial that presented either strong or weak arguments in
favor of the exam policy. As predicted by the ELM, when the speaker
advocated that the exams should be instituted at the students’ own cam-
pus, the quality of the arguments in the message had a greater impact on
attitudes than when the speaker advocated that the exams should be insti-
tuted at a distant institution. That is, as the personal relevance of the mes-
sage increased, strong arguments were more persuasive, but weak argu-
ments were less persuasive than in the low-relevance conditions (see left
panel of Fig. 7.3). In addition, an analysis of the thoughts that the students
listed after the message suggested that the more extreme attitudes were
accompanied by more extreme thoughts. When the arguments were
strong, students exposed to the high-relevance message produced more
than twice as many favorable thoughts as low-relevance students, and
when the arguments were weak, high-relevance students generated
almost twice as many unfavorable thoughts as students exposed to the
low-relevance version.
In an interesting extension of this work, Burnkrant and Unnava (1989)
have found that simply changing the pronouns in a message from the
third person (e.g., one or he and she) to the second person (i.e., you) was