Page 42 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Psychological Foundations of Social Marketing 35

1991; Petty & Cacioppo, 1979), when they are personally responsible for
outcomes related to the information (Petty, Harkins & Williams, 1980), or
when the person naturally enjoys thinking (Cacioppo, Petty & Morris,
1983). However, in addition to being motivated to process information, an
individual must have the ability to do so. A variety of factors can affect an
individual’s ability to process a message, including the person’s level of
knowledge (Wood & Lynch, 2002), whether the person is distracted (Petty,
Wells & Brock, 1976), and whether the person has multiple opportunities
to read the message via repetition (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979).
Importantly, although there are two routes to persuasion, this does not
mean that a message recipient is forced into processing information via
only one route. Rather, as the degree of elaboration increases, an individu-
al’s response to a persuasive message is more likely to depend on central
route processes and less likely to depend on peripheral route processes.
For example, an individual paying attention to the substantive merits of a
message is more likely to consider the relevance of the source’s physical
attractiveness, but this does not mean that attractiveness will not also exert
some minor influence as a simple peripheral cue or work by other means
(e.g., biasing thinking). Thus, the central and peripheral routes should be
thought of as anchors at either end of the elaboration continuum, but an
individual can fall along any point of that continuum.

Multiple Roles for Variables

One of the most powerful insights from the ELM is that it proposes that
variables can play “multiple roles” in the persuasion process and that the
process by which a variable affects persuasion depends on the level of mes-
sage elaboration. That is, depending on whether an individual’s elaboration of
a message is relatively low, moderate, or high, the same variable (e.g., source
credibility, emotion) can exert an influence on persuasion through a different
process. As will be explained, the fact that the same variable can affect persua-
sion through distinct processes means that the same variable can have posi-
tive or negative effects on persuasion depending on the process.
Understanding the multiple mechanisms by which variables impact at-
titudes is critical for a number of reasons. First, understanding the process
by which variables can produce influence is important because if any one
variable can affect influence via different processes, then different out-
comes for the same variable are possible. For example, when thinking is
constrained to be low, a happy state of the consumer might lead to more
attitude change than a sad state because emotion serves as a simple posi-
tive cue (i.e., if I feel good, I must like it), but when thinking is