Page 44 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Psychological Foundations of Social Marketing 37

to think), irrespective of the actual merits of the arguments presented, in-
dividuals are likely to be more persuaded by credible sources compared to
noncredible sources (Petty, Cacioppo & Goldman, 1981). This can be un-
derstood as resulting from the use of a simple heuristic or association such
as “If an expert and trustworthy source supports this position, it must be
good.” Similarly, message factors, such as the total number of arguments
contained in a message, have been shown to serve as input to a numerosity
heuristic when the level of thinking is low, but not when it is high (Petty
& Cacioppo, 1984a). When not thinking much, people might rely on the
following heuristic: “If there are so many (few) reasons in favor of this
proposal, it must be good (bad)!”
Recipient factors can also be used as simple heuristics. For example, the
mood of the recipient can be used as a simple cue. In one study, Schwarz
and Clore (1983) showed that participants reported being more satisfied
with their lives on sunny days than on rainy days, which the authors rea-
soned was a result of participants misattributing their good mood from the
weather to their life satisfaction. In the persuasion domain, Petty,
Schumann, Richman, and Strathman (1993) found that when elaboration
was low because the message object was irrelevant to the participants,
people liked the object more when they were in a positive mood than
when they were in a negative mood. Furthermore, Petty and colleagues
(1993) found that participants’ actual thoughts toward the product did
not differ, suggesting this outcome occurred because of a thoughtless and
heuristic process.
Cutting across source, message, and recipient factors, under low-elabo-
ration conditions, persuasion is typically the result of a simple inference or
association process. Individuals can look to the source, message, or them-
selves for simple cues to help them make a decision, irrespective of mes-
sage content, or these simple cues can sometimes become automatically
associated with the attitude object.

Effects of Variables Under Moderate (Unconstrained) Elaboration Conditions

When individuals’ elaboration level is moderate (i.e., not constrained to
be very high or low by other factors), variables can affect the amount of
thinking in which people engage. For example, variables might serve as
critical triggers that lead people to either increase or decrease their motiva-
tion or ability to process a persuasive message. As a consequence, a source,
message, or recipient factor might lead people to rely more versus less on
either peripheral cues or their reactions to the substantive message argu-
ments. A common means to study whether a variable affects the amount of