Page 46 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Psychological Foundations of Social Marketing 39

of the message compared to when the vivid aspects were incongruent with
the theme of the message.
Finally, recipient factors also affect individuals’ motivation to process a
message. One important individual difference measure linked to elabora-
tion is “need for cognition” (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty &
Kao, 1984). Need for cognition reflects individual differences in the extent
to which people enjoy and engage in thinking. When situational factors do
not encourage or prevent people from processing a message, individuals’
high in need for cognition are more likely to elaborate on a message than
those low in need for cognition. For example, Haugtvedt, Petty, and
Cacioppo (1992) found that individuals high in need for cognition were
more influenced by the quality of the arguments in an advertisement than
those low in need for cognition, but those low in need for cognition were
more influenced by the attractiveness of the endorsers pictured in the
ad than were those high in need for cognition. In addition to chronic
individual differences, situational factors can also affect the degree of
elaboration people engage in. For example, Worth and Mackie (1987) ex-
amined the role of mood in people’s processing of a message. They found
that, compared to participants in a neutral mood, participants in a happy
mood scrutinized subsequent information less carefully. In general, sad
individuals tend to process information less carefully than happy individ-
uals, but an exception occurs if people in a happy state believe that the
message to be processed will maintain their happiness. If this is the case,
then they can process as much or more than those in a sad state (Wegener,
Petty & Smith, 1995).

Effects of Variables under High Elaboration Conditions

As we have reviewed, under low elaboration conditions, variables affect
persuasion via a simple associative or cue-based process, and under mod-
erate elaboration conditions, variables affect persuasion by influencing the
amount of message processing. In contrast, when elaboration is con-
strained to be high, these same variables can affect persuasion through
several different processes. Specifically, under high elaboration conditions,
variables have been shown to affect persuasion by serving as arguments,
biasing an individual’s processing, validating an individual’s thoughts, or
being involved in a correction for bias.
First, under high elaboration conditions, variables can serve as argu-
ments. Here, the same variable (e.g., source expertise, the individual’s
mood) that served as a simple cue when the level of thinking was low, or
affected the extent of processing when thinking was not constrained, is