Page 47 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

40 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

itself scrutinized as to whether or not it is a meaningful and logical argu-
ment or reason for changing an attitude or adopting the advocated posi-
tion. For example, whereas an attractive source might increase persuasion
under low elaboration purely because people have a positive association
with attractive individuals (Snyder & Rothbart, 1971), under high elabo-
ration conditions, people scrutinize whether the attractiveness of the
source is relevant to the advocacy. An attractive source will exert little im-
pact when people view the attractiveness as irrelevant to the merits of the
advocacy. However, when the attractiveness is relevant—for example, if
the source is advertising a beauty product that should make the user look
attractive—then a physically attractive source could be more persuasive
than an unattractive source by serving as a cogent argument (Petty &
Cacioppo, 1984a). Similarly, the content of the message in terms of the
arguments presented plays an important role under high elaboration con-
ditions. With high elaboration it is not as important whether there are
numerically many or few arguments, but whether the arguments presented
are strong or weak (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984b). As discussed earlier, when
the arguments presented are strong, people will be more persuaded than
when the arguments are weak. Finally, with respect to recipient mood,
Martin, Abend, Sedikides, and Green (1997) examined how participants
evaluated a story designed to make them happy or sad. Because a core goal
of the story was the mood it was supposed to induce, participants’ mood
could be viewed as a relevant argument. Thus, if a story was designed to
make people sad, actually feeling sad would be a strong argument in favor
of the merits of the story, but feeling happy would make the story seem
worse.
Second, under high elaboration conditions, variables can also direct or
bias individuals’ thinking. In particular, when arguments are not clearly
strong or weak (i.e., ambiguity exists), variables can bias or cloud how
individuals assess the arguments. For example, Chaiken and Maheswaran
(1994) found that when arguments were ambiguous, individuals tended
to generate more favorable thoughts, and thus form more positive atti-
tudes, when those arguments were associated with an expert versus a non-
expert source. This effect can be understood by the notion that the expert’s
credibility affected the thoughts participants focused on and generated in
response to the message. When thinking levels are high, people interpret
the ambiguous arguments in such a way as to make the arguments seem
more compelling. Similarly, in the domain of recipient variables, mood has
been shown to bias processing. In the research described earlier by Petty
and colleagues (1993), in addition to examining the effects of mood under
low elaboration conditions, the authors examined the effects of mood