Page 48 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Psychological Foundations of Social Marketing 41

under high elaboration conditions (e.g., when a product was viewed as
relevant to individuals and thus meriting their attention). The authors
found that positive moods also led to more favorable attitudes than nega-
tive moods when the level of thinking was high. However, unlike low
elaboration conditions, where mood did not affect participants’ thoughts,
Petty and colleagues found that under high elaboration conditions, posi-
tive mood led to greater persuasion by biasing the thoughts participants
generated about the product, making them more favorable when partici-
pants’ moods were positive rather than negative.
Third, in addition to serving as an argument and affecting the direction
of the thoughts generated, variables can also have an impact on the struc-
tural features of an individual’s thoughts under conditions involving a high
level of thinking. Although there are a number of dimensions of thoughts
that might be affected, one being accessibility, most research has focused
on a meta-cognitive factor—the confidence people have in their thoughts
(for a review, see Petty, Briñol, Tormala & Wegener, 2007; Briñol & Petty,
2009b). Confidence in thoughts is important because as thoughts are held
with greater confidence, people are more likely to use those thoughts in
forming their judgments (Petty et al., 2002). In contrast, when people
doubt the validity of their thoughts, their thoughts are less likely to have
an impact on judgments. This may be one reason why some advertising
campaigns are unsuccessful; although such campaigns might produce the
appropriate favorable thoughts, these thoughts are not held with sufficient
confidence to affect attitudes.
There are many factors of the source, message, and recipient that can
influence persuasion by affecting thought confidence. For example,
Tormala, Briñol, & Petty (2006) found that learning a message came from
an expert source after processing it led people to have greater confidence
in their thoughts than learning a message came from a non-expert source.
Because participants were more confident in their thoughts when the
source was an expert, people were more likely to use those thoughts in
forming their attitudes. Recipient mood has also been shown to affect the
confidence people place in their thoughts. Specifically, Briñol, Petty, and
Barden (2007) exposed participants to a message containing either weak
or strong arguments and encouraged them to process the message care-
fully. This fostered relatively high elaboration conditions where partici-
pants generated either favorable thoughts (in response to the strong
message) or unfavorable thoughts (in response to the weak message).
Subsequently, Briñol and colleagues manipulated participants’ moods by
asking them to recall a time they were happy or sad. Finally, they assessed
participants’ attitudes toward the message. Results showed that positive