Page 49 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

42 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

mood validated participants’ thoughts such that they were more confident
in their thoughts after they had recalled a time they felt happy as opposed
to after recalling a time they felt sad. As a result of this “thought valida-
tion,” participants were more (or less) persuaded when their favorable (or
unfavorable) thoughts had been validated.
Finally, under high elaboration conditions, variables can lead individu-
als to respond to potential bias in their thinking and attempt to correct for
such bias. Specifically, because people are motivated to hold correct atti-
tudes (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), under careful scrutiny they might detect
factors that they believe are biasing their judgments and make an effort to
correct for them. For example, as mentioned earlier, Schwarz and Clore
(1983) found that incidental effects of the weather (e.g., mood) on judg-
ments were attenuated when participants were first asked about the
weather. Presumably being asked about the weather made the idea that the
current weather might bias their evaluation salient, which led them to cor-
rect for it. In the domain of persuasion, Petty, Wegener, and White (1998)
showed that people were more persuaded by a source they liked (e.g., an
individual from a rival university who praised the participants’ own uni-
versity) than a source they disliked (e.g., an individual from a rival univer-
sity who chastised the participants’ own university). However, under high
elaboration conditions, when participants were instructed to avoid bias,
they corrected for their dislike of the source. In fact, they appeared to over-
correct such that they become more favorable to the dislikable source. Of
course, people must be motivated and aware of a bias in order to correct
for it (for discussion, see Wegener & Petty, 1994; Petty et al., 1998).

Summary of Multiple Roles

To reinforce the idea that elaboration affects how the same variable
might influence persuasion, consider the variety of examples previously
used with respect to recipient mood. On first blush, it might seem logical
that positive mood would foster greater persuasion than negative mood.
Indeed, as we noted, the first research based on simple associative pro-
cesses was consistent with this perspective (Razran, 1940; Gorn, 1982;
Zanna, Kiesler & Pilkonis, 1970). However, the now-large empirical litera-
ture suggests the relationship between mood and persuasion is highly de-
pendent on elaboration.
When thinking is constrained to be low (e.g., due to many distractions),
then emotions tend to serve as simple associative cues and produce evalu-
ations consistent with their valence (Petty et al., 1993). Under low-level
thinking conditions, positive emotions produce more agreement than