Page 51 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

44 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

(for reviews, see Petty, Wheeler, & Bizer, 2000; Briñol & Petty, 2006;
Rucker, 2012; Salovey & Wegener, 2003). As an illustrative case, we re-
view several examples of how information about a recipient factor might
interact with the type of message factors a marketer should vary to affect
persuasion through a variety of roles.

Self-Monitoring and Matching

Self-monitoring is an individual difference measure (Snyder, 1974) that
refers to whether individuals change their behavior to fit with the demands
of different situations or focus on their internal values and feelings to guide
their behavior across situations. In an early demonstration of matching ef-
fects, Snyder and DeBono (1985) examined how individuals who were
low versus high in self-monitoring responded to appeals focused on the
social image conveyed by the product as opposed to appeals that stressed
the intrinsic quality or merit of the product. Snyder and DeBono reasoned
that because high self-monitors are social chameleons who adapt to the
situation and the desires of others, they would be more persuaded by ar-
guments that signaled the social image function that an object offered to
them. In contrast, because low self-monitors are more focused on their
own values, the authors reasoned they would be more persuaded by argu-
ments that stressed the inherent merits of the product. Indeed, the authors
found evidence consistent with this perspective. Why does matching the
message to an individual’s self-monitoring affect persuasion? As with other
variables, we propose that the matching may affect persuasion through a
variety of processes.
When elaboration is low, a match of message content to a person’s level
of self-monitoring is more likely to influence attitudes by serving as a sim-
ple cue (DeBono, 1987). That is, whereas early work is consistent with low
and high self-monitors evaluating different arguments (social image versus
quality) as more compelling, even when the content of the message is not
processed carefully, if a source simply asserted that the arguments were
consistent with a person’s values, a low self-monitor might be more in-
clined to agree than a high self-monitor by reasoning, “If it links to my
values, it must be good.”
In accord with the ELM, if elaboration is not constrained to be high or
low, matching messages to individual differences in self-monitoring can
increase message processing (Petty & Wegener, 1998b). This means that
when the arguments are strong, matching should lead to more persuasion
(as found by Snyder & DeBono, 1985), but when the arguments are weak,
matching leads to less persuasion (the opposite effect). In one study, Petty