Page 55 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

48 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

In the work by Dubois and colleagues (2013), the authors explicitly
encouraged people to process and think about the information condition
(i.e., high elaboration conditions). However, consistent with the multiple
roles hypothesis, different outcomes are likely to occur at different levels
of elaboration. For example, under moderate elaboration conditions,
matching might affect the amount of information processing, which could
increase or decrease persuasion based on whether subsequent arguments
are strong or weak.

Matching Effects: Summary

For social marketers, the notion of message matching, alignment, or
tailoring is a powerful tool. This suggests that after the source, message,
and recipient factors have been identified, one should consider whether
they are in alignment and the consequences of alignment or misalignment
for persuasion. This section has emphasized the possibility of matching
messages and recipients, but social marketers can work with many other
kinds of matches, such as matches between the source and the recipient,
the recipient and the context, the inductions and the measures, and so
forth (Petty & Briñol, 2014). Furthermore, based on the ELM, matching
effects need not always have a positive effect on persuasion. Rather, the
result of message alignment is likely to hinge on factors such as the elabo-
ration level and the quality of the arguments.

Attitude Strength: Persistence, Resistance, and Influence

As indicated earlier, the importance of attitudes, and therefore the topic
of persuasion, stems in part from the fact that attitudes can ultimately in-
fluence behavior. However, a large body of literature now recognizes that
not all attitudes are equally likely to predict behavior to the same
degree. In particular, attitude scholars have introduced the idea of
“attitude strength” to recognize that attitudes differ with respect to the
extent to which they are persistent across time, resistant to change,
and likely to predict and influence behavior (Petty & Krosnick, 1995).
Given that a core goal of persuasion research is to create attitudes that
are likely to guide behavior over time, persuaders often should be focused
not only on changing attitudes, but on creating changed attitudes that
are strong.
There are many determinants of an attitude’s strength (see Petty &
Krosnick, 1995, for a review). For example, attitudes tend to be stronger
when they are held with certainty (Tormala & Rucker, 2007; Rucker,