Page 56 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Psychological Foundations of Social Marketing 49

Tormala, Petty & Briñol, 2014), are easily accessible (Fazio, 1995), or are
important to a person (Eaton & Visser, 2008). Of relevance to the discus-
sion of elaboration, attitudes formed under high elaboration conditions
tend to be stronger than attitudes formed under low elaboration condi-
tions (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Petty, Haugtvedt & Smith, 1995). For ex-
ample, with regard to attitude persistence, Haugtvedt and Petty (1992)
developed a paradigm where individuals who were high and low in need
for cognition formed similarly valenced and extreme attitudes. Haugtvedt
and Petty then measured participants’ attitudes two days later. As stated
earlier, individuals high in need for cognition are more likely to engage in
greater elaboration when forming their attitudes (Petty & Cacioppo,
1984a). Although individuals with high and low need for cognition had
equally favorable attitudes initially, after two days, only the new attitudes
of individuals with a high need for cognition persisted. Those who were
low in need for cognition showed a marked decrease in favorability after
this period of time.
Attitudes formed under high elaboration conditions have also been
shown to be more resistant to subsequent efforts to change them. For ex-
ample, Haugtvedt and Wegener (1994) developed a paradigm that exam-
ined how resilient participants’ initial attitudes were to a subsequent
attack. Specifically, participants were first given a message either in sup-
port of or in opposition to a topic. The elaboration of this message was
manipulated by how personally relevant the message was to participants.
This encouraged participants to form an initial attitude on the topic that
was based on high or low amounts of thought. Subsequently, all partici-
pants received a second message that presented the opposition’s position
on the topic. Haugtvedt and Wegener found that participants changed less
in the direction of the second message when they had processed the first
message under high, as opposed to low, relevance conditions. Put differ-
ently, if participants formed their attitudes toward the first message under
high elaboration conditions (i.e., high relevance), those attitudes became
more difficult to change.
Finally, research has shown that attitudes formed under high elabora-
tion conditions are more predictive of behavior than attitudes formed un-
der low elaboration conditions. As one example, Petty, Cacioppo, and
Schumann (1983) gave participants a message for a consumer product.
Elaboration was manipulated by making the product of either low or high
relevance to participants. Petty and colleagues found that participants’ at-
titudes were more predictive of their behavioral intentions (e.g., intention
to buy) when the attitude had been formed under high as opposed to low
elaboration conditions.