The elaboration likelihood model - persuasion psych notes PDF

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The elaboration likelihood model in Week 1's persuasion section of notes ...

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The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1980. The central route involves a high level of message elaboration in which a great amount of cognition about the arguments are generated by the individual receiving the message. The results of attitude change will be relatively enduring, resistant, and predictive of behavior.

On the other hand, under the peripheral route, persuasion results from a person's association with positive or negative cues in the stimulus or making a simple inference about the merits of the advocated position. The cues received by the individual under the peripheral route are generally unrelated to the logical quality of the stimulus. These cues will involve factors such as the credibility or attractiveness of the sources of the message, or the production quality of the message.

The likelihood of elaboration will be determined by an individual's motivation and ability to evaluate the argument being presented. Considerable research was devoted to the study of attitudes and persuasion from the 1930s through the late 1970s. These studies embarked on various relevant issues regarding attitudes and persuasion, such as the consistency between attitudes and behaviors and the processes underlying attitude/behavior correspondence.

However, Petty and Cacioppo noticed a major problem facing attitude and persuasion researchers to the effect that there was minimal agreement regarding "if, when, and how the traditional source, message, recipient, and channel variables affected attitude change". Noticing this problem, Petty and Cacioppo developed the elaboration likelihood model as their attempt to account for the differential persistence of communication-induced attitude change. Petty and Cacioppo suggested that different empirical findings and theories on attitude persistence could be viewed as stressing one of two routes to persuasion which they presented in their elaboration likelihood model.

The ELM posits that when a persuader presents information to an audience, a level of “elaboration” results. Elaboration refers to the amount of effort an audience member has to use in order to process and evaluate a message, remember it, and then accept or reject it. Specifically, the ELM has determined that when facing a message, people react by using either of two channels (but sometimes a combination of both, too), reflecting the level of effort they need. As such, they either experience high or low elaboration, and whichever of these will determine whether they use central or peripheral route processing.

ROUTES The elaboration likelihood model proposes two distinct routes for information processing: a central route and a peripheral route

THE WAY PERSUASION IS HARD-WIRED: UNDERSTANDING ELM

Developed in the mid-1970s by the cofounder of the field of social neuroscience, John Cacioppo, and Richard Petty, a distinguished psychology professor at Chicago University, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) seeks to explain how humans process stimuli differently and the outcomes of these processes on changing attitudes, and, consequently, behavior.

The ELM posits that when a persuader presents information to an audience, a level of “elaboration” results. Elaboration refers to the amount of effort an audience member has to use in order to process and evaluate a message, remember it, and then accept or reject it. Specifically, the ELM

has determined that when facing a message, people react by using either of two channels (but sometimes a combination of both, too), reflecting the level of effort they need. As such, they either experience high or low elaboration, and whichever of these will determine whether they use central or peripheral route processing.

Central route processing involves a high level of elaboration. Here, the audience (or user) scrutinizes the message’s contents (rather than reads casually) because of a high motivation level. Users know what’s important to them; consequently, they will invest in examining a credible design’s message.

So, if users are persuaded via central route processing, they will have focused on the message’s strengths. Because they’ll be reckoning so much on what the message is telling them, a decision to agree with it will be because of the users’ “work” (i.e., thought). They’ll also be more likely to focus and ignore distractions (such as pop-ups) as they seek their goals.

That is, they will resist the message and may move away from the proposed position. Two advantages of the central route are that attitude changes tend to last longer and are more predictive of behavior than the changes from the peripheral route. Overall, as people’s motivation and ability to process the message and develop elaborations decreases, the peripheral cues present in the situation become more important in their processing of the message.

Peripheral route processing involves a low level of elaboration. The user isn’t scrutinizing the message for its effectiveness. As such, other factors can influence him/her, including distractions. These

include such users as those who know that they want an item, but do not know much about the detail of that item. For example, someone wanting “a new laptop that’s good but cheap” is more likely to process by the peripheral route than one who is knowledgeable about the specific features of laptops.

Credibility is a low-effort and somewhat reliable way to give us an answer of what to decide and/or believe without having to put in much work to think it through. Peripheral route processing involves a low level of elaboration. The user isn’t scrutinizing the message for its effectiveness. If these peripheral influences go completely unnoticed, the message recipient is likely to maintain their previous attitude towards the message. Otherwise, the individual will temporarily change his attitude towards it. This attitude change can be long-lasting, although durable change is less likely to occur than it is with the central route.

DETERMINANTS OF ROUTE

The two most influential factors that affect which processing route an individual uses are motivation and ability . The extent of motivation is in turn affected by attitude and personal relevance. Individuals' ability for elaboration is affected by distractions, their cognitive business, and their overall knowledge.

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Motivation

Attitudes towards a message can affect motivation. Drawing from cognitive dissonance theory, when people are presented with new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values, they will be motivated to eliminate the dissonance, in order to remain at peace with their own thoughts.

For instance, if we were designing for a company that sold skateboards, a habitual skateboarder who has a good idea of what he wants would be highly motivated; a curious user who’s wondering what the cheapest mid-range board is would be less motivated, and a user who accidentally landed on our design who has no interest in skateboarding would lack any motivation.

Personal relevance can also affect an individual's degree of motivation. For instance, undergraduate students were told of a new exam policy that would take effect either one or ten years later. The proposal of the new exam policy was either supported by strong or weak arguments. Those students who were going to personally be affected by this change would think more about the issue than those students who were not going to be personally affected. Factors related to ability to think includes: time pressure, message repetition, distraction, knowledge, fatigue, social pressure, etc.

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Core ideas

There are four core ideas to the ELM. This means that when the central route is taken, the attitudes formed become more stable and less susceptible to counter-persuasion, whereas when the peripheral route is taken short-term attitude change is more likely to occur.

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Variables

A variable is essentially anything that can increase or decrease the persuasiveness of a message. Motivation, ability, attractiveness, mood and expertise are just a few examples of variables that can influence persuasiveness.

Variables also have different roles, for example, they may have a positive effect as a cue, but a negative effect if it ends up decreasing thought about a strong message. Under high elaboration, a given variable can serve as an argument or a biasing factor, at the expense of contradicting information. Under low-elaboration conditions, a variable may act as a peripheral cue . While this is similar to the Einstein example above, this is a shortcut which does not require thought. Under moderate elaboration, a variable may direct the extent of information processing he has to say").

If the message succeeds in persuading people (such as an effective web page that engages and informs), these users will follow through with a call to action. Their behavior will be more enduring and less likely to be changed. However, they may change again if they process another convincing argument.

This group of users looks more to the appealing secondary factors of a design. Because they’re not looking for the message’s details, their eyes drift about, taking in other factors. If you have “bells and whistles”, such as enticing, pleasing imagery, you’ll appeal to them. For instance, as powerful as the message might be, if you’ve included an image of a celebrity giving an endorsement, the latter is what will catch this user’s eye more. Also, imagery such as food, sex, free items and humor are likely to have

these users forming attitudes above whatever they might make of the main message’s fine details. However, these are weaker than those positive notions that central route processing forms...