What makes the central route to persuasion distinct from the peripheral route quizlet?

Message characteristics: Aspects, or content, of a persuasive message, including the quality of the evidence and the explicitness of its conclusions.

Message quality- more persuasive especially for people high in motivation and ability. They are high quality when they appeal to the core values of the audience.
More attitude change will result if the conclusions are explicit in the message, refute the opposition, and argue against their own self-interest.
Higher when: appeal to core values, straight foreward, clear and logical, explain the desirable consequences of taking action.

Vividness- information that is colorful, interesting, and memorable is more effective. Personal and emotional narratives. Vivid but misleading info. Can often trump more valid and relevant information that's not as flashy.
Identifiable victim effect: The tendency to be more moved by the vivid plight of a single individual than by a more abstract number of people. Elicit feelings of empathy.
• Limitations: blame a victim breeding negative perceptions decreasing rather than increasing aid

Fear- fear, especially when paired with instructions on how to respond to the fear, is likely to lead to attitude change.

Culture- Persuasive messages are generally targeted to collective concerns in interdependent cultures and individual concerns in independent cultures. Messages may vary at different times within the same society or culture.

Participants were asked to take part in a study on consumer attitudes. They were told that, as a reward for participating, they would be able to choose a product from among a few different brands at the end of the study. Some participants were told that they could choose from among different brands of razor blades; others were told that they could choose from among brands of toothpaste. Later, when all participants were asked to flip through some ads, they came upon an ad for Edge razor blades. You can imagine that this ad was relevant for participants expecting to choose a brand of razor blades but not for those expecting to choose a toothpaste brand.

The researchers introduced two other variables. First, half the participants read strong arguments for the Edge razor's quality, such as "Special chemically formulated coating eliminates nicks and cuts and prevents rusting." The other half read weak arguments, such as "Designed with the bathroom in mind." Second, one version of the ad featured an attractive celebrity endorsing the Edge razor, whereas the other version featured anonymous, average-looking people endorsing it.

What influenced participants' attitudes toward the Edge razor? When participants expected to choose a razor later on—that is, when the Edge ad was relevant to their decision—the most influential factor was the strength of the ad's arguments for the Edge brand's quality. If the arguments were weak, participants disliked the Edge razor; if the arguments were strong, they liked it. But a very different picture emerged among the participants who did not expect to choose a razor—that is, those to whom the ad was not relevant. They were not influenced by whether the ad's arguments were strong or weak. Instead, their attitudes were influenced by the spokesperson: They liked the Edge brand if it was endorsed by an attractive celebrity spokesperson, but not when it was endorsed by the Average Joe. Note, though, that among people who were motivated to think carefully about the message, the attractiveness of the spokesperson did not influence attitudes: People taking the central route to persuasion are not impressed by those kinds of peripheral cues.

This was shown in a study by John T. Cacioppo and his colleagues (1983). The researchers measured college students' need for cognition, then asked them to read an editorial, allegedly written by a journalism student, arguing that all seniors be required to pass a rigorous, comprehensive exam to graduate. Thus, in this experiment, the message is relevant to all the participants. But for half the participants, the editorial contained fairly strong arguments in favor of the exam ("The quality of undergraduate teaching has improved at schools with the exams"), whereas the other participants read fairly unconvincing arguments for the exam ("The risk of failing the exam is a challenge more students would welcome"). Overall, as you might expect, participants were more favorable toward the exam requirement when it was supported by strong rather than weak arguments. But participants with high need for cognition were especially likely to approve of the proposal when it was supported by strong arguments and to disapprove of the proposal when it was supported by weak arguments (see FIGURE 8.10). So even though the message was equally relevant to all participants, some of them were inherently motivated to pay close attention to the arguments, whereas others were content merely to skim the message.

The students rated a few sample recordings and were told that they would receive one of the records as a gift. (Yes, if the study were done today it would likely be an iTunes download.) In one condition, participants were told that they would get to choose whichever record they wanted. In another condition, participants were also given the opportunity to choose, but the options were rigged so that the participants were told that their third-rated record inadvertently had been excluded from the shipment and was unavailable. Thus, in this condition, a restriction was placed on the participants' freedom to choose what they wanted. All subjects were then asked again to indicate their ratings of the different musical samples, and it was these changed attitudes that revealed reactance. Among subjects who were given a choice but denied the freedom to choose their third most highly rated selection, 67 percent increased their ratings of this selection, compared with 42 percent of participants' increasing their rating of this record when they had no restriction on their freedom.

So we can think about reactance as pushback against attempts to restrict our freedom to have, do, or think what we want. The amount of pushback depends on how important that freedom is to us as well as how forceful the threat is.

In a classic illustration of this point, Davidson and Jaccard (1979) asked a sample of married women about their attitudes toward birth control in general. Two years later, they interviewed the women again and asked how often they had used the birth-control pill in the preceding two years (see FIGURE 8.13). In the first condition, the researchers asked women, "What is your attitude toward birth control?" They found that responses correlated .08 with Pill-taking behavior. This means that there was practically no relationship between the women's attitude and their behavior.

Why do you think this relationship was so small? Obviously the question was quite general, glossing over many ways of thinking about the Pill. For example, people might have a positive attitude toward birth control in general but feel that the Pill is not the best method. Still others might be trying to get pregnant, so although they might advocate birth control for other people, they are not using birth control themselves.

In the second condition, the researchers asked a more specific question: "What is your attitude toward the birth control pill?" Here they found that the correlation between women's attitude and their behavior improved to .32. This means that women who reported more positive attitudes toward the Pill were somewhat more likely to be taking it. But the relationship between attitude and behavior still was not very strong. In the third condition women were asked about their attitudes "toward using birth control pills," and in the fourth condition, their attitude "about using the birth control pill in the next two years." In these conditions, the correlations increased to .53 and .57, respectively. These findings show that attitudes that are more specifically relevant to a behavior are better predictors of that behavior.

What makes the central route to persuasion distinct from the peripheral route?

What is central route of persuasion?

What is the peripheral route persuasion?

Which two factors determine whether a listener will use peripheral route or central processing?