Lecture 3

Question 1

What is the Yale model?

Answer 1

• Messages can change attitudes by presenting an incentive for attitude change
• Message recipient must attend to it, then comprehend it correctly, then accept the message
• Attitude change must be reinforced in order to go from comprehension to acceptance

Question 2

What variables affect the ‘Who’ in the source of a message?

Answer 2

• Attractiveness
• Expertise
• Status
• Trustworthiness
• Likeability

Question 3

What variables affect the ‘What’ in the message?

Answer 3

• Fear: different levels of fear affect attitude change - looked at asking people to take care of teeth, had a low fear message of implication of what happens, a moderate, and high level of fear
• Curvilinear effect = attitude change was greatest during moderate, high turned people off
• One vs two-sided arguments: when presenting greatest incentive for attitude change
• Early or late arguments = primacy vs recency effects

Question 4

What variables affect the audience = ‘Whom?’

Answer 4

• Mood
• Self-esteem
• Intelligence
• Pre-existing views

Question 5

What are the strengths of the Yale Model?

Answer 5

• Initial empirical attempt to document range of factors that can influence determine how attitudes are formed and changed
• Laid foundation for further work
• Led to important real world changes in attitudes and behaviours

Question 6

What are the limitations of the Yale Model?

Answer 6

• Useful descriptive beginning but we do not know the processes through which incentives elicit change or not = what provides/underlies inceptive
• What about interactions among source, message and audience factors - interactions of variables

Question 7

What is McGuire’s Information-Processing Paradigm?

Answer 7

• Processing stages: breaking down attend, comprehend and accept = like a multiplicative model
• Reception-yielding model: how things interact

Question 8

What are the processing states?

Answer 8

• Presentation
• Attention
• Comprehension
• Yielding
• Retention
• Behaviour
• Behaviour is a function of all these, multipliable

Question 9

What is the compensation principle?

Answer 9

• Variable can have opposing effects on comprehension and yielding which can create curvilinear effects on persuasion
• Looking at self-esteem = how it affects different stages of McGuires Model = can change how people receive or yield to the contents of the message
• As self-esteem increases, more likely to receive message, people with higher self-esteem are less likely to yield to a message = curvilinear model when you combine the variables

Question 10

What has McGuire’s Model added?

Answer 10

• Offers a more detailed consideration of stages involved in attitude change
• BUT said less about how message acceptance emerges = led to importance of cognitive responses = thoughts after being presented with a persuasive message = underlies attitude change

Question 11

What is a dual process model?

Answer 11

• Two routes to persuasion
• Route taken depends upon different factors
• Elaboration Likelihood model
• Heuristic-systematic model

Question 12

What is the Elaboration Likelihood Model?

Answer 12

• People are motivated to hold correct attitudes
• When people are presented with persuasive information, their motivation to think about it can vary along a continuum
• A variable can affect attitudes in different ways depending on the nature and amount of elaboration
• e.g Source expertise can act as a cue (is accepted) when elaboration is low but be scrutinised as an argument when elaboration is high (deeper thinking) = When people are not motivated to think about the message, if it comes from an expert, it will be accepted and vice versa
• The motivation and ability to process a message objectively elicits greater argument scrutiny
• Biased processing leads to biased issue-relevant thoughts
• Cognitive responses: our responses to the information we encounter influence the extent to which we agree with the contents of a persuasive message
• Elaborate processing causes new, strong attitudes

Question 13

What was a study looking at the ELM?

Answer 13

• Uni students were told that your uni will have oral comprehensive exams instead of written exams that will either occur this year or in 10 years (personal relevance high vs low)
• Ppts will get a persuasive appeal that would vary with source expertise: either comes from high expert or low expert, and message strength: strong arguments or weak arguments
• When personal relevance is low = less processing of the message, more reliance on cues
• When relevance is high, deeper processing, less reliance on cues
• When highly involved = source did not matter, when not = source was very important
• When highly involved = strength of argument mattered, less impact in low involvement

Question 14

What was the study about trustworthiness on the ELM?

Answer 14

• DO we treat trustworthy and untrustworthy sources the same?
• Under low elaboration = more likely to scrutinise message from less trustworthy source = we can trust high trustworthy source
• Argument quality should have a greater affect with less trustworthy source
• e.g two ice skating rivals = one kicked the other = trustworthy vs not
• Ppts were presented with an ad for a new brand of roller blade: trustworthiness was either high or low (endorsed by the rivals), message strength: strong or weak
• Ppts were then asked to give thoughts about the message to provide their attitude
• Argument strength had strongest effect when elaboration was not constraint, greater for untrustworthy source
• Correlation between attitudes and cognitive responses = favourability and attitude is sig greater for untrustworthy vs not

Question 15

What are limitations of ELM?

Answer 15

• What makes a message strong?
• Do we only seek correct attitudes

Question 16

What is the Heuristic-systematic Model?

Answer 16

• Desired attitudes
• Processing modes
• Determinants of processing mode

Question 17

What are the desired attitudes?

Answer 17

• People may seek a correct attitude
• An attitude that expresses their values OR attitude that helps their social image

Question 18

What are the processing modes?

Answer 18

• Heuristic mode - people employ simple decision rules (heuristics) to form their opinions
• Systematic mode - people scrutinise their persuasive arguments and consider other information they might possess = requires more effort than heuristic

Question 19

What are the determinants of Processing Mode?

Answer 19

• People are more likely to use the systematic route when they are highly motivated and able to obtain their desired attitude
• Distinguish between cognitive and motivation determinants:
• C: ability and availability of heuristics, M: least effort and sufficiency principle: use easiest way to achieve sufficient confidence
  If personal relevance is high = systematic mode is used, if low = heuristic will ve used

Question 20

What are limitations?

Answer 20

• Are the attitudinal motives exhaustive of those that play a role
• Does the model’s increased complexity increase its predictive power over ELM

Question 21

What is the metacognitive model?

Answer 21

• Thoughts about thoughts: thought confidence and thought validity
• Objects can be linked in memory with positive and negative evaluations

Question 22

What was a study on the meta-cognitive model?

Answer 22

• Self-validation hypothesis: post message beliefs are more likely to impact attitudes when they are held with greater confidence
• As thought confidence increases, the valence of the beliefs are more likely to predict attitudes
• e.g if two people want to buy an electric car, and both have the same thoughts, valence etc. but they have different confident levels which affects the level of attitude
• We can have divergent associations that can be held with different levels of confidence, and highlights the potential of explicit-implicit ambivalence

Question 23

What is explicit-implicit ambivalence?

Answer 23

• Divergence between explicitly and implicitly measured evaluations of the same attitude object
• Internal state of tension and discomfort, linked with negative affect
• The deeper the ambivalence = the deeper they should process to remove the ambivalence

Question 24

What was a study looking at ambivalence?

Answer 24

• Self-reported heterosexual ppts
• Explicit measures of Sexual Orientation: direct questions on preferences = response time to each question measured
• Implicit measure of SO: Personalised IAT on sexual orientation
• Uses scores from both measures to derive an index of explicit-implicit SO ambivalence
• Ppts with greater E-I ambivalence took longer to deliberate about direct questions about their sexuality

Question 25

Does ambivalence always lead to negative affect?

Answer 25

- Self-reported gay or lesbian ppts and completed explicit and implicit measures of SO - Measure of general affect, and measure of trait mindfulness - Mindfulness is linked with greater acceptance of one's thoughts; non-judgmental - Mindful ppts should be more comfortable with ambivalence; mitigating negative affect - More ambivalence = reduced positive affect = low in mindfulness = mindfulness is linked to with accepting our thoughts