Routes of persuasion in political campaigns

ELM stands for Elaboration Likelihood model. The excerpt below is from a paper about political communication that was published in 1996.

Using the central route, the person will purposefully evaluate, or process, the message based on the quality of the arguments that are presented. During the evaluation, the person will generate thoughts about the message. If the arguments are strong, the person will generate positive thoughts about the message. The greater the number of positive thoughts that are generated, the greater the attitude change in favor of the message.

If the arguments are weak, however, the person's attitude generally will not change. The person might even generate counterarguments against the message, which could result in a more negative attitude, the boomerang effect.

In an era of information overload, ELM assumes that people are "cognitive misers" who hoard their cognitive resources (Petty & Cacioppo, 1983). Although motivated to hold correct attitudes, people do not have the time or cognitive energy to process all of the messages via the central route.

If a person does not have the ability or motivation to process the message or has not been exposed to it, the peripheral route will be used. Because the person wants to hold a correct attitude but doesn't want to exert much energy to form it, the person will survey the setting and find one or more cues on which to base the attitude. The cues can be any piece of information, including the candidate's appearance, reputation, political party or what friends say about the candidate. Because a cue is being used, the person will not evaluate the candidate's arguments. Instead,
the person's attitude will be based solely on the quality of the cues.

People will not use central or peripheral processing exclusively. Petty and Cacioppo envision a continuum of elaboration likelihood. On one end of the continuum are people that are highly motivated, have a high ability to process the message and/or are presented with the opportunity to do so.

There is a high likelihood that these people will elaborate on the message using the central route. On the opposite end of the continuum are people who have low motivation to process the message, low ability to understand it and/or have little exposure to the message. There is a low likelihood that these people will elaborate on the message. Instead, they will use peripheral processing. In the middle is a vast gray area where people will use varying amounts of both types of processing. Little research has been conducted in this area.

Because people using the central route have expended more cognitive energy in evaluating the message, Petty and Cacioppo say their attitudes will be more enduring and more predictive of behavior (Petty & Cacioppo, 1983). On the other hand, because people using the peripheral route have invested little energy in their decision, their attitude change will be temporary and not very predictive of behavior.

Today is the day that I teach all day--psychology classes for college undergrads, for anyone who was not aware of that. So I don't have time to discuss this further at the moment, but I wanted to put it out there seeing as how Ken Blackwell was using an awful lot of peripheral persuasion techniques in the gubernatorial debate last night. And he seems to count on people having an automatic "yuck" response to the word psychologist, as if it meant (recalling an old George Carlin routine) "commie-fag-junkie". Oh, and the word "taxes" and calling Strickland a "taxer"--that's a favorite of his. Anyway, I hope to discuss this more later, but maybe in the meantime you might think about the types of messsages you have seen used in campaigns this season.

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