- [Voiceover] Imagine that you are in school,
and the school has brought in two speakers
to talk about an issue that might cause controversy.
Maybe it's about stopping the sale
of all soda products on campus.
So you have one speaker who is arguing for this policy,
and one who is arguing against it.
How do you, as the listener, evaluate
the messages of these two speakers?
There are three main characteristics
that seem to have an impact on how
we are persuaded for or against a certain message.
The first are message characteristics.
These are features of the message itself.
Was the argument logical?
Did it have key points?
Did it follow a clear path,
or did the speaker jump around a lot?
So, message characteristics include
how well thought out the actual message is,
but it also includes other aspects of the message,
like how well written it was.
Does the speaker seem to have
a good grasp of the rules of grammar?
Did they use the appropriate vocabulary?
Was the talk a good length,
or was it too long or too short?
These are all characteristics
of the message that is being given.
But it turns out that while we're paying
attention to the message itself, we are also
paying attention to the environment around us.
These are referred to as source characteristics.
Let's take a moment to think about our two speakers.
What is their level of expertise
for the topic that they're discussing?
Do they seem knowledgeable?
Do they seem trustworthy?
And what about the information in their talks?
Does it come from a medical or psych journal?
Or was it collected via the internet or street polls?
We can also pay attention to the actual
physical environment where the speakers came from,
and also the venue that the speaker is currently in.
Is this talk taking place on the campus of the school,
or in a less formal setting outside of it,
maybe a bar?
The last set of characteristics
that can influence how we receive a message
are referred to as target characteristics.
These are the characteristics of the listener
who is receiving the message.
So in our example here, that would be
the characteristics that you bring to the table.
Are you in a good mood or are you in a bad mood?
Do you have high or low self-esteem?
Are you awake and alert, or did you stay up
all night studying so now you're tired?
Target characteristics include everything
about the listener, from how intelligent they are
to whether or not they've had enough to eat that day.
These are all things that can influence
how we attend to and receive a message.
All of these characteristics,
but especially the target characteristics,
play an important role in the elaboration
likelihood model, which is a model
that tries to explain how our attitudes are formed
and how they can be changed.
So let's use the same example.
You're a listener and you're still listening
to these two speakers.
When the speaker gets up and starts to give
a presentation, we don't just want to know
what characteristics people pay attention to in their talk,
we want to know how do we evaluate the speaker's message?
How do we come to be persuaded or not persuaded
by what they have to say?
According to the elaboration likelihood model,
we process information along two possible paths
or two possible routes.
These are referred to as the central and peripheral routes.
According to this model, after a particular
route is chosen, the information
is then passed through three different stages.
The first stage actually has to do with the target
characteristics that we were talking about earlier.
The main idea here is that before we can even
consider information or be persuaded by it,
that information is first filtered by our perceptions
of it and our perceptions of that situation.
Maybe you, personally, think that the topic
of discussion is really interesting,
or maybe you find that you're really
motivated to learn a lot more about it.
You think it's really important.
In that case the elaboration likelihood model
would say that you were moving onto the central route.
But maybe, for whatever reason,
you actually don't have a lot of interest in the topic,
and you also don't have a lot of motivation
to pay attention.
Maybe you skipped lunch and are really hungry,
or maybe you just don't find the topic that important.
All of these audience factors,
all of these target characteristics,
actually filter the information
before we're even able to process it.
The next stage of the elaboration likelihood model
is the processing stage.
This is the stage where message characteristics
and source characteristics are both taken into account.
Following along the central route,
when a listener is highly motivated and interested,
they tend to pay a lot of attention
to the quality of the message being delivered.
This leads to deep processing of the material,
so a real understanding of it.
But what about the people who aren't
really interested in the topic
and who aren't really motivated by it?
They generally focus on the message less
and, instead, they pay attention to superficial
characteristics or shallow characteristics,
things like how attractive the speaker is,
or how impressive their PowerPoint looks,
even things like how many points the speaker made
without really focusing on whether or not
those facts were backed up.
They'll even focus on things like how many times
the speaker got the audience to laugh.
Because they're paying attention
to all of these superficial characteristics,
they tend to not really process
the information in a deep way,
and so we say that there's shallow
processing of information.
How do these two paths differ in regards
to actual attitude change?
High motivation leads to deep processing
of the information, which then serves
to persuade us towards a message,
possibly creating a lasting attitude change.
Those along the peripheral route
might also change their attitude,
but if they do, it'll be temporary.
It's likely to fade over time
or be successfully attacked in a future argument.
So while they might have been persuaded
by the speaker at that moment,
they probably won't stay persuaded for long.