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Key Takeaways

Definition

The elaboration likelihood model seeks to explore how humans process stimuli differently and how the outcomes of these processes result in changing attitudes and, consequently, behavior.

Persuasion happens internally, which means that no one can persuade anybody with certainty of success. Rather, people can only design for persuasion. Thus, the model is ultimately a way of guiding how people can design more persuasive systems.

Ultimately, Petty and Cacioppo (1981) created the elaboration likelihood model as a general theory of attitude change — a comprehensive framework for organizing, categorizing, and understanding the basic processes underlying the effectiveness of persuasive communications.

How the elaboration likelihood model works

According to the elaboration likelihood model, when a persuader presents information to an audience, some level of elaboration results.

This elaboration refers to the amount of effort that any audience member of a message has to use to process and evaluate a message, remember it, and subsequently accept or reject it.

When someone faces a message, the elaboration likelihood model posits that people react using one of two channels: the high or the low elaboration channel.

The level of someone’s elaboration can predict the likelihood that that person will then use central or peripheral route processing to assess the contents of the message.

elaboration likelihood model

Central Route Processing

Thecentral routeis the message that is important. The central route is logic-driven and uses data and facts to convince people of an argument’s worthiness.

These messages require an audience to really think about the message, perhaps because the message is personally important to them. Also, some people enjoy analyzing arguments and creating a deep understanding of the issues; they have a high need for cognition.

The Central route creates a long-lasting attitude change.

Central route processing requires a high level of elaboration. This high elaboration can result from, say, someone knowing what is important to them and therefore investing a substantial amount of effort in examining an argument’s message.

When people are persuaded via central route processing, they have focused on the message’s strengths. On the virtue of the amount of effort that the person being persuaded has made in deciphering what the message is telling them, they will make a decision based on their thoughts.

Those using central route processing are also more likely to focus and ignore distractions in seeking out their goals (Geddes, 2016).

Peripheral Route Processing

Peripheral route processing is an indirect route, which involves a low level of elaboration, and uses peripheral cues to associate positivity with the message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

On the other hand, some people do not want to spend time and effort to consider issues, or the message is not personally important/relevant to them, so they tend not to process the information in-depth – they are cognitive misers.

This means that the receiver of the message is not scrutinizing the message for its effectiveness, and other factors, such as distractions, can influence them. They take shortcuts and jump to conclusions on the basis of limited information.

With the peripheral route, the focus is more on the context than on the message itself. The audience is not required to think deeply about the meaning of the message. This creates a short-lived attitude change.

Peripheral route processing can often come from people who know what they want but do not know much about the details of that item.

For example, someone who wants a career that involves travel but also pays well is more likely to process via the peripheral route than someone who is knowledgeable about the specifics of careers (Geddes, 2016).

Examples

The extent to which someone is likely to scrutinize the canvasser’s argument depends on a number of factors. One of these is time.

Someone who is hurriedly running to work is less likely to seriously scrutinize the argument than someone who is motivated and able to do thorough research and carry out discussions on the implications of a soda task.

Meanwhile, someone who has little to do with soda on a day-to-day basis may be more likely to evaluate the canvasser’s argument objectively, given that they have few ties to the issue.

Assumptions of the model

The elaboration likelihood model has seven major postulates (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986):

People are motivated to hold correct attitudes.

In general, incorrect or improper attitudes can have negative behavioral, affective, and cognitive consequences.

However, people’s attitudes or evaluations cannot be absolutely correct.

Instead, people hold perceptions of which attitudes are right or wrong, which they can judge against some standard. Generally, people think they are right when they hold opinions similar to others (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

The elaboration likelihood model does not exclusively link someone’s subjective assessment of the correctness of an attitude toward how many other people seem to have the same opinion.

Rather, there are a number of standards that people could use to determine which attitudes are correct for them, and the standards that people use to judge what is written or wrong can even differ among people (Kohlberg, 1963).

Generally, nonetheless, psychologists have seen attitudes as correct or proper to the extent that they are seen as beneficial to someone’s physical or psychological well-being.

Although people want to hold correct attitudes, the amount of effort they are willing or able to exert to hold a correct attitude varies widely.

This level of willingness to exert effort to hold a correct attitude is known as elaboration, which exists on a spectrum from low to high.

There are several major factors that affect elaboration. One of them is whether an issue is personally relevant. For example, if someone is reading about a proposed nuclear plant in their neighborhood, they are more likely to have a higher level of elaboration than someone who lives in an entirely different region of the country.

Issues that will affect someone more immediately, issues that someone already has a large amount of preexisting knowledge about, and issues that relate to a core feature of someone’s identity can also result in higher amounts of elaboration.

However, someone overwhelmed with other events in their life is far less likely to do so.

The elaboration likelihood model views arguments as pieces of information contained in a communication that is relevant to a person’s subjective determination of how much the position that is being advocated for is merited.

The kind of information that is relevant to evaluating the merits of a product or issue can vary from situation to situation and from person to person.

Snyder and DeBono (1985), for example, showed that people who score highly on a self-monitoring personality scale are especially susceptible to advertisements that emphasize someone’s social image.

Meanwhile, people who were low self-monitors were less concerned with how a product would impact their image and more about the product’s specific attributes.

The variables that affect message processing in a biased way can produce either a positive (favorable) or negative (unfavorable) motivation or ability bias to the stream of thoughts that someone has around an issue.

There are two types of elaboration, according to Petty and Cacioppo (1986): a relatively objective and relatively biased elaboration.

When someone is motivated to process a message in a relatively objective manner, they are trying to seek the truth of the situation. Meanwhile, when someone has the ability to process a message in a relatively objective manner, they have the requisite knowledge and opportunity to consider the arguments impartially.

Essentially, the more someone scrutinizes the argument in a relatively objective way, the more apparent the strengths of cogent arguments become and the more obvious the flaws in specious ones (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

In contrast, relatively objective processing is processing in a relatively biased manner. This means that some factor either encourages or inhibits the generation of either favorable or unfavorable thoughts.

This makes it more likely that a person will side with one side over another. For example, someone may be more likely to side with a family member whom they feel affection toward than a stranger in an argument in which that family member is involved.

The objectivity of elaboration depends on several factors. Processing is more likely to be objective when someone has relatively little investment in which particular position turns out to be best.

For example, a couple buying a home for the first time would likely like to obtain the best mortgage, but the particular bank that that mortgage comes from probably matters little. Meanwhile, elaboration is more likely to be biased when some threat is associated with adopting one position over another.

There are many competing motives that factor into how objectively people process situations, and people often have more information on one side of an issue than another (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

As someone’s motivation or ability to process arguments decreases, external factors (including distraction) can become more important in determining persuasion.

Although the elaboration that someone carries out on a persuasive message can proceed in a relatively objective or biased manner, people can, in some contexts, be unmotivated or unable to engage in either kind of message elaboration. There is a trade-off between message elaboration and the effectiveness of peripheral cues (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

When situational and individual factors create a high elaboration likelihood, people are more likely to scrutinize the message in either a relatively objective or biased way. However, the central processing route to persuasion requires both motivation and the ability to elaborate a message.

For example, if the ability is high but motivation is low when someone is exposed to a message, they will care about little argument processing. This processing could jump to the central route if someone subsequently becomes motivated to process an issue.

Meanwhile, if someone’s motivation to process a message is high, but their ability is low, the person will want to process the message arguments but will be unable to do so.

As a result, the person will likely engage in whatever processing is possible, possibly relying on shortcuts to make inferences about the validity of a message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

Attitude changes that result mostly from processing via the central route will be:

Finally, the last postulate specifies the different consequences of attitude changes induced via the central and peripheral routes.

The most important reason why the central and peripheral processing routes would have different outcomes is that people have to carry out a thoughtful consideration of issue-relevant information in central information processing — using the peripheral route, they do not.

Generally, the greater the accessibility of the information supporting an attitude, the greater the likelihood that the same attitude will be reported over time, given that people consider their prior knowledge before assessing a new message (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

References

Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986).Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of personality and social psychology, 51(5), 1032.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986).The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In Communication and persuasion(pp. 1-24). Springer, New York, NY.

Petty, R. E., Kasmer, J. A., Haugtvedt, C. P., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1987). Source and message factors in persuasion: A reply to Stiff’s critique of the elaboration likelihood model.

Petty, R. E., Barden, J., & Wheeler, S. C. (2009).The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion: developing health promotions for sustained behavioral change.

Wagner, B. C., & Petty, R. E. (2011). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion: Thoughtful and non-thoughtful social influence.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Charlotte NickersonResearch Assistant at Harvard UniversityUndergraduate at Harvard UniversityCharlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Charlotte NickersonResearch Assistant at Harvard UniversityUndergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.