The scientific background

The Elaboration Likelihood Model

Persuasion is any process that attempts to influence a person’s behaviour by guiding that person toward the adoption of specific attitudes. Attitudes are complex psychological constructs that characterise a person. They are acquired through experience and they determine how the person will respond to other persons, places, things, events and also propositional contents. Usually, a positive attitude towards a behaviour leads to higher motivation to perform that behaviour, hence making it more likely that the person will do so. By changing attitudes, persuasion can therefore also reinforce or change behaviours.

A persuasive message can be considered any message that is aimed at shaping, reinforcing or changing the perceptions, emotions, beliefs, intentions and behaviours of a person or group of persons.  Given a persuasive message, it is possible to distinguish between the characteristics of the message, the characteristics of the source of the message (who is giving the message, but also the environment around the listener) and the characteristics of the target of the message (who receives the message.) 

ELM (Elaboration Likelihood Model) is a model of persuasion that describes how change of attitude happens. It has been developed in the context of putting the study of attitude and persuasion as the central focus of social psychology. ELM describes the likelihood of a person to elaborate on a persuasive message, stating that a person is more or less likely to elaborate on a persuasive message depending on her level of motivation and on her ability.

The level of motivation depends on the relevance of the message (personal relevance: how much is the topic of the message urgent for the listener? Does the listener need to know about the topic of the message?), the need for cognition (how much is the listener interested in the topic of the message? Is the listener an individual who takes pleasure thinking and tends to engage in effortful thinking?) and the responsibility of the listener towards the message (what is the initial or background attitude of the listener towards the topic of the message?). The ability of the listener to elaborate depends on knowledge and understanding (familiarity with the subject of the message, but also relevant knowledge needed to examine the arguments), available time, distraction and repetition.

The model proposes two processing modes for persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route of processing is chosen whenever the message is judged important, and the interest and  motivation of the target are high. In this case, attention is paid to the quality of the message and of its source, and the information is processed at a deep level. On the other hand, when the interest and motivation of the target are low, and the message is perceived as unimportant, the peripheral route of processing is chosen, peripheral cues become influencing and overall the information is processed in a shallow way. According to the ELM model, attitude change is considered to be more resistant and enduring if persuasion is achieved through the central processing route. 

Examples of characteristics of the message: How well thought out the actual message is? Was the argument logical? Did it have key points? Did it follow a clear path, or did the speaker jump around a lot? How well written the message is? Does the speaker seem to have a good grasp of the rules of grammar? Did she use the appropriate vocabulary? Was the talk a good length, or was it too long or too short?

Examples of characteristics of the environment (also referred to as source characteristics): What is the speaker’s level of expertise for the topic she is discussing? Does she seem knowledgeable? Trustworthy? And what about the information in her talk? Does it come from a scientific journal? Or was it collected via the internet or street polls? Also attention can be paid to the actual physical environment where the speaker came from, and 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?

Examples of target characteristics (the listener who is receiving the message) include everything about the listener, from how intelligent they are to whether or not they've had enough to eat that day. 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? Are you interested in the topic? Do you already know something about it?

The target characteristics play an important role in the elaboration likelihood model. The main idea here is that before we can even consider information or be persuaded by it, that information is first filtered by our perception of it and our perception 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.

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.