Dr. Richard Petty is a professor of psychology at Ohio State University. He’s probably best known for co-developing the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion (but he’s done a lot of other stuff, too). He was also my advisor in grad school.
In the last episode of Opinion Science, Rich lent his voice to telling the story of the ELM. Go check that out if you haven’t already. But my full conversation with Rich was also great and went in a few directions that just didn’t fit into a general intro to the ELM. So, I present that full interview here. It gets a little inside baseball at some points, so be aware of that. But it’s an interesting glimpse at the random ride that a career in science can be and the number of lucky moments that can steer the wheel.
Transcript
Andy Luttrell: Hey everyone, you are listening to Opinion Science, the show about our opinions, where they come from, and how we talk about them. I’m Andy Luttrell. Last time on the show I shared an episode on the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. It’s an approach to understanding when and why messages change people’s minds, and it’s become an influential way of thinking in social science.
At the center of that episode was Dr. Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University who co-developed the model starting around the late 1970s. A much less influential scientist started grad school at Ohio State in 2010. Me! I’m talking about me. Rich was my advisor while I was getting my PhD, and we’ve remained close collaborators ever since.
So, when I started Opinion Science, Rich was obviously at the top of my list of people to talk to. I knew I needed to have him on. But I also wanted to make sure I had gotten the swing of this podcasting thing before I asked if he was up for it.
Also, I wanted to wait until I could talk to him in person. I mean, he lives like, two minutes away from me. But the early days of the podcast were peak COVID. So, I was just biding my time until it was safe enough to meet up in person. So, in the summer of 2021, vaccines were rolling out. We were finally cautiously resuming in person stuff. So, I jumped at the chance.
I emailed Rich right away, like two weeks after I got my vaccine and I was like, do you want to record an interview in person? And he said, yes. And it was great. We did it. But I was also already working on our big behavioral economics podcast series. I had just had a kid. What I’m saying is I sat on the interview for like three years.
Every once in a while, I would bump into Rich and he would be like, so what’s going on with that? Is that ever going to come out? Eventually I decided that the 100th episode of Opinion Science would finally be an ode to the people and ideas who got me into this field in the first place.
And so here we are. That came out. I feel very good about it. It’s an episode on the elaboration likelihood model featuring Rich and other folks. And so, now what? This is episode 101.
When I started Opinion Science, I set an explicit goal for myself of getting to 100 episodes, and I did it! And you’re here!
People actually listen to this, and it means the world to me. But I met that goal now, so what’s next? So, don’t worry, I want to keep making this podcast, and I will. But I think I’m going to slow it down a little. People often ask me how I’m able to make this podcast all on my own while doing a bunch of other things. And I’m always like, I don’t know, but I make it work. And I don’t really know how it all comes together.
But there are only so many hours in the day, and the only real conclusion is that the time I use to make this, which is quite a lot of time, is time that I’m not using for other things. And I’m starting to feel the strain of keeping up with the bi-weekly release schedule for this show.
I want to protect some of my time for other things. So at least for now, I’ve made the difficult decision to make Opinion Science a monthly podcast instead of the bi-weekly podcast, it’s been for the last few years. And when I started, it was weekly and that was not sustainable. So, it’ll come out. The first Monday of each month. Starting now.
Welcome to November. The next episode will come out next month, December 2nd, and on and on. It’ll be the same Opinion Science that I know and love, just a little less frequent. And who knows, maybe I get antsy and go back to bi-weekly or occasionally do a mid-month bonus episode. We’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, episode 101, this one, you’re listening to right now is the full or full’ish, interview with Rich Petty. You’ll recognize a few bits from the Elaboration Likelihood episode, but there were a lot of interesting details and ideas in this interview with Rich that just didn’t fit into that introductory episode.
So, as a result, this one might feel a little inside baseball, so if what you’re really looking for is an introduction to the Elaboration Likelihood model, start with episode 100. But if you’re curious about this Rich Petty guy, including how his very first study held the keys to the rest of his career, what might have made the ELM as influential as it’s been, and what the pleasure chair does, keep listening.
Okay, I know I’ve been doing a lot of self-serving preamble, but just a few quick notes to set the stage for this interview. First, is that this was the first in-person interview that I had done, and I learned some things. In particular, the microphone stands I was using were not great. So, you’ll hear the mic wobbling a bit on the table throughout.
This is probably more annoying to me than to you, but whatever, that’s what that sound is. Also, I’ve always abbreviated the Elaboration Likelihood Model as the ELM, but I’ve come to learn that Rich usually refers to it as the ELM, so just know that we’re talking about the same thing.
And finally, we start out this conversation talking about Tony Greenwald. He’s the Tony we’re referring to. In general, it’s worth noting that Tony Greenwald and Tim Brock were two established social psychology professors at Ohio State at the time that Rich started grad school. And they both had done a bunch of work on attitudes and attitude change. Tony Greenwald would go on to co-develop the Implicit Association Test, and a field of research on so called Implicit Attitudes.
You can check out episode 16 with Mahzarin Banaji for more on him, but enough out of me. Let’s get into my conversation with The Rich Petty.
Andy Luttrell: The hope is just to kind of paint a little bit of a historical picture of what it was like at the time. And one of the things that I was hoping to talk to Tony about maybe was that what was happening in attitudes before you guys showed up. The cognitive responses, stuff that was starting to move forward, just as a sort of springboard into what you guys did with it.
Rich Petty: And why he said, avoid the topic at all costs.
Andy Luttrell: Oh, is that right?
Rich Petty: Well, it was done. It was that frustrating period for attitudes research where it was kind of on the tail end because there were too many confusing and conflicting findings that Tony said. It was basically social cognition, but he was cognitive psychology is really what he, and he was right. That’s a cognitive revolution.
Tom Ostrom, became social cog person. And so. it was the heyday of attitudes and their view would have been when Claude was here in the 60s, late 60s. It was so popular, I think, within social psychology that everybody was doing it. And it sort of collapsed upon itself that there was almost like the replication crisis.
That there were so many findings that, so you write about it way back in the 86 book that you’d get expert sources, increased persuasion, expert sources, reduced persuasion, we got no effect. And there were annual reviews of psychology papers at the time that said, Okay, I think we’re done. Until a new paradigm comes along or until this is just not very useful. And it was also the age of, do attitudes really predict behavior anyway?
Andy Luttrell: Yeah, that would have been just before. That Wicker paper was late 60s. So, what year, would it have been 70s?
Rich Petty: 70s or early to mid, I graduated in 77. Later part of, Wicker was 73. Yeah, so he’d kind of declared that. Is that a 73 paper?
Andy Luttrell: I think it’s 67.
Rich Petty: Yeah, it’s older.
Andy Luttrell: Or 68, something like that.
Rich Petty: That didn’t really take off because Fishbein & Ajzen came along and they kind of fixed it, in the 70s and had those papers that, well, if you measure things at the right level, you can get much higher correlations.
What you’re trying to do is, do you like coffee, and then you measure the DV. Did you go to a coffee shop on this one particular day? In the middle of summer? And I didn’t predict that very well. And so, they had the whole, you need to measure things at the same level of correspondence. So that kind of fixed the methodological thing.
But even with that, the correlations weren’t great. And so, it was later that moderators came along and so forth that helped save that issue.
Andy Luttrell: It’s funny that it sounds like at the time, there was just a lot of like, let’s stop this. This one’s over. This one’s over.
Rich Petty: And attribution theory. And if there was nothing to replace it that got people excited, then maybe it would have eventually, but it’s what I knew and we studied. But I came to Ohio State a little too late to be in on the, when people were excited about it. It was like, yeah, you can do it. And so, all the people I mentioned to you, the students that you might talk, none of them do attitudes research or even did in grad school.
Andy Luttrell: But it worked out I think for you.
Rich Petty: It worked out okay, no regrets.
Andy Luttrell: Still do that.
Just in thinking about the time when you came, like you’re saying, there was this heyday of work, lots of innovations happening in attitudes and attitude change and how we do that stuff and then it started to die down. Did you come to Ohio State thinking that like, well, no, that that’s what I want to do? Or did you discover only after you got here that that was an interesting question?
Rich Petty: No, I specifically came here because that’s what I wanted to do. And so as an undergrad, I took this grad course in attitude change, from a faculty member who went to Michigan. It’s a great course. It was very applied, very exciting. And so at the end of the course, it’s like, okay, now where do I go to study this further? And he had a few possibilities, one of which, of course, was Illinois with Fishbein. He really isn’t a persuasion person, right? as it turns out in the long run.
In Ohio State, he said, last edited book on attitudes, full of all the different theories. It was like, dissonance has kind of passed. So, there are people still studying dissonance, but in his view, I think little did they know how long dissonance would continue and how much more interesting stuff one could do on dissonance. But they sort of felt like, well, that’s run its course.
But at Ohio State, there are all the non-dissonance people, and in fact, that was the theme of that 68 book that Greenwald, Brock, and Ostrom did. There had been an earlier book, Theories of Cognitive Consistency, that was all these chapters, maybe 50 of them, all about dissonance theory, or consistency or balance theory.
As I understand it, the goal of Greenwald, Brock, and Ostrom was to do a book that was not at all on dissonance theory, but had all sorts of other approaches to attitudes.
Andy Luttrell: So, dissonance was kind of like the name of the game in attitudes at the time?
Rich Petty: Dissonance was the learning theory had its heyday, right? So you had Hovland and then Festinger and the dissonance people, the motivational people, took over.
Andy Luttrell: Was that the stuff you were learning about in undergrad that you thought, oh, this is cool?
Rich Petty: In part, yeah. So in part, dissonance was, I think, everyone gets interested in dissonance because it seems so exciting, from when prophecy fails to the spool turning study and all that kind of stuff.
Andy Luttrell: And so you got here and that was not what was going on. How long did it take to realize that those plans were dashed?
Rich Petty: The way grad school worked at the time was you didn’t have an advisor coming in like you do today where you would apply to work with a particular person.
You came in and you interviewed with all the faculty who were present. And so, you went through this too a bit, but it’s more during the recruitment stage and then you sort of figure it out where the faculty tell you what they’re doing, here’s what I’m working on and here’s what I’m working on.
So, I went to all the different faculty, the four main faculty, none of whom mentioned attitudes as what they were interested in or doing. And then there was this one new guy who was a visiting faculty member, Bob Cialdini, and he was doing attitudes and social influence. And so, it was like, well, literally I thought, did I come to the right graduate program now given nobody’s doing this?
But thank goodness Cialdini was there. And he was just a beginning assistant professor out maybe three or four years himself, at most, on loan from, Arizona State. Back then, he was doing more traditional, some traditional attitude studies, and I did some work with him on that.
But, of course, he was just beginning all the exciting stuff he was doing on compliance, and so he did some of that work when he was here, too. But he became my advisor for the first year. Thank goodness, because then I got my feet wet. They still taught attitudes as a course, as a graduate course. So, just during my first year, I got to take a course in attitudes, learn a lot more than I knew, of course, as an undergrad, begin to do some initial studies on attitudes.
And then with that foundation first year, I was able to be a little bit more self-directed after that.
Andy Luttrell: But Cialdini was only here for a year.
Rich Petty: He was just here for a year.
Andy Luttrell: So, you are relief that you found your guy, was short-lived.
Rich Petty: And fortunately, it would have been so much easier if we had the internet back then or Zoom or whatever, but we did stay in contact by telephone cause we still had some work we were doing. Literally, you’d have to mail manuscripts back and forth if you’re working on it together. So, it was really kind of amazing, but thank goodness for Bob Cialdini.
Andy Luttrell: But then once he left, there was no one here doing that work, right? So, then what? So, you were still in contact with him, but that wasn’t sustainable for like everything you could do.
Rich Petty: Right. And so my advisor became Tim Brock, and he had started to study what he called interpersonal pleasuring. The aggression machine, shocks delivered, electric shocks to people.
So, he invented the pleasure machine, which looks just like the aggression machine, except you press buttons to deliver vibrations to a person who is sitting in a chair that are supposed to be pleasurable. And just like the shock machine, there is no a real pleasure being delivered to anybody. And so it’s all in the mind of the person who’s delivering the pleasure volts.
And so the question is what are the things that caused people to give more and more pleasure to other people, much like the aggression studies? And so a long story that what Tim was interested in at the time and just supervised a dissertation on was responsiveness.
So, we like people who are responsive. And so, the study they had just completed was what if the person in the chair responds positively to the pleasure. Would you give more? Seems obvious that you wouldn’t and you did and so my question was how can I get Tim interested in an persuasion study, but I had to build responsiveness into the study because that was the key variable not attitude change.
So, we ended up doing this, really probably my first study with Tim, during my first year in the program. So, I knew Tim was going to be my advisor after Bob left. So, he was the advisor in waiting. So, I did do some work with him and we did this responsiveness study, which involved having a speaker give a speech to a live audience of undergraduates.
And the speaker would be heckled at various points during the speech, live heckler, very impactful in the days of impactful social psychology, which Tim also loved to do. And so, the speaker would get interrupted and the key variable was how the speaker responded. Did they respond nicely or did they respond in a condescending way?
This sort of combined Tim’s interest in responsiveness, my interest in persuasion was the audience influenced by the speaker based on the heckles and the speaker’s response to it. And heckling was also a very important practical thing at the time. This is a lot of protests, not too similar from today’s where speakers would go out and they’d get booed and they’d get heckled and so forth.
And so it was a real practical issue of what’s the best way to respond. You ignore them, which was one of the conditions in our study. Do you respond in some way?
Anyway, so the challenge was to try to get people interested in attitude change, but connected to. It’s probably still the challenge today for grad students to get your advisor interested in something that you’re interested in, but that they’re willing to supervise.
Andy Luttrell: Did you have to meet in the middle somehow?
Rich Petty: You have to be motivated to do this stuff yourself. So that was my intro. That was my first attitude change study with Tim and with Bob Cialdini.
He had come to Ohio State with some data that he did a postdoc, I believe, at Columbia University and was doing a traditional sort of attitude change study where he was interested in what would happen to your attitude if you anticipated interacting with someone else, on the topic, right? And what he found in some early research was that if I knew I was going to talk to you and I knew you disagreed with me or I didn’t even know what your opinion was, but I had to interact with you, I moderated my opinion before the interaction.
And the idea Bob had was that was an impression management tactic. So, if I took a very neutral position, I was safe no matter what your position was or even if I knew you were against me, I would move toward a neutral position away from my position which could also look like I was moving toward you.
But the idea was that, no, I wasn’t really moving toward you. I was just moving toward a neutral position. So, that would avoid some confrontation. And so, he had these data, but the topic he was using was really unimportant to people. And I’m like, nobody cares about whatever this is.
We ended up doing a study to pair with it, where we varied something that was going to be very important later in my career, and that’s how important the topic was to you. So, we had an induction of whether the topic was really important and involving and relevant to you or whether it was unimportant. This is my first sort of laboratory study, not out with people heckling, and what happened was we got the moderation effect when the topic was not important to people, but when it was important, people polarized. So, they became more extreme in anticipation of the conversation, and so that was sort of the first study where you could see people changing their attitudes differently as a function of something like personal relevance or importance.
Andy Luttrell: Well, was there anything at the time that would have anticipated that, the importance or relevance would matter or it’s kind of, as you describe it, you’re just sort of like, well, this doesn’t seem important. Let’s make it important and see if that changes anything, or was there like, no, there’s importance is this thing that people say is important. And so we should have come for it.
Rich Petty: I think, and this is probably hindsight, or I’m sure it’s hindsight reasoning. It’s hard to know what you’re thinking at the time when you did something. But in high school, I was on the debate team. And so, the topic of what do you do in preparation for something was really interesting.
So, in preparation for a debate, you really have to marshal all of your arguments together and so on and so forth. Based on things like role playing research, which was known at the time, Janis and King, people moved in the direction of their preparation. So, first of all, as a result, it seemed like I wouldn’t do that.
It’s one of those me search topics. What I would do is I’d really prepare and I get more convinced of my side. And so, I would polarize. So you first think, well, your thing is just wrong, but you don’t tell your advisor that’s wrong. And in fact, you know, it’s not wrong because the data showed that that’s what people did.
So, the question then became, well, why would they do that? And that’s where the issue of the topic just didn’t seem to be something they cared about. Now, in debate, it’s not that you care about the topic necessarily, in the sense of we’re debating something I could care less about, but the topic’s important to me to prepare for because I want to win the debate, right? And so forth. And so you care about it in a different sense than you prepare, but the key thing is, did you prepare for the topic? And so, in hindsight, this study was really important to the rest of my career. And so, we have high and low relevance. And then, because I was at Ohio State and Tony Greenwald had invented the fault listing procedure.
It’s like, well, we got to build a fault listing into this to see if people actually are preparing and they write more thoughts when it’s a high involvement topic than a low involvement topic. And that can in fact account for the polarization that they do. And so you can see a lot of themes that later came to be in the work we did on the Elaboration Likelihood Model.
Andy Luttrell: But at the time, that was just certainly solving a real problem.
Rich Petty: One-shot study. No idea whatever. And so, again, in hindsight, I was like, wow, there’s a lot going on in that study that really came to be important. Another thing that study had, which in hindsight is amazing, is it had a measure of did the change lasted. And so, they moderated and then they polarized in anticipation of the discussion.
But then, we had conditions where we canceled the discussion. Oh, by the way. you’re not going to be discussing this after all, and then took another measure of their opinion. And in the impression management case, if you were just moderating to take a position that’s defensible, once the discussion was canceled, you’d go back to your original position, which is what happened called an elastic shift. I think that’s the title of the paper, Elastic shifts of Opinion.
But Bob, I think, also thought the polarization would be for impression management purposes, that if this topic’s important to me, I want to show that I really am committed to this, and so I’m going to polarize my position. And the test of that is, well, that should then snap back to its original position too, right? If that’s all it is.
But it turns out that one doesn’t snap back. That one stays more polarized.
Andy Luttrell: That study, we should just, that’s it.
Rich Petty: It has everything in there, doesn’t it? When you think about it.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. And that it wasn’t in the service of testing the model.
Rich Petty: Not at all.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah.
I want to go back to the debate thing. Again, I’m asking you to speculate on the cognitive process. When I talked to Nisbett, I was like, you know better than anyone that you don’t actually know what led you to study.
But was any part of your interest in, because you mentioned attitudes and that stuff, but then it’s really the persuasion piece that took hold, it seems, which, if we’re to make the movie of your life, the debate thing is going to lead right into that.
How much do you think that that is a legitimate version of the story versus happenstance? Those were two things that you were doing, and then one did not inform the other.
Rich Petty: One certainly didn’t lead directly to the other, but it does suggest that that’s a topic I was interested in, right? Because if you said, what I did was played a lot of tennis and you’d go and then you turn out doing something that’s very related to tennis, you could probably connect the dots.
And so the fact that I enjoyed debate so much, which is interesting because the goal in a debate is, as it turns out, isn’t to really persuade anybody, right? It isn’t to persuade anybody. It’s to look good, and do stuff. And I don’t know if you debated, you maybe debated, but it turns out one of the things that’s critical to winning debates is citing the most expert sources.
And so that’s one of the things you learn is that the merits of the arguments, as it turns out, don’t really matter as much as if who can pull out of their Rolodex or index box, Dr. So and so or whatever. And then the judges, because in some sense you’re not persuading them, but you’re trying to convince them that you have the best arguments. And because you’re talking about all these topics, the judges probably don’t know anything about.
In hindsight, what impresses them is the more experts that you can cite and the more impressive they are, you’re more likely to win. And so you spend a lot of time in debate, at least back then. Hopefully, it’s better now. Explaining who your sources are, why this person is so great. And then you say, Oh, and they endorse this.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. It’s a performance. Not so much.
Rich Petty: It’s a performance.
Andy Luttrell: It’s persuasive message.
So, you get to Ohio state and there’s a guy named John Cascio, but who gets there the same time?
Rich Petty: Same time. Yeah.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. I mean, this is one of the collaborations that is sort of probably one of the more central collaborations in social psych in terms of the longevity and the impact and all that. And you were just too grad student schmoes who show up. And I just want to know, because you were technically advised by different people eventually or was it Cialdini that advised both of you at first?
Rich Petty: No, Cialdini was my formal advisor. Tim Brock was John’s formal advisor in his first year. And then he shifted to Tony Greenwald as his advisor for his dissertation. And I went to Brock.
Andy Luttrell: So, how did you guys ever link up? What explains that connection?
Rich Petty: Good question. Something again, speculation, right? So, there were four of us in this class and entering class and, and you’re just sort of thrown in together in class. And it was a great class when you throw Gary Wells in there, you can imagine, all really bright people. Rod Bassett was the fourth member, who got his degree and is a social psychologist. I think teaches at more teaching-oriented institution, but it’s still in the field.
The classes back then were very much focused on interaction and debate. And so, Tim Brock, who taught some of the classes, Tony Greenwald, who taught some of the classes, were very interested in getting the students to interact with each other and debate things. And so that was the kind of atmosphere.
It was exciting. John and I and Gary and whatever often found ourselves sort of being forced into taking one or the other side of a position. And so you get to know people really well that way, and then just outside of class, John and I just hung out, and we were on the quarter system then, and so I lived in the dorms for one quarter, not the best thing, necessarily.
I don’t know, John came with a girlfriend and he was living with her and then after a quarter, he broke up with her. I was done with the dorms, and we ended up moving into a house. Second semester in the middle of winter. And so, Gary Wells was married at the time and had some children. And so he wasn’t available to
Andy Luttrell: Crash at the house.
Rich Petty: Crash at the house. And so John and I kind of roomed in together and then you get to know somebody very well. We’re taking all the same classes together and just had lots of time to interact and became really good friends.
Andy Luttrell: Was that the house that you were in or did you move from there?
Rich Petty: We moved from there. This house, we moved into it in the middle of winter, this house just off campus, very rundown, probably the most rundown place I’d ever lived in, in my life. And so when we went home for Christmas break, there was a break in and everything we owned of any value was stolen; a little TV, didn’t have laptops at the time, thank goodness or they would have been taken.
Andy Luttrell: The prized possessions of grad students.
Rich Petty: The prized possessions. They were gone. And then we kind of realized this isn’t like the safest environment to live in. And then we got our heating bill for the winter. And it was 5 times our monthly salary because the house had no insulation, everything leaked like a sieve. It was a particularly cold winter and we just had the heat cranked up.
You’re not giving much thought to that. And then we got our heating bill, which took us another year and a half to pay off once we moved. So, anyway, we ended up moving at the end of the year to something that couldn’t be more different than that old house. And it was to this brand-new apartment complex.
That turned out to be relatively inexpensive because it was way out in the northern part of town, and they just were desperate to have people move in. So, for, a fraction of what we’re paying for this on-campus thing, we had a place with racquetball courts, a swimming pool, brand new. It was luxurious.
Andy Luttrell: And the heating bill was manageable?
Rich Petty: The heating was in the rent, so it was pretty cool.
Andy Luttrell: That’s all you need. It was ideal. And that was then where you stayed?
Rich Petty: That was where was it?
Andy Luttrell: I’m just saying that for the duration then of grad school.
Rich Petty: Was there for the duration of grad school.
Andy Luttrell: And so that is then the location of the iconic wall, I’m guessing? Or was that different?
Rich Petty: The wall was in the old house.
Andy Luttrell: Oh, was it?
Rich Petty: We were there for two semesters. This is first year.
Andy Luttrell: Okay.
Rich Petty: First and second, third semester. You weren’t allowed to paint the walls in the apartment complex. It was far too nice.
Andy Luttrell: But you probably wanted to because…
Rich Petty: We’d gotten rid of it. I been there, done that probably, but it served its purpose.
Andy Luttrell: So, like the story of the ELM is, as far as science stories go, it’s a pretty solid story. It has a lot of those narrative elements and so I kind of want to unpack some of those here too and get some of those details, the details of the house are great.
And so what is this? I mean, anyone who’d like knows the inside scoop on the ELM story knows about this chalkboard wall. So, could you give just like an overview of where that idea came from, why you needed to do it, and in my impression, it would be in the Smithsonian of social psychology.
But I don’t know if that is your impression of it.
Rich Petty: I’m sure the painting the wall with the chalkboard paint was not my idea. I’m sure that was John’s idea because he just loved to doodle and write and work out things. And so, he was very mathematically oriented. And so, of course, in math, he always started writing out equations and things.
And he was already beginning his interest in psychophysiology, right? So, the board was useful for that. And so, I think that was the idea. But then, the connection to the ELM was when we were in the first year of studying for our attitudes class. And the core textbook at the time was a book by Chet Insko.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that book. It’s interesting to look at. If you looked at it today, you wouldn’t think it was a textbook. I should go back and look at it. But as I recall, it had topics for each chapter, but each chapter was just a list of studies. And it would say, Smith, and here’s what Smith found, and then here’s, Jones, and here’s what Jones found, and here’s what this, so just summaries of all these studies, that the test was going to be, can you memorize all these studies, which is rather difficult, because they all would find different things, and so you couldn’t say, oh, well, these studies have in common credible sources lead to more persuasion or repeating the message, leads to, more persuasion or whatever.
You had to know, oh, well, this study found this and this study found that. And in part it was, can we come up with a heuristic to help us remember which studies found this effect and which studies found that effect? And so that’s what the board was for. You can imagine making a big matrix on the board with the different variables down one column, and sort of other characteristics of studies, down the other end and try to use it as a heuristic.
And so the real connection to the ELM is not that we diagram the ELM on the chalkboard, but in the context of discussing all of these studies and what made them similar or different. Some of the core concepts that we later used in the ELM like well, this is an important topic and this is an unimportant topic, hold over from the, work I was doing at the very same time with Cialdini, right? or maybe this is a topic people know about and this is one they don’t know about, and so you later turn knowledge into example of an ability variable, so they’re able to do this.
This message is complicated, and so again, something that might relate to difficulty of understanding it. Why did this message? What is this variable repetition? What is that? What does it do psychologically? And so classically, it would be, well, repetition was important because it made you learn. It’s related to the induction of learning, but because of cognitive responses, you’d say, well, maybe repetition has something to do with thinking and you can think about it more.
And so, again, was later when we were writing our book, and in my dissertation, I put the first elements of doing it, trying to, that’s where the two roots came from, and then fleshing it out, going back with John and discussing with him, let’s expand even further what I had in the dissertation.
But the dissertation where the first presentation came of the schematic of the two roots, has its roots in that first study with Cialdini. As you can see, that one goes all the way to the consequences, right? That thoughtful persuasion will be more persistent than non-thoughtful persuasion, but also goes back very importantly to that blackboard or that chalkboard, and more not so much was on it literally, but all of the conversations with John about all these different variables.
And at the time it was, oh, we have variables like repetition and knowledge and complexity, and it was, ah, let’s take those and simplify those further into, well, some of these are motivating you, and some of those are enabling you. Some of these just seem like they don’t do either of those.
We didn’t have the word heuristic at the time, but they just seemed like simple cues that you could say, well, I like it because the expert said it or the attractive person said it, and so forth. And so then, all these roles that variables could play. And then could a variable like expertise not just be a simple cue, but maybe it could also affect thinking and motivate you to think, and so you could see how over the course of, by the time we got to the 1986 book, we’re really trying to work out it in much more detail, where the multiple roles thing became much more important.
Andy Luttrell: Did you remember, like, the conversation went back to the blackboard?
Rich Petty: Certainly, when I was doing it for the first in the dissertation that those conversations about trying to simplify these variables. You start out with all these studies that had so many different effects. Simplifying some of the variables into; well, expertise is a variable; a repetition is a variable, and then, trying to simplify it even further, which is where the dissertation came in. And then adding some critical stuff, like the multiple roles idea, going back, when we were turning it into a formal theory, did harken back, again, I would love to know what we actually had on the board, but very much like, you know, even if at the time I didn’t think that early study with Cialdini was impactful, you can’t help but read that study today.
I can’t help but go back and look at it and see how related it is. In fact, this is, this is crazy. Just a side note, two weeks ago, I get this email out of the blue, which you get a lot of them. But this person said it’s related to the 76 study, which is why he said, okay, so you measured thought confidence in that first study, but you didn’t say, you know, what you found. Thought confidence.
Like, no way! Did we measure thought confidence in this 1976 paper, my very first study. So, I have to go back and I was going to tell him, sorry, you misunderstood. So, I go back and read the paper. It’s two weeks ago, man! Here we do. We did that. We had thought listings. That, of course, I remembered, but then it said, okay, we then asked people to go back and rate how confident they were in the validity of their thoughts. No way!
And the person who wrote to me was right. And then no word was ever said in the rest of the paper about what we did with that. And so I can’t even remember where that came from or why it came. But it made me think, okay, well that was something I was thinking of at the time and then many, many years later when Pablo Brinol had came to visit with these strange data he had about head nodding, and I remember saying, well, that kind of looks like they’re validating their thoughts, that that’s the only thing is it’s not affecting how much they think or any of the other roles. It seems like it’s, it’s just making them go with their thoughts.
Let’s do a study where we actually measure that and thinking we were doing that for the first time, measuring it and that became a whole thing unto itself. And anyway, so it just shows how, how something, you know, early on an idea, you don’t even know where it came from, but there it is on the record. Has an impact later and influences you and you don’t know it.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. I’m thinking that the validation advances chapters 2006. Is that right? So, 30 years.
Rich Petty: 2009. Yeah. It’s even 2007 or 9.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. So, that was anticipated.
Rich Petty: But the first study is 2002, where I would, if someone asked me, I’d say, well, that’s when we first measured, you know, do you care about the validity of your thoughts? In psycho. And it’s like, oh, no, did it in 1970.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah, and it sounds like that study was just like, all the pieces just arrived to you as just like, well, I guess, yeah, we might as well measure this. Might as well look at the delayed effects and maybe importance is the thing. It’s almost like you intuited the rest of your career in that one study.
Rich Petty: Yeah, at some level, maybe because of debate or my interest, it’s like all the questions I had about persuasion, right? Does it last? What determines it? When do you move in this direction or that direction? Every intuition you might have had got built into that study, ironically, right?
Not that all of it mattered. So, we never said anything about persistence depends on the amount of thinking that you do. None of those ideas are in the paper, but the effects are all there, right? So, you can go back and at some level, you could have taken that one study and made it the first study, in a long line of research, which in hindsight it is.
So, now we’re saying, well, that actually is the first day in a long line of research. So that’s where my gratitude to Bob comes in just. getting me involved in some data he brought with him. So, in terms of these counterfactuals, you have to think, well, what if that wasn’t, what if Bob wasn’t there with that particular study and we didn’t do that particular study later?
Would these ideas probably still would be floating around, right? But who knows?
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. And like you said when Pablo came around, those were data that, already existed too, but you wanted to expand upon. So, like two inflection points of the ELM were data someone else had started. Projects other people had started.
Rich Petty: And trying to explain them.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. And then you went, oh, well, it’s a good thing, the explanation panned out. So, how’d you do on the test?
Rich Petty: Probably fine.
Andy Luttrell: I’ve heard rumor that there’s an irony that you didn’t do great in the attitudes class.
Rich Petty: Well, I did do fine in Tim Brock’s attitudes class that was the first one, sort of the introductory class, which is the one we were studying for. So, that one turned out okay. But it was Tony Greenwald’s advanced attitudes course. That I got a B and my only B in grad school.
Andy Luttrell: So Rich Petty couldn’t hack advanced attitudes.
Rich Petty: It was too tough.
Andy Luttrell: So, I’m actually curious, were Tim and Tony involved in this at all? Like, all the ELM studies are you and John and some other people who are not your grad school advisors. Was this just your own side project, or how involved were they? Like, I couldn’t imagine in grad school doing a similar kind of thing, of just teaming up with a buddy and doing our own stuff.
Rich Petty: Well, there was no Elaboration Likelihood Model study, literally, when I was a grad student. Unless you count that first study with Bob Cialdini, which, in hindsight, is very much an ELM study. So, the ELM, the even idea to do a theory came when I was doing my dissertation. So, my dissertation was about the persistence of persuasion.
We knew at that time that simply learning the arguments wasn’t enough. And they thought at the time, as you know with the Hovland School, that the better you learn the arguments, the more your attitude should persist. So, using the cognitive response approach, the answer was no, it should be the better you learn your thoughts, the more you could remember your thoughts, the more persuasions should persist.
So, that’s what my dissertation was about, was research where you got people to generate thoughts and some would try to memorize their thoughts and to see if a persuasion persisted more when you memorized your thoughts. Some would memorize the arguments instead and so forth. And that turned out to be true, that memorizing your thoughts led to more persistence than memorizing the arguments. And so that’s just an empirical study that is linked to the ELM in some sense, if you know it. But the concluding chapter in the dissertation is the outline of the model. And this is where Tim Brock comes in.
Tim read the first draft of the dissertation. And goes, so the studies are all well and good. They seem fine for a dissertation. But where’s your theory? Well, it’s learning theory, but applied to, it’s an application of learning theory to cognitive responses. I guess, no.
For a dissertation, you need to go off and develop a theory of attitude change. That’s what I’d like to see in your dissertation, which is quite a challenge when you think your dissertation’s done and your challenge to write a theory.
This is now where you draw on everything you’ve learned in grad school, all my conversations with John, the early influence of Cialdini in that first study, and so propose the two routes to persuasion as the concluding chapter, that there’s thoughtful persuasion.
Those are the conditions under which people would generate thoughts, and probably remember their thoughts, the more they are drawing on the depth of processing notions, right? The more carefully you attend to something, the better you remember it. But then added the cue thing that, right? It’s sort of an influence from Hovland where they had their augmenting and discounting cues, which they viewed as outside of the learning process.
And so that’s kind of, oh, yeah, that makes sense. They’re augmenting and discounting cues and they’re outside of the thinking process, right? But whereas they took them totally outside of the process and didn’t explain when they would work and when they wouldn’t, that’s where some of the stuff on the blackboard like, oh, expertise seems to work when people don’t care or don’t know much about the issue but expertise doesn’t seem to produce any impact when people are doing this thinking.
So, that was an advance over the Hovland notion of just there’s these augmenting discounting cues that just operate. It’s like, well, when do they operate? And then, Greenwald’s cognitive response approach was, well, this is what determines persuasion thinking, your cognitive responses.
It’s like, well, no, under low thinking, from the Cialdini study, they don’t. And so that’s where the whole idea of kind of, it was a chance to integrate all of these thoughts that had developed from the Cialdini study, working with John, studying for the test, to put it all in a handy form at the end of the dissertation. And Tim goes, great! You got a theory, so forth.
In my mind, it was like, well, this is kind of a nice roadmap. I was becoming an assistant professor starting the next year that now we can start to test those things. So, the first research to actually test some of those notions and the two routes didn’t occur till after grad school. So, that’s why Tim really wasn’t involved with that.
I’m not sure he would have been interested anyway, but those studies didn’t occur until I graduated. And it’s the concluding chapter of my dissertation, which is like the last thing you do, right? in grad school, is do that. So, it was the very beginning of my research career when I became a new assistant professor.
And, of course, John, who was at Notre Dame at the time would have these weekly phone calls to talk about what research was next on the docket, which was just a continuation of what we had done in grad school because we already started working together and had published a few papers in grad school.
We were able to continue that, which was so critical as a beginning assistant professor to get some feedback about what you’re doing and I would give him feedback on what he was doing. And so we both were very interested in the topic of change and social influence, sort of moved a bit in different directions over the years, but certainly started out in a very similar place.
Andy Luttrell: Is that why you have been a co-editor of a psychophysiology book? This reciprocity… Well, he was helping with the persuasion stuff, so my impression is that that was not in your wheel, like that was not the thing you were.
Rich Petty: Well, the chapter I wrote in there was on the psychophysiology of attitude change. And so, I was quite interested in that. And so the studies that John and I did in grad school all had to do with attitude change.
And so things like, well, if you’re counter arguing, can you measure that sub-vocally is our people sub-vocally mouthing things or if you look at Alpha activity in the brain, how was that impacted by a higher low elaboration? And so John was the expert in psychophysiology, and that was his sort of secondary thing.
And he did other kinds of psychophysiology studies that didn’t relate to attitude change. But those were really of interest and so we did collaborate intensely on both. John very much on the persuasion studies and me very much on the psychophysiology studies as they related to our joint interests.
Andy Luttrell: To that overlap, same question of when you’re trying to work with an advisor who’s like Well, okay, but…
Rich Petty: Yes, and so over time, it was more if I’d have a study I wanted to do, he’d be like, Well, there’s any psychophysiology in there? No, I don’t think so. Can you think of how to do it? And so then eventually, it was like, Well, he was less interested in that.
And I’d be asking, Was there any Attitude change in that one and is like, no, this is really about how the brain like… okay, bye-bye. But yeah, so for a while there was very… and so a number of the studies in the social psychophysiology book were about social influence, dissonance, and misattribution of arousal and so forth, as well as other things, but there was a good segment.
The question you could ask is why did you edit a book on cardiovascular psychophysiology. And so, you probably don’t know that one, but that was definitely, a case of, okay, I’ll do it and I’ll read the chapters to help make them more accessible to people who didn’t know the field, but that was painful and tedious and it was sort of… I’m not doing that anymore. And John moved off totally into it, but I did do that one. That was more of the payback, but not the social psychophysiology.
Andy Luttrell: Got it. That one has totally flown past me. I knew the psychophys one, but this I must have just thought, Oh, that must be a different
Rich Petty: Perspectives in Cardiovascular Psychophysiology. Edited a book where I read every chapter, but…
Andy Luttrell: And that was the last time you read any of those chapters. I wanted to ask about the impact of the ELM. And so, was there a moment where you started to see that this was actually informing stuff that you weren’t doing?
Because now this is like go to, this is the model that people are often using, talking to journalists, writing books about persuasion. They’re talking about the ELM being co-opted in all these other fields. I talked to political scientists, and they’re like, Oh yeah, no, everyone knows the ELM over here.
Was there kind of a moment where you sort of saw that it was picking up steam, sort of the, it was escaping you this contribution?
Rich Petty: Maybe not a moment, but because my dissertation in 77, I had the ELM, we started doing work on it, and then, of course, Shelly Chaiken in 78 had this heuristic systematic model of work going.
And so, what I think ended up being good for the ELM and as well as Shelley’s model was that these two things were going on about the same time. And so for one reason or another, different people who are interested in this topic would pick one approach or language over the other. And I think the fact that these both were going on, gave a sense to the field and outside the field that, ooh, there’s something really important going on with this.
And I always wondered if it was just us doing this thing, would it have gotten the same level of attention as when there are two things sort of triangulating? You can’t triangulate with two things, but you know what I mean.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah.
Rich Petty: That were going on that sort of like when there were the duelling attribution theories, right?
Kelley and Heider and different Jones. And so it’s like, Ooh, attribution. That’s a cool thing because different people have different points of view about what to do. And so I think, again, I can’t say I had this thought at the time. But in hindsight, I think the fact that there were these two different approaches that had a lot of similarities, a few differences, but more similarities than differences.
It gave it a sense both inside the field of social psychology and outside, ooh, that there’s something to these dual process or dual root models.
Andy Luttrell: Speaking of differences, from your vantage point, what are the differences? Because people will ask me and they’ll go, and I’m like, I should have a great answer, but I’m kind of hard-pressed to give like the definitive, here’s the prediction that they would make differently. It’s sort of like, hmm, pretty similar. Maybe the mechanism is like a little bit different, but is there like a go-to like, the HSM would say this, but the ELM would say this.
Rich Petty: I think it’d be tough to do a critical test of like when they said, well, what’s different between dissonance and self-perception? And you go, oh, it’s the discomfort or the arousal. That’s the critical difference. Otherwise, they make a lot of the same predictions.
The ELM and HSM, come out of different traditions. So, especially if you go back and look at the early HSM and stuff, it comes more out of the Hovland tradition. Alice Eagley, Shelly’s advisor, is more steeped in that. So, it comes more out of a learning tradition. And some of the early work they talk about learning and stuff, whereas the ELM comes out of the cognitive response tradition, which is a very non-learning arguments tradition.
But over time, I’d say they become more similar than they are different. So the key elements are the same. All right, there are these heuristic and systematic. Systematic and central, I think, are pretty similar. Systematic, very carefully, systematically studying. Central, focusing on the central, but they both would be high elaboration. It’d be hard pressed to see too much differences there.
Heuristic was much more specific. Use of heuristics like experts are correct. So, Shelly did some interesting work where she tried to prime heuristics to see if that would get people to do things focusing on that mechanism.
Whereas the peripheral route, was always meant to refer to a family of low effort processes. Heuristics would be one of them. But a classical conditioning where you have this affect transfer would be another. So, we didn’t specify the mechanism under and so that’s a difference that if you want to talk about a low effort mechanism, other than heuristics, then the ELM would be better for that purpose.
But you can turn any low effort thing into a heuristic if you want, I think. So, even conditioning, you could say, well, in essence, it’s, I felt good when I did this. So, I like it, even if it’s not an explicit heuristic that you’re using that that it’s more implicit heuristic.
But if you want to allow for that, that any association could be verbalized at some point and that’s even a debate within conditioning these days, right? Whether these things happen automatically or whether they have to be translated into propositions, in which case they’d be more like heuristics. So even that one, depending on how open you were to having different kinds of heuristics, they would be pretty similar.
The biggest difference might be, I think, in the multiple roles when we propose that they’re actually, two roots, but that just refers to the high and low effort. But the key thing the model did was to say for any variable, what is it actually doing? And so, that is different. But after we proposed that, then HSM had a way of talking about it. So, for example, talk about heuristic processing, biasing, systematic processing,
Andy Luttrell: I knew there was a motivation bias thing that they were proposing as some this like innovation. And I always thought, well, I mean, that’s kind of part of the ELM already, sort of baked in.
Rich Petty: Yeah. So, I think today it’s more a matter of… I’m sure you could find something that we’ve written or the HSM people have written that’s different, but I think it’s more a matter of preference. Of course, I have my preferences, but I think they’ve helped reinforce each other.
Andy Luttrell: Shelly was involved with the dual process book too, which probably was another just thing that was stoking interest in the general thing.
Rich Petty: Yeah. The dual processes of impression formation. Do you rely on category-based impressions like stereotypes? You belong, you’re a female, so you should be like this. Well, that was kind of like heuristics or cues as opposed to individuating, which would be more like high elaboration and so then there were a whole bunch of more specialized dual process things that came after all culminating in some sense with turning into dual systems where people really went hog wild and said, well, now we’ve got different systems of the brain that do system one and two and X and Y and so forth that have a lot of baggage that come with them. So it really became dominant.
Andy Luttrell: So at the time of the ELM coming together, was this a thing that was like, you know, because eventually it was pick your favorite topic in social psychology. There’s a dual process model of it. I mean, you were just sort of trying to solve a puzzle at the moment and the solution was this dual process thing, but was that sort of borrowing from what was out there?
Rich Petty: The closest borrowing would be the levels of processing and memory. It was all about when would you remember words? And so if you saw a word like happy, and you thought about its features, like, is it upper or lower case?
That would be a question they’d ask you is happy in upper or lower case. That would be shallow processing of the word. Didn’t require much or extensive processing deeper processing is Fred characters. You see the word happy and you go, does that characterize Fred? And so that would require more thinking, that would be a deeper.
So, they had the continuum went from shallow to deep processing, but it’s all about words because it comes from cognitive psychology, and they want to know what helps you learn words better. And so that would be a continuum of thinking that existed before the elaboration continuum. And so that idea was influential and was out there, but it was used to explain recall.
We’re just like, well, we don’t want to explain recall, but this depth of processing is important not just about individual words, but arguments and so forth.
The reason I think that is a precursor and I like that is because it was seen as a continuum going from shallow to deep. It wasn’t a dual process. And so when the Elaboration Likelihood Model came, one of the confusions is we really thought of it as a continuum. It’s an elaboration continuum, right? How likely is it could go from zero to continuum?
Andy Luttrell: Right there in the name.
Rich Petty: I think it’s right there. But then we said when you’re up here on the high end, we’re going to call those processes central root processes without articulating all of the processes that might occur. So, they would be things like cognitive responding. It could be things like what Fishbein & Ajzen talk about thinking about the likelihood and desirability of things that would be a high effort process. And likewise, at the low end, these peripheral processes could be things like conditioning or balance theory, you just go along with it because someone you like goes along with it or an attribution approach or heuristic approach, and so it was a family of processes that occurred under high and low thinking, but then there had to be variables that pushed you one way or the other like involvement.
So, it was all always a theory that had multiple processes that operated along a continuum. And so, thought of as a dual process, but that sort of artificially makes you put things into one or the other as opposed to a continuum, which is really what it is.
Andy Luttrell: I almost wonder if the success of the ELM is in the misinterpretation of it because the categorical, it just there’s something so appealing about that like the success of thinking fast and slow as a book in the public kind of astounds me but I think it’s such an intuitive I’m talking about system one.
Rich Petty: Which is one or the other.
Andy Luttrell: Because you’re well, it’s these kinds of things are these kinds of things that I make decisions using one type of brain or the other type of brain. And I think people love the allure of like, Oh, there’s two routes and persuasion can happen two different ways. And you’re either going to go down one or the other.
And there’s this coin that we can flip that’ll tell you where you go. And in some ways, the nuance that makes it actually a more elegant model might have just failed to capture as much attention if that became.
Rich Petty: Well and definitely once the HSM came out and I think the title of the first paper was a systematic versus heuristic processing as if it’s one or the other sort of then it’s like, oh, we have central or peripheral.
It’s got to be one or the other and people would say, which variables are the peripheral ones and which ones are the central ones? Well, no, actually, any variable could be either depending on what you do, which is pretty complicated to explain, and so we, I’m sure, fell into the trap of going. It’s peripheral, you followed the peripheral route as if that’s just one path, as opposed to, well, the peripheral route is more likely the lower you are on the elaboration continuum.
I was like, what are you saying?
Andy Luttrell: Which one am I on?
Rich Petty: I’m like, which one, I just want to know, which, is the right path or the left path? And so that’s a little confusing, but there are these different processes that take place that are mostly characterized differently under high or low thinking. But yeah, just what it is.
Andy Luttrell: It did all right. And so the thing that makes it tricky is it’s a very good explanatory model, but when you teach persuasion, people want to go, well, how do I? What should I do? How should I use it? And I’m a little hard-pressed sometimes to find, like, well, here’s the practical implication of, like, here’s the advice I would give you, but you’ve spent more time thinking about this.
So, surely people have asked you lots of times, so how do I be more persuasive? Do you think the ELM gives practical advice for things like that?
Rich Petty: The advice is figure out where you are along that continuum first. And so that means knowing something about your audience, potentially, knowing something about the context in which your message will be delivered, knowing something about the nature of the topic that you’re talking about.
And so these are all these things that you can sort of put together and figure out where your default position. If you did nothing, if I didn’t intervene. It’s like, I have to talk about this topic, and I have to talk to this audience, and I have to talk in a big auditorium, or whatever. And then once you know where you are, it’s like, if you are on the low, if you find out, okay, they’re not going to be very motivated, they don’t know much about this, blah, blah, blah, I’m going to be on the low end.
Then the question becomes, well, okay, do you have really, strong arguments that you could present that if people thought about them, would be compelling to them? Do you have those kind of arguments? And sometimes the answer is going to be, nope, I don’t have any of those.
But if the answer is yes, then the ELM’s advice is, okay, you want to move them up. Here are some of the tools you can use to move them higher on the continuum because you’ve got arguments that are good, and maybe it’s, well, you need to repeat them, that gives them more opportunity. Or you need to motivate, you need to show them the personal relevance of these, which isn’t naturally there to them.
Or you need to educate them first, so they are able to process it. All right, so the ELM points to all these different tools that we have in our toolbox that if you diagnose, yeah, I need to move them higher on the continuum. Or if you don’t, then we’re left with cues. It’s like, okay, well, pull out your cues in the toolbox and that at least we’ll get the momentarily to agree or like it.
But bear in mind, because it won’t be very temporary, you’re going to have to keep reminding them and spending your money and keep advertising or whatever you’re doing and/or emailing them or whatever. Because you’re going to have to keep reminding them of those cues. If you’re at the high end, they’re going to really want to think about this, then you might think about, well, are they going to think about this in an objective way?
So, my arguments, if I have strong arguments, will come forward or are they going to be biased? And so you start to look at, again, these are all things within the theory that you can use to diagnose your situation. And so unlike on the low end, if you’re on the high end, then you immediately go to, well, what are my arguments and pretest your arguments.
And if people aren’t going to respond positively to them, you better change those arguments or decide, well, because of legal reasons, I have to give these arguments and they’re really weak. Then, you’re going to want to push them down. the continuum and distract them and throw in cues. And so yeah, I think, but the first thing, right in the title of the theory, elaboration likelihood, figure out what the likelihood is of elaboration in your situation.
And then all the other features of the theory can come in to help you know what to do or where your leverage is. Where do I have cases? And so, if I’m on the low end of thinking Cialdini has six or seven now heuristics that you can use, right? Great, but those are particularly going to be effective when you’re down there and people don’t have time to think about it and they need to give you a quick response.
Yes, I’ll buy this or no, I won’t. And so forth, and maybe sometimes influence the question is, do you care if you really change their attitude, in which case we’re in the domain of attitude change, or do you just want them to do something, and you don’t care, if they like it or not, and so the current vaccine thing is and people call and ask about that.
And they say, well, how do we change their attitudes? It’s like, you know, you don’t really need to. We don’t care if they love vaccines or they think they’re the best thing. You just want them to get a vaccine. And if entering a lottery will get them to do it, even if they think it’s not the best thing. That’s fine. That will help society. And so, attitude change isn’t always the correct route to behavior change.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah, it’s almost also the implication. I can’t give you the magic strategy that’s going to be persuasive. It’s that you need to know that this strategy is going to work sometimes and not others.
But the nice thing is we kind of have some sense of when it’s going to work and when it’s not going to work. It’s not just like, Hey, good luck. But yeah, identifying where along that continuum people are going to already be at and then using that to inform.
Rich Petty: Right. But you’re right. Everyone wants to know, well, what’s the best cue to use? I just want to know the best one or what’s the best argument or what’s the best thing? And it’s like, no, if it were that simple, you know, we wouldn’t have 10,000 studies on influence. It’s not that simple. What’s the best argument in this context might not be the best argument in another context.
Is it a high or low thinking context? What’s a good cue for one person might not be a good cue for another person. You have to match the right cue to the message and so the good thing is that for any applied person, they know what their topic is. They know what information they have and so forth. And so they can use the ELM to try to figure out what’s the best way to strengthen that argument and get people to pay attention to it if that’s what they want?
Or what cues are going to work in this context or for their audience and so forth? And so the ELM really is just a list of things to be concerned about and becoming an expert in it will allow you to go from one situation to the next because the specifics are going to change from one situation to the next.
But the principles, like you have to motivate them to think they’re the same from one situation to the next.
Andy Luttrell: They just look different.
Rich Petty: They look, they’re instantiated or in the language of experimentation, they’re operationalized differently, but at the conceptual level, they’re the same.
Andy Luttrell: Great. I think I’m gonna leave it there. I think I got plenty of stuff.
Rich Petty: Good.
Andy Luttrell: Alrighty. That’ll do it for another episode of Opinion Science. Big, big thank you to Rich Petty for putting up with me, not just with this interview, but like in general for the past 14 years. Thank you for everything, truly.
If you want to know more about Rich, I don’t know, open any psychology textbook. But otherwise, if you’re interested in any of his almost 500 research articles, you can find a link to his website in the show notes.
For more about this show, well, gosh, you can find it at opinionsciencepodcast.com. There you’ll find all the past episodes, ways to support the show, and other fun stuff. Make sure you’re subscribed to or follow the show on your favorite podcast player so you don’t miss anything.
And leave a review online. Apple podcasts is a great spot, but wherever you’re listening to this is probably fine too. I just checked the show’s reviews and I saw a fairly recent one from a listener in Ghana who said it gives very insightful information about opinions, group behavior, and behavioral psychology.
I’m still floored that I get to say thank you to someone in Ghana who listens to my voice. But that’s the wild ride that this has been. Okay. I’m all set here. Hopefully, you’re feeling good. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next month for more Opinion Science. Bye.
