Elaboration Likelihood Model

A two-route account of persuasion: when a person is able and motivated to think about a message they process its arguments; when they are not, they respond to the cues around it instead.

Richard Petty & John Cacioppo (1986), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

What it does

Tells you which lever the situation has left you. Under high elaboration argument quality decides and the spokesperson does not; under low elaboration the reverse holds. It is why the rational-versus-emotional argument in advertising is badly posed — the route, not the appeal, is the variable — and it predicts that attitudes formed by the central route last longer and resist counter-argument better.

When it breaks

Elaboration is not observable in advance. In the field the route gets inferred from what worked, which makes the model unfalsifiable there: a rational ad that failed is relabelled a low-elaboration situation and the model is preserved. It also presumes a decision worth thinking about, and most category purchases are low-attention repeats where neither route is engaged and availability decides the outcome.

Case

Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann tested the model on advertising directly, varying involvement, argument quality and endorser prominence for the same product. Under high involvement, argument quality drove attitudes and the celebrity endorser did not; under low involvement, the endorser drove attitudes and the arguments did not — the same ad elements changing sign with the audience's motivation to think.

Petty, Cacioppo & Schumann — Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement, Journal of Consumer Research (1983) ↗

Diagram not yet drawn

Two routes running from message to attitude, one through argument evaluation and one through cue, the resulting attitudes drawn at different weights and durabilities — plus a dotted line showing the route being assigned backwards from the outcome.

In the wild

Unchecked · not part of the tier

What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.

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