Have you ever
found yourself holding this weird thing you got some time ago and thinking,
“Why in the world did I even buy it? I will never use it in a million years!” Don’t
worry – not all of it is your fault, you might have been influenced by
commercials and advertisements of this product that in many cases have been
very carefully constructed and created by professionals who put a lot of effort
into making sure you won’t be able to deny. And social psychology principles
serve them well.
According to Petty and Cacioppo (1986),
we use a dual-process model to perceive information (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
That means that if we focus on the content of the message itself, strong
arguments, we use the central route of processing; but if we are concentrated
more on other aspects of the presented information like who wrote the message, how
much we like that person, how long it was, we use peripheral route to
persuasion. And we choose the way we want to engage in whether central or peripheral
processing based on our ability (Is it easy to understand the message?) and
motivation (How much could it affect me personally?). If we are highly
motivated and willing to show interest in the topic, we will use central route
processing. But if we are lazy and unmotivated, we will go with a peripheral route
processing (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
Politicians and sales-people use it
to take advantage of us all the time, but I would like to talk about something
we see all around us every day: advertisements, specifically for products
targeting young people. When you are 20 and flipping through a magazine, the
last thing you will want to do is to read a hundred reasons for why this
product is good written in a barely readable font with no pictures. So, companies
advertise themselves in a way that is very clear, easy to understand and
attention grabbing. For example, this advertising campaign for a Bulgarian
vodka Flirt:
The caption with
a table says “She said she was making cake”. And the caption with a man says “He
said he was picking roses”. The message is very short, it takes just a few
seconds to read and it definitely targets the peripheral processing route. Yet,
we find it interesting, using humor and sexual context also works great in
attracting young generation because this is something that is exciting and
interesting to them. Sometimes, like in this ad for a male deodorant that is
promising you to get all the girls in the world, there are no words or actors
needed:
Petty, R. E.,
& Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). Communication
and persuasion: Central and peripheral routes to attitude change. New York:
Springer-Verlag.
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