Exam (elaborations) UNDERSTANDING Medical Surgical Nursing

This review describes two core processes involved in understanding how attitudes are structured and changed. Elaboration refers to the extent to which people think carefully or in a more cursory manner about messages and validation refers to the extent to which people see their thoughts and attitudes resulting from messages as correct or not. Elaboration is important for understanding both initial attitude changes that occur as a result of media exposure as well as whether those changes are consequential (e.g., resist change and relate to behavior). Validation processes are important for understanding whether thoughts are relied upon in forming attitudes and whether attitudes are relied upon in determining behavior. Elaboration and validation are related in a number of ways such as when more extensive elaboration of an issue leads to an attitude that is perceived to be valid. Every year, governments, agencies, and companies spend billions of dollars in attempts to change peoples’ attitudes about social policies, political candidates, consumer products, health and safety practices, and charitable causes. The technological advances of the last century have made it possible Address correspondence to Pablo Briñol, Department of Psychology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Campus de Cantoblanco, Carretera de Colmenar, Km. 15, 28049 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: 267 Downloaded by [Ohio State University Libraries] at 10:26 15 July 2015 268 P. Briñol and R. E. Petty not only for institutional, but also for individual communicators to have constant access to unprecedented numbers of potential message recipients. In most of these instances, the ultimate goal is to influence peoples’ behavior so that they will vote for certain politicians or proposals, purchase products, engage in safer activities, or donate money to various causes. The success of media campaigns depends in part on the extent to which transmitted communications are effective in changing the attitudes of the recipients in the desired direction, and also on whether these modified attitudes in turn influence peoples’ behaviors over time. Our goal in this review article is to present a brief overview of two critical psychological processes that can be used to understand mass media attitude change. Specifically, in this review, we describe two core processes that have proven to be highly useful in understanding how attitudes are structured and how they change or resist change over time. We begin with an analysis of the role of elaboration processes and then describe the role of validation processes. After briefly describing each of these processes, we discuss their interrelationship, including applications of these approaches to understanding attitudes toward a variety of objects ranging from consumer products to people and groups. Understanding attitude formation and change is key to understanding which behaviors people enact and, as we will see, the processes of elaboration and validation are central to understanding the relationship between attitudes and behavior (Petty & Briñol, 2014). After explicating elaboration and validation processes, we first demonstrate the utility of these concepts by exploring a common persuasion technique—matching the source or the message to the target of influence. To provide an illustration particularly relevant to the study of media psychology, we address how aggressive people playing violent videogames can create a match and thereby influence attitudes and persuasion through these two processes, leading to a variety of paradoxical effects. After this, we outline the importance of considering the concepts of elaboration and validation in order to understand a number of other phenomena related to attitude structure and behavior change. ELABORATION Elaboration is a core construct in the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), one of the earliest dual process theories that distinguished thoughtful from non-thoughtful determinants of judgment (see Chaiken & Trope, 1999). Since the introduction of this model there has been an explosion of dual process and dual system theories of potential relevance for understanding attitudes (see Sherman, Gawronski, & Trope, 2014), although much persuasion research remains guided by the ELM. The ELM proposes that attitudes, as well as other judgments, can be Downloaded by [Ohio State University Libraries] at 10:26 15 July 2015 Elaboration and Validation Processes 269 modified by processes that involve relatively high or low amounts of issue or object-relevant thinking or elaboration, but the processes and consequences of persuasion are different depending on the amount of thought involved.1 Furthermore, the ELM holds that there are numerous specific processes of attitude and belief change that operate along the elaboration continuum. For example, classical conditioning (Staats & Staats, 1958) requires relatively little thought and operates at the low end of the continuum, but expectancy-value models of attitudes (e.g., Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) require high degrees of thought and operate along the upper end of the continuum. The mental processes that occur along the low end of the continuum are collectively referred to as following the peripheral route to persuasion whereas the operation of processes along the high end of the continuum are collectively referred to as following the central route to persuasion. Whether attitude change occurs as the result of relatively high or low amounts of thinking matters not only for determining what attitude is formed, but it also determines how consequential or strong that attitude is (see Petty & Krosnick, 1995, for a review of