Research-Based Theory Analysis Essay: Social Judgement Theory and Elaboration Likelihood Model
Christina De La Ossa
Donald Edison
Annissa Fitch
Tommy McCardle
Matthew Saribut
California State University San Bernardino
Abstract
This paper analyzes two theories in communication, Social Judgement Theory (SJT) and Elaboration Likelihood Method (ELM). For each theory, four published articles have been reviewed to draw strengths and weaknesses from the theories. In the SJT articles, not every article aimed to use SJT as a tool to evaluate and bring understanding to their hypothesis. Siero and Doosje (1993) argued that the SJT had a number of methodological and theoretical problems. In the ELM articles, Lazard and Atkinson (2015) posits that they can combine both SJT and ELM. Another approach in an article was from Flynn, Worden, Bunn, Connolly, and Dorwaldt (2011), as the purpose to their research was to see if ELM can be used to contribute research in finding if adolescents are at risk to developing smoking habits. Furthermore, there were comparisons of similarities and differences between SJT and ELM, such as perceived competence and personal involvement being a shared element while differences between the two theories were relatively fewer.
Research-Based Theory Analysis Essay: Social Judgement Theory and Elaboration Likelihood Model
Communication is the process of creating meaning through using verbal and nonverbal signs. Gerard Miller states, “Communication is a transactional and symbolic process.” As such, people communicate every day, either through interaction with other people, surrounding environment, or through introspection. Due to this, it is argued that one cannot not communicate. The elements of which to communicate come from the communicator itself, the message that is being conveyed, the context in which to define the meaning of the message, and the dimension of the context. Why people communicate range from expressing feelings to persuading those that they come into contact with. Numerous studies have been done to understand the psychological aspect of persuasion. Within the realm of persuasion are theories that help better understand why people perceive things the way they do, or make it easier to predict their behavior, attitude, or schemata towards topics. This paper explores two theories, SJT and ELM, and evaluates what aspects of these theories can be relevant to communication as does Unsworth and Harries (2015) attempts in their article to gain understanding of the decision making process of general practitioners.
Social Judgement Theory
First introduced by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland, SJT is a method of persuasion where Sherif established three zones; those being the latitude of acceptance, latitude of rejection, and the latitude of noncommitment. Other key elements to the SJT are a person’s ego involvement and anchor position. The theory states that in the moment of perception, a person judges messages in comparison to their current point of view. Siero and Doosje (1993) hypothesize that messages in the noncommitment zone are expected to cause the biggest change in attitude. In another hypothesis, they argue that a person with high motivation will elaborate the message more intensely. Meaning they will read the message in the folder more carefully and precisely to understand the details. The methodology was the subjects received a folder containing a persuasive message. In that message, was followed up by a weak or strong argument. Their results and findings, as expected, support both of their hypothesis. This goes hand in hand with a person’s ego-involvement in that the more a person is involved with a subject matter, the higher their involvement in the topic. Furthermore, those with a high motivation, or ego-involvement, also reacted very differently to weak or strong arguments in comparison to those with low motivation. This also makes sense due to the fact that those that are highly involved in a subject matter will greatly be affected than those that are not highly involved. However, the results of this study do not provide any evidence for the assimilation-contrast effects. In other words, no data could conclude if individuals could perceive their message as being closer or farther away from their own positions on the latitude than it actually is. The study also admits how unclear the SJT and ELM can be related to each other. Therefore concluding the study that discovering how a message in the latitude of rejection is subject to counter argumentation without the result of a shift of opinion, is unable to be answered. The conclusion rested on how a more carefully designed laboratory experiment could clarify this question whereas this study could not. On the other hand, results of this study can benefit future research because this study provides a foundation that is equivocal if and when assimilation-contrast effects occur. Also, this study takes note of the manipulation of arguments.
Another way the SJT method was used is in the study how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors made fitness-to-drive recommendations (Unsworth, Harries, & Davies, 2015). The reason for this study was because “very little is known about how therapists use information to make decisions” (Unsworth, et al., 2015). Instead of a hypothesis, the research was to gain more understanding of how decisions were made and that the method in which to do so was by recruiting a number of experienced occupational therapists. The research questions were what fitness-to-drive recommendations are made, how do occupational therapy driver assessors determine the importance of different types of information when making the decision for older people and people with disabilities, and do the therapists have a general consensus about the fitness-to-drive decisions that are made. Case scenarios were then created for the therapists, to which they were to fill out and complete. The researchers themselves use the SJT in a numerous amount of ways to explore how the therapists decide if a person is fit to drive or not. One way they use the SJT is a “quantitative approach that uses statistical methods to describe the relationship between the information available and an individual’s judgment.” (2015). Also they state that it is the best judgement or decision making process when the optimal judgement is not known and where there are real world consequences when errors are made. The researchers also were able to find out to the level of degree to which the therapists agreed upon decisions or not. However, a weakness to this study was stated that the sample size of forty five occupational therapy driver assessors is very small, so increasing the number for future studies would be beneficial.
A similar research article was created by Smith, Gilhooly, and Walker (2003) in that they were aiming to understand the decision making process of general practitioners and investigate the extent that clinical guidelines influence their decisions along with identifying any factors that influence the general practitioners behaviors when making their decision. A questionnaire was created and the results became varied. Though relative importance was given to symptoms and patient’s characteristics, the level of agreement between guideline experts and general practitioners varied slightly in general, but drastic in a few cases. This shows that the SJT still is relatively different for each person in terms of where their anchor position lies.
Chen, Jing, and Lee (2014) found that competence, social dominance, and likeability are distinct from each other in their article about the looks of a leader. Correlation between perceived competence and social dominance were small as well as association between competence and likeability. There was a negative relationship between social dominance and likeability and trustworthiness plays a primary role in global impression formation, yet also was unrelated to real-life outcomes. That being said, trustworthiness is only influential when the social targets are perceived as meeting a high standard of competence. Facial features created a backlash for political candidates in actual elections, where all four personality traits were to predict the winning of the hypothetical elections. The weakness in this research was the participants not having the option to indicate that two candidates were equal, thus creating the “False Dilemma” fallacy, however a strength was giving the participants an in-depth look at a candidate’s character through personality traits.
Elaboration Likelihood Method
Within the ELM article by Chmielewski (2012), it was found through questionnaires that the political party preference was related to voting in the high involvement contest. Meaning, the high involvement individuals rather than the low involvement individuals had more of an actual political party preference, going more towards the central route. On the other hand, candidate image and favorability was strongly related to voting preference to the low involvement voters. This goes along the same theme as a person’s peripheral route in terms of voting.
Lazard and Atkinson (2015) did research on how ELM and SJT could be combined. And experiment was conducted to study the relative impact of visual messages versus text-based messages on audience elaboration. They state that “it is significant to recognize the way a message is framed and received by audiences can influence the message’s effectiveness.” (Lazard & Atkinson, 2015) and that the “study demonstrated that in order to increase a viewer’s response, visual information must guide the audience in a complex and reliable manner.” (2015). The first question was based on discovering if an individual’s visual literacy competency affect the level of elaboration for pro-environmental text-based or infographic messages. The second question was based on discovering significant differences for elaboration between the text based and visual based messages. The results were that visual learners had a consistent level of elaboration in either format and verbal learners had a greater level of elaboration when exposed to an infographic message.
Another ELM article was researched to see if it could be used as as helpful strategy for reaching adolescents at risk for developing a smoking habit (Flynn, Worden, Bunn, Connolly, & Dorwaldt, 2011). The article also had the question of “does progress in reducing youth smoking depend on developing better methods in communicating with higher risk youth?” The methodology had students from public schools evaluate three types of preventative smoking messages based on strategies supported by the ELM. The results were that those that may initiate smoking find that strong factual messages are appealing for “active consideration of the pros and cons of cigarette smoking” (2011). This means that they are using more of a central route when it comes to making the decision if they will smoke or not.
In the article by Yates (2001), it asks the question “does media literacy training increase the likelihood of persuasion via the central route and what role does media literacy training play in influencing children’s attitudes toward a product of high personal relevance?” The methodology was through an experiment and to find out if their attitudes towards products changed. The findings were that there were no differences among groups of subjects when level of treatment, argument quality, and number of arguments were considered. It is not known what each child’s particular exposure to the product in question was, or their exposure to television for that matter, so as far as this product being of relevance to each child is unknown.
Comparisons: Strengths, Weaknesses, Similarities, and Differences
In SJT, a major component referred to is ego involvement. When a person is to be considered having ego involvement on a matter, it means that the matter at hand is extremely relevant to their life. A group member in the presentation had high ego involvement on the topic of punishment for those who were pulled over in their vehicle for driving drunk. The group member recalled having a friend that lost their license due to drunk driving, which caused the group member to be a personal driver for their friend for a period of time, and this affected the group member’s life to a degree which became relevant to their life. This could be compared to the central route processing as a component in the ELM. The central route uses the information that a person already know about a topic, or putting in time and effort to research as much information as one can on a subject because it is personally relevant to them. An example would be a person shopping for a new car to get them to work. If they must drive 200 miles per day, it is likely they would research cars with the best gas milage within a particular price range. Key elements that would persuade this person would be cars that are the cheapest in their price range in relation to getting the best gas mileage, meaning that price and gas mileage are central to their decision making process. Chen, Jing, and Lee (2014) having participants from psychology students with high ego-involvement in the experiment due to gaining course credit.
There are also similarities found with non-commitment within SJT and the peripheral route in ELM. Non-commitment occurs when a person does not know enough about a topic to make a decision one way or the other as the peripheral route is similar in that if the person being persuaded is limited in knowledge about a particular subject, it does not hold much relevance to them personally. Therefore, they can be more easily persuaded in either theory by the persuader, with factors such as the persuader being physically attractive or their perceived knowledge of the subject playing a larger part than normal. Chmielewski (2012) noted in their article that candidate image was related to voting for those who were not involved in the campaign.
The strengths to both the ELM and the SJT is that understanding the theories themselves can allow someone to more easily persuade another. This is due to the understanding of where an anchor position may lie or what peripheral route may be taken as a path of least resistance to persuade a target.
A particular weakness with the ELM and the SJT is that in most of the articles read, the researchers did not give a position or stance on any particular idea. Another weakness is that because most of the methodology were controlled experiments, surveys, or questionnaires, it can not be known how honest the answers were given by the samples. Indeed, it seems to be an innate problem with either the ELM and the SJT as it is difficult to find a methodology where it can be done naturally without control or surveys.
References
- Chen, F. F., Jing, Y., & Lee, J. M. (2014). The looks of a leader: Competent and trustworthy, but not dominant. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 5127-33. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2013.10.008
- Chmielewski, T. L. (2012). Applying the Elaboration Likelihood Model to Voting. International Journal Of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 6(10), 33-47.
- Flynn, B. S., Worden, J. K., Bunn, J. Y., Connolly, S. W., & Dorwaldt, A. L. (2011). Evaluation of smoking prevention television messages based on the elaboration likelihood model. Health Education Research, 26(6), 976-987. doi:10.1093/her/cyr082
- Lazard, A., & Atkinson, L. (2015). Putting Environmental Infographics Center Stage: The Role of Visuals at the Elaboration Likelihood Model’s Critical Point of Persuasion. Science Communication, 37(1), 6-33. doi:10.1177/1075547014555997
- Siero, F. W., & Doosje, B. J. (1993). Attitude change following persuasive communication: Integrating Social Judgment Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model. European Journal Of Social Psychology, 23(5), 541-554.
- Smith, L., Gilhooly, K., & Walker, A. (2003). Factors influencing prescribing decisions in the treatment of depression: A social judgement theory approach. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17(1), 51-63.
- Unsworth, C., Harries, P., & Davies, M. (2015). Using Social Judgment Theory method to examine how experienced occupational therapy driver assessors use information to make fitness-to-drive recommendations. The British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 78(2), 109-120. doi:10.1177/0308022614562396
- Yates, B. (2001). Media Literacy and Attitude Change: Assessing the Effectiveness of Media Literacy Training on Children’s Responses to Persuasive Messages Within the ELM. n.p.:
