Browsing by Subject "harkinnan todennäköisyysmalli"

My thesis is a scientific review written for psychology students and researchers, wherein I assess factors affecting attitude certainty. Research on persuasion and attitude change has political, commercial, educational, therapeutic and everyday value. The most popular model describing attitude change is the elaboration likelihood model, according to which attitudes shift either through the central route, where people think though the pertinent issue carefully, or through the peripheral route, where environmental cues lead to a shift in the attitude. A large proportion of the research on persuasion and attitude change has been conducted with an emphasis on marketing with relatively homogeneous populations and low-stakes research frames. Therefore, the generalizability of these results warrants skepticism. People have differing cognitive styles and ways of processing information, one of which is the need for cognition. It reflects individual differences in the extent to which people enjoy cognitive tasks. The elaboration likelihood model has been studied through this construct, which has been linked to attitude permanence. However, the need for cognitive closure, which reflects the tendency to form opinions quickly and to hold on to them steadfastly, has been found to have a similar effect. Also, intellectual humility might moderate the connection between elaboration and attitude certainty. In this review I critique the elaboration likelihood model through these contradicting research results. I also reflect on the effects of the thoughtfulness heuristic (which refers to the tendency to feel as if one has thought about a certain issue more than one has) and the type of information assessed (e.g. is the issue familiar or new) on attitude certainty. The material referred to in this review was searched using Scopus and Google Scholar. Keywords used were, among others, ”elaboration likelihood model”, ”attitude change”, ”attitude certainty” and “persuasion”. The material spanned the years 1980–2017. The focus was on articles concerning the elaboration likelihood model, attitude change and differing cognitive styles, many of which were published in the journals ”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology” and ”Personality and Social Psychology”. The elaboration likelihood model’s 7th postulate, according to which attitudes formed through the central route are stronger than the ones formed through the peripheral route, ought to be questioned. Also, the research results on the thoughtfulness heuristic blur the distinction between the model’s central and the peripheral routes. The generalizability of the model is limited, because the variance in cognitive styles is greater than the one in the population used in the creation of the model. Different cognitive styles ought to be compared using longitudinal settings in order to gather more information about the true permanence of attitudes.