Source factors in occupational health and safety communication: An ELM perspective

Transcription

1 Source factors in occupational health and safety communication: An ELM perspective Master Thesis Bjørn Jacobsen Aarhus University Business and Social Sciences Department of Business Communication Supervisor: Chiara Valentini Characters(no spaces) in abstract: 1832 Characters(no spaces) excluding front page, abstract, table of contents, list of appendices and bibliography:

2 Abstract The paper examines how Petty and Cacioppo s Elaboration Likelihood Model(ELM) can be practically applied to improve occupational health and safety communication. Literature on the ELM is reviewed alongside with some literature on occupational health and safety management, and based on this theoretical foundation three hypotheses are created about how a construct variable called the organizational proximity of the source would affect the persuasive effect of a message regarding a policy change in a factory. To test the hypotheses, an experiment is conducted among workers at a factory. The results are flawed with methodical problems which lead to low observed power and mostly insignificant results, but an interpretation of the data is offered which is argued to be in line with the theoretical orientations postulated in the literature review. This suggests that organizational proximity of the source can be a variable that is worthy of further research. The experiment acts as a catalyst for further discussion about the practical application of the ELM. It is concluded that although the ELM provides the tools to describe the persuasion processes retrospectively, it is not practical for prescriptive strategic planning because it lacks the means to realistically predict the persuasive outcomes of communication. In general, this thesis builds upon the research that has been conducted on the ELM and demonstrates experimentally how the postulates that are being put forward in the ELM could be applied to health and safety communication in a corporate internal communication context. In spite of the methodical problems and the problems with the results, it effectively demonstrates some of the practical and theoretical difficulties of applying the ELM in a real life setting. The research could hopefully give communication practitioners working with internal communication a better understanding of how health and safety communication could be interpreted by applying the principles of the ELM, especially concerning the effects of source variables. This could help the communicators improve their communication tactics and strategies. 2

3 Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction... 5 Problem statement... 5 Motivation... 6 How the rest of the paper is organized... 7 Definitions... 8 Chapter 2: Literature review... 8 The elaboration likelihood model... 8 The elaboration continuum Message arguments, cues and elaboration Objective and biased elaboration Consequenses of Elaboration Complicating factors Practical application of the ELM Step 1: Consider audience elaboration level Step 2: Design and evaluate message characteristics Step 3: Message objectives: Immediate or enduring attitude change Step 4: Evaluate audience elaboration, message characteristics, and message objectives Step 5: Test message effectiveness Step 6: Evaluate message effectiveness Health and safety communication Research proposal/hypotheses Chapter 3: Research approach/method Operationalizing the variables in the survey Independent variables Dependent variable Tool used for survey Ethical considerations Chapter 4: Results Manipulation checks

4 Organizational proximity of the source Personal relevance Argument strength ANOVA on dependent variable level of agreement to the text Qualitative feedback Analysis Limitations ELM interpretations Chapter 5: Discussion Conclusion List of appendices Bibliography

5 Source factors in occupational health and safety communication: An ELM perspective Chapter 1: Introduction Problem statement Generally, this paper investigates how the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion(elm) (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) can be used to better understand the impact of internal communication campaigns that promote Health and Safety behaviors in the workplace; and more specifically how the model can be used instrumentally to make Health and Safety messages more persuasive. While the ELM has been thoroughly studied in different contexts since its introduction, there are few studies that look into its practical application by communication practitioners, especially in an internal communication context of a multinational company. This leads to the guiding research question of the paper: How can the ELM be practically applied by a communication practitioner working with Health and Safety questions? To answer this question, the study takes an experimental approach by attempting to apply central concepts of the ELM to an organizational context by investigating differences in attitudes towards a message about a health and safety policy in a Norwegian chemical company, Yara. The results of the experiment create a departure for discussion about how communication practitioners can apply the ELM in practice in a corporate environment. The experiment aims to test whether or not a variable called the organizational proximity of the source(a construct that encapsulates professional distance between a source and a recipient in an organization) can be useful to determine the persuasive effectiveness of a message. The experiment is used as an example of how the ELM could hypothetically be applied by a communication practitioner to determine message objectives, message characteristics, audience elaboration and message effectiveness. While the results of the experiment itself can be considered interesting, the main focus of the study is rather to have a meta-discussion about how the experiment is conducted; the importance lies in accounting for how the ELM is understood and applied. The goal of the study is to: (1) test if organizational proximity of a source affects the persuasiveness of a message about a health and safety policy change in a factory owned by Yara by conducting an experiment; (2) to have a meta-discussion about how the ELM has been applied and understood in the experiment; and (3) to have a broader discussion on how communication practitioners can apply the ELM in practice in a corporate environment. 5

6 Motivation The idea for this paper evolved from a motivation to write about persuasion a topic which I find highly interesting. Persuasion permeates all aspects of society from explicit advertisements on television, to the promises made by politicians during elections; from a parent trying to persuade the teenager to not get into trouble, to charity organizations running campaigns to convince people to stop smoking. Briñol and Petty(2009) points out that persuasion is the most prevalent and civil means of social control: Instead of using threats, violence and force to meet ends, persuasion provides an alternative that is more likely to be lasting, satisfying and rewarding for all parties involved. What makes some persuasion efforts successful, while others fail? I found this question intriguing and surprisingly little touched upon in the general field of corporate communication, considering that the goal of many corporate communication practices often revolve around convincing other people that certain viewpoints are more favorable than others. Either if the goal is to create and position a brand which consumers can trust; strengthen reputation and belief in a company s solutions among its stakeholders; trying to secure license to operate; maximize equity valuation; or to promote efficiency, performance and motivation among employees; persuasion is often the means to reach the goals. As I was digging into the research about persuasion, I found that there are no simple answers to this complex subject. There is a myriad of research on the subject, with different departures and many contradicting results. Historically, if one thinks broadly about the subject, research on persuasion dates back to classical works by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero (O'Keefe 2009). However, it was in the midtwentieth century that scientific research on persuasion exploded, coinciding with the rise of mass media and social-scientific attention to processes of social influence (ibid.). The first ideas about persuasion were guided by assumptions that single variables were thought to produce effects by single processes (Briñol and Petty 2012), but as data accumulated it became clear that any one variable did not always have the same effect on persuasion. One treatment could lead to durable attitude change which guided behavior in one context, while the impact could be short-lived and insignificant in another context. The elaboration likelihood model, introduced by Petty and Cacioppo in the beginning of the eighties, is one theoretical framework that seeks to accommodate these findings by articulating multiple processes by which variables could affect attitudes in different situations. The model is in many ways the most comprehensive and structured approach towards systematically understanding persuasion; There are other contending models, such as the Heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken 1980) or the Unimodel (Kruglanski and Thompson 1999), but no other model of persuasion has been as thoroughly researched as the ELM. That is why I chose to focus on the ELM in particular for this paper. While I was preparing for this paper I was working as an intern in the communication department of a company called Yara, and I wanted to angle the paper towards internal communication, particularly regarding health, environment, safety and quality (HESQ, in norwegian HMS Helse, miljø og sikkerhet), which was considered to be one of the cornerstones of the company. Yara is a chemical company with a broad range of activities in more than 150 countries and around employees. With the diverse geography and activities, internal communication always faces a challenge in how to get the message through. In addition, there are many different stakeholders who want to get their messages through in the internal communication channels, creating information clutter. Could the ELM be applied in this 6

7 environment to improve the messages, making them more impactful towards their audiences and making them stand out of the information clutter? In researching this question, I found that the ELM has been tested extensively through experiments conducted by Petty and Cacioppo and other researchers, but it has also been applied in field studies within marketing and advertising and also health communication(briñol and Petty 2012). However, these studies have been addressing questions about the phenomena of persuasion towards a general public, and do not seek to find how the ELM could be practically applied in an organizational context, such as Yara s. Thus, I figured that I had found a reasonably original contextual approach for the ELM. There are a number of ways in which the ELM explains persuasion. The ELM offers a set of empirically tested variable relations, particularly different variable relations that act as moderators to central or peripheral processing. This will be explained thoroughly in the literature review section of the paper. Source factors (certain characteristics of the source of a communication that affects the persuasiveness of a message), is one category of variables that has been shown a lot of interest within the research on the ELM. For example, there has been research on the effects on persuasiveness of source factors such as attractiveness, expertise, perceived in-group/out-group membership of the source, and many other attributes which has been thought to have an influence on persuasion, as will become evident in the literature review. In the search for an approach for how I could apply the ELM in this paper, I thought that it would be interesting to find a source factor that was particularly relevant to the organizational context that I had chosen. In my internship in Yara, I observed that for corporate messages it was often considered important who said what, and it seemed that the more strategically important the message, the more important it was that the person who delivered the message was of a high position in the company. Intuitively, it seemed like a sound strategy to keep a close fit between the strategic importance of message and source: The high position of the source stresses the importance of the message and it helps the receiver to distinguish what the management considers more important messages from less important messages. It is also feasible that the source s position in the company itself could act as a persuasive cue, as will be evident in the literature review of the ELM. However, in a large company with thousands of employees and several hundred divisions and business units, it could also be conceived that the further away on the organizational chart the source is from the receiver, the less personal and relevant the message could come across in the eyes of the employee. I wanted to see if this proximity in the organizational hierarchy between the source and the receiver had any impact on the persuasiveness of the message. This is the source factor that I refer to as the organizational proximity of the source. How the rest of the paper is organized The remaining chapters in this study cover the knowledge about health and safety information processing and the ELM. Chapter two, the literature review, will apply communication philosophy and theory to establish a foundation of knowledge about how and why people are motivated to process some messages and not others. From this basis, a call for more research is suggested: a new research question is offered, and three hypotheses regarding the impact of organizational proximity of the source 7

8 are proposed. Chapter three describes the method for carrying out the study to answer the research question and test the hypotheses. Chapter four presents the results of the study, provides a data analysis and an interpretation of the findings. Finally, chapter five gives a broader discussion of the ELM and its practical application within internal communication in a company. Furthermore, the chapter looks into some of the limitations of the study, suggests further areas of inquiry, and provides summary conclusions. Definitions Before proceeding with to the literature review, some of the technical terms used in this paper will be defined. Most of the terminology used in the thesis follows that given by Petty and Cacioppo(1986). Organizational proximity of the source: A construct which is thought to reflect the distance in the organizational hierarchy between the source of a communication and the recipient of the communication. This paper particularly looks into the difference in agreement to a message delivered by a local line-manager and a corporate level, which reflects a vertical distance in the hierarchy. Health and safety communication: This refers to the communication of occupational hazards in the work place. It is often referred to in relation to risk communication. Chapter 2: Literature review The purpose of this review is to present the current academic literature on the elaboration likelihood model, and to build a foundation for understanding how it can be applied to understand health and safety communication and processing in a company like Yara. First, the ELM and its details will be presented. This includes: a thorough explanation of the theory; its underlying psychological mechanisms; and some a presentation of some literature about its practical application. The research and experiments by Petty, Cacioppo and other researchers and academics that make up the ELM will then be seen in light of a context of organizational health and safety communication. This includes presentation of some of the current theoretical and practical academic literature on organizational health and safety communication and a discussion for how the ELM is relevant for this research. Finally, from the presented literature a new research proposal is drawn, presenting the research question and hypotheses for this paper. The elaboration likelihood model The basic assumption of the ELM by Petty and Cacioppo(1986) is that persuasion in a communication can occur by taking either of two routes: The central route, or the peripheral route. The central route relates to persuasion caused by the recipient of a message being able to think objectively, or elaborate, about all the aspects of the subject matter in the communication, while the peripheral route, on the other hand, relates to persuasion caused by a simple cue in the communication that is not central to the subject matter of the communication, for example the attractiveness of the source, nice images or music accompanying the message, or similar effects. 8

9 Organizational proximity of the source is a source factor; it is an attribute related to the source of a communication that may influence persuasion outcomes. A considerable amount of research has been carried out on different source factors and the ELM, such as expertise of the source(petty, Cacioppo, and Goldman 1981, Chaiken 1980), age and attractiveness(puckett et al. 1983),and perceived credibility(moore, Hausknecht, and Thamodaran 1986), to name a few examples. Common to the studies on source factors and the ELM, like other variables, is that there are no single effects on persuasion caused by the source factors in isolation, but that the effect varies in terms of strength of the attitude formed and the role which the variable takes depending on the level of elaboration likelihood of the message. For example, in a review of three different studies on the effects of source attractiveness, Petty(1987) finds that under conditions of low elaboration likelihood, increased source attractiveness will serve as a peripheral cue, enhancing attitudes regardless of argument strength. However, under conditions of high elaboration likelihood, source attractiveness would be less important as a peripheral cue and could serve as a persuasive argument if it provides information central to the merits of the attitude object such as having an attractive source presenting a beauty product. To investigate the ways in which the ELM could be implemented in health and safety communication in an organization like Yara, and more specifically how organizational proximity of the source affects persuasion in an occupational health and safety message, a review of the research on the model will be conducted in the following chapter of the paper. As briefly mentioned earlier in the paper, there has historically been little agreement within research on persuasion concerning if, when and how the traditional source, message, recipient and channel variables affected attitude change. For example, as Petty and Cacioppo points out (1986), in the question concerning whether or not source expertise affected agreement to a message, research before the ELM was conceived had shown a wide diversity of results: Sometimes expert sources had the expected effect that recipients became more agreeable to a message, sometimes no effects were obtained, and sometimes reverse effects were obtained. What lacked in the area of persuasion research was a general framework for organizing, categorizing, and understanding the basic processes underlying the effectiveness of persuasive communication. Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model of persuasion(elm) sought to fill this gap, providing a theory that unified the diverse results in persuasion research. In reviewing the research in the field, they found that the empirical findings and theories could be divided into two routes to persuasion. The first type was that which likely resulted from a person's careful and thoughtful persuasion of the true merits of the advocacy - which would be referred to as the central route. The other type of persuasion was that which more likely occurred as a result of some simple cue in the persuasion context - such as perceived expertise of the source - that induced change without necessitating scrutiny to the true merits of the information presented. This would be referred to as the peripheral route. In one of Petty and Cacioppo s seminal papers from 1986, the ELM is expressed through a series of postulates. These postulates, although dicussed, modified and transformed through a vast body of research in more than thirty years, form the basic foundations for how the ELM is understood today. This paper will not discuss these postulates deeply, but they are worth mentioning, 9

10 as they are important for understanding the philosophical and empirical assumptions that the ELM are built upon. The elaboration continuum One of the first postulates concerns the variations in the elaboration that people engage in when evaluating content. According to Petty and Cacioppo(ibid.), the ELM states that the amount and nature of issue relevant elaboration in which people are willing or able to engage to evaluate a message vary with individual and situational factors. By elaboration in persuasion context, it is meant the extent to which a person thinks about the issue-relevant arguments contained in a message. Petty and Cacioppo write(p.128): When conditions foster people's motivation and ability to engage in issue relevant thinking, the elaboration likelihood is said to be high. This means that people are likely to attend to the appeal; attempt to access relevant associations, images, and experiences from memory; scrutinize and elaborate upon the externally provided message arguments in light of the associations available from memory; draw inferences about the merits of the argument for a recommendation based upon their analyses; and consequently derive an overall evaluation of or attitude toward, the recommendation. Cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman writes in his popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow(Kahneman 2011) about his research in cognitive and social psychology, which states support for the view that the brain process information in either a controlled, deep, systematic and effortful way, and at other times it processes information in an automatic, shallow, heuristic, and mindless. In line with Kahnemann s research, the ELM states that the extent of issue-relevant elaboration of a message can be placed along a continuum going from no elaboration to complete elaboration of every argument and complete integration of these elaborations into a person's attitude schema. It is clear that Petty and Cacioppo s original conception of the ELM can be viewed as a framework for organizing the then existing research on persuasion and attitude change by placing them alongside this continuum. At one end of this continuum Petty and Cacioppo included theories such as the inoculation theory(mcguire 1970), information integration theory(anderson 1971), cognitive response theory(ronis et al. 1977), and the theory of reasoned action(ajzen and Fishbein 1980), which all assume that people typically attempt to carefully evaluate the information presented in a message. Research in this tradition emphasized the need to examine what kinds of arguments are persuasive and how variables affect the comprehension, elaboration, learning, integration and retention of issue relevant information. At the other end of the continuum Petty and Cacioppo looked at studies that did not focus on the arguments in a message or issue-relevant thinking, but how affective processes influenced attitudes or on how people could apply a variety of rules or inferences in their thinking processes that affected attitudes or the acceptability of a message. The ELM proposes that when motivation or ability to process issue-relevant arguments is low, attitudes could be influenced by relating a subject matter with various affective cues, or people may attempt to form a reasonable opinion by making an inference about an 10

11 attitude position based on peripheral cues such as message discrepancy, one's own behavior, or characteristics of the message source. To recap: Petty and Cacioppo argue that there is a continuum of message elaboration ranging from none to complete, and that different attitude processes operates along this continuum. Furthermore, it is worth noting that these theoretical processes can be viewed as postulating two polar opposite routes to persuasion. The first route, the central route, follows when motivation and/or ability to scrutinize issuerelevant arguments are relatively high. The second, the peripheral route, follows when motivation and/or ability are relatively low and attitudes are determined by positive or negative cues in the persuasion context which either become directly associated with the message position or permit a simple inference towards the message. Message arguments, cues and elaboration Another of Petty and Cacioppo s postulates concerns the distinguishing qualities of message arguments, cues and direction of elaboration(petty and Cacioppo 1986). The ELM states that variables can affect the amount and direction of attitude change by: serving as as persuasive arguments; serving as peripheral cues; and/or affecting the extent or direction of issue and argument elaboration. Petty and Cacioppo operationalize these variables in order to experimentally test the ELM. They hold that if elaboration likelihood(motivation and/or ability to process a message) is high, extramessage treatment should have less effect on persuasion and only the quality of the message arguments should determine the extent of attitude change. So, one way to influence attitude is by varying the quality of the arguments in a persuasive message. Thus variations between strong and weak arguments will vary the degree of persuasion, especially if the elaboration likelihood is high. If elaboration likelihood is low on the other hand, another possibility is that a simple cue in the persuasion context affects attitudes in the absence of argument processing. Petty and Cacioppo argues that some cues will do this because they trigger affective states that becomes associated with the attitude object. The third way in which a variable can affect persuasion is by determining the extent or direction of message processing. Variables can affect argument processing in a relatively objective or a relatively biased manner. In the former, some treatment variable either motivates or enables subjects to see the strengths of cogent arguments and flaws in specious ones, or inhibits them from doing so. In the latter, relatively biased processing, some treatment variable either motivates or enables subjects to generate a particular kind of thought in response to a message, or inhibits a particular thought. Objective and biased elaboration Petty and Cacioppo found that to test if a variable affects argument processing in a relatively objective manner, it is necessary to measure the extent of cognitive processing, that is: How much effort is devoted by the subjects to issue-relevant thinking. One way to do this is to manipulate message argument quality. This could be exemplified by a hypothetical control condition in which motivation or ability to process issue-relevant arguments is rather low. They theorized that subjects should show relatively little differentiation of strong from weak arguments in this condition. However, if a 11

12 manipulation enhances argument processing, subjects should show greater differentiation of strong from weak arguments. Conversely, if the message processing were to be interrupted by some variable causing reduced motivation or ability, argument quality should be of less importance. By manipulating argument quality along with some other variable, it is possible to tell whether that variable enhances or reduces argument processing in a relatively objective manner. Through several different experiments, a wide variety of variables that can affect a person's motivation and/or ability to consider issue relevant arguments in a relatively objective manner has been identified: Distraction, repetition, personal relevance/involvement, personal responsibility, need for cognition, cognitive dissonance, social judgment, among others(see Petty and Cacioppo, 1986: ). The implications of this, Petty and Cacioppo argues, is that when the arguments in a message are "strong", persuasion can be increased by enhancing message scrutiny, but reduced by inhibiting scrutiny. However, if the arguments in a message are "weak", persuasion can be increased by reducing scrutiny, but can be decreased by enhancing scrutiny. Thus, argument quality will be an important determinant of persuasion when motivation and ability to process message arguments are high. But what happens when motivation and ability to process arguments are decreased? The ELM holds that as motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become relatively more important determinants of persuasion(petty and Cacioppo, 1986). Conversely, as argument scrutiny is increased, peripheral cues become relatively less important determinants of persuasion. Petty and Cacioppo decided that testing this required establishing two kinds of persuasion contexts: one in which the likelihood of message-relevant elaboration is high, and one in which the elaboration likelihood is low. Through experiments, they found that both source and message factors may serve as peripheral cues. Source cues included factors such as expertise and fame, while message cues included factors such as number of arguments and message length. Furthermore, other factors other than message and source related factors could also serve as peripheral cues, such as attribute or affective orientation, and visual salience. Petty and Cacioppo found that there are other moderators of cue effectiveness. Just as for example personal relevance is an important determinant of the central route to persuasion, other variables should also determine the route to persuasion by affecting a person's motivation and/or ability to process the arguments in a message. For example, in an early study(kiesler and Mathog 1968) it was argued that distraction enhances persuasion only when the source is credible because more credible sources induce more dissonance, or because more credible sources induce more counter-arguing. However, the ELM would claim that rather than emphasizing the finding that distraction enhances persuasion when source credibility is high, the ELM views the interaction as showing that credibility enhances persuasion when distraction is high. These examples show that a wide variety of variables can moderate the route to persuasion by increasing or decreasing the extent to which a person is motivated or able to process the issue-relevant arguments in a relatively objective manner. However, as noted earlier, Petty and Cacioppo(1986) argues 12

13 that variables can also affect persuasion by affecting motivation or ability to process message factors in a more biased fashion. Petty and Cacioppo notes that unlike a variable operating as a simple positive cue, a variable producing a positive processing bias is not expected to affect all messages equally. Since the pure cue processor is not elaborating message arguments at all, the effectiveness of the cue is not constrained by the arguments presented. The biased processor on the other hand, is attempting to process the arguments and in this regard is similar to the objective processor. Nevertheless, an important difference between objective and biased processing exists. The objective processor is motivated or is able to discover the "true validity" of the message, Petty and Cacioppo argues, and thus strong arguments induce more persuasion and weak arguments induce less persuasion with more processing. In contrast, the biased processor is either particularly motivated or able to generate a particular kind of thought, often in defense of an initial attitude. So, if a person is biased to counter-argue against an argument, this person's task is simpler to the extent that the message provides a weak argument rather than a strong argument. A treatment that biases thinking in a positive direction should generally have a greater impact on a strong than a weak argument because it will be more difficult for a person to generate favorable thoughts to weak than strong message arguments, and vice versa with a treatment that biases thinking in a negative direction. This shows that just as there is a trade-off between a person's motivation and ability to process a message in a relatively objective manner and the effectiveness of peripheral cues, so too is there a trade-off between biased processing and the operation of cues. As argument scrutiny is reduced, whether objective or biased, peripheral cues become more important determinants of persuasion. Experimental studies have identified some major variables affecting information processing in a relatively biased manner(ibid.). For example, prior knowledge; the more issue-relevant knowledge people have, the more they tend to be able to counter-argue communications opposing their initial positions and to cognitively bolster congruent messages. Also, when prior knowledge is low, simple cues are more likely to affect susceptibility to influence. Consequenses of Elaboration The ELM holds that attitude changes that result mostly from processing issue-relevant arguments (central route), will show greater temporal persistence, greater prediction of behavior, and greater resistance to counter-persuasion than attitude changes that result from peripheral cues(petty and Cacioppo 1986, p. 176): Under the central route, the issue-relevant attitude schema may be accessed, rehearsed, and manipulated more times strengthening the interconnections among the components and rendering the schema more internally consistent, accessible, enduring, and resistant than under the peripheral route. It is argued that as the accessibility of the information supporting an attitude increase, likelihood that the same attitude will be reported over time increases, because it makes the information supporting a 13

14 certain attitude more accessible. The greater the accessibility of the attitude itself, the greater is the likelihood that it can guide behavior. Many studies provide evidence that the central route produces persuasion that is more persistent(ronis et al. 1977, Mitnick and McGinnies 1958, Chaiken 1980, Watts and Holt 1979), more resilient to counterpersuasion(haugtvedt and Petty 1992) and produces attitudes that have a greater chance of behavioral change(petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983, Cialdini, Petty, and Cacioppo 1981, Pallak, Murroni, and Koch 1983). For example, In regards to attitude persistence - that is, how long and how strong a person tends to hold an attitude - research show that the greater the elaboration of the message arguments, the more persistent the resulting attitude change becomes. In an experiment(petty, Cacioppo, and Goldman 1981), subjects who formed an initial attitude from high relevance arguments, showed greater persistence of attitude change than subjects whose initial attitudes were based on low relevance cues. When it comes to what Petty and Cacioppo refers to as the attitude-behavior link that is, the likelihood that the attitude is transferred into desired behavior research show that attitude change induced via central route are more predictive of behavior change than changes induced via the peripheral route(pierro et al. 2012). Finally, concerning resistance to counter-persuasion the ability for people to stand up for the acquired attitude research show that people who come to accept a position because of a peripheral cue should be more susceptible to an attacking message than people who adopt the same issue position based on a careful scrutiny and elaboration of the message arguments(tormala and Petty 2004). Complicating factors As is evident from the literature review, the ELM tries to place many contradictory results and theories from behavioral sciences, psychology, marketing, communication, linguistics under one theoretical umbrella by stipulating the major processes underlying persuasion and indicating how many of the traditionally studied variables and theories relate to these basic processes. The ELM specifies the most important ways in which variables can have an impact on persuasion, and it points to the main consequences of these different mediational processes. In spite of its complications, the ELM is in one way rather simple. It specifies that variables can affect persuasion in only a limited number of ways: a variable can serve as a persuasive argument, serve as a peripheral cue, or affect argument scrutiny in either a relatively objective or a relatively biased manner. Petty and Briñol later expands upon this, holding that any variable related to a communication process can influence attitudes by affecting five underlying psychological processes that guide persuasion(petty and Briñol 2008). The underlying psychological processes in question are: the amount of thinking about the communication; the direction of thinking about the communication (e.g. is the communication for or against the recipient s favored position); the structural features of thoughts; the communication serving as arguments; and finally, the communication serving as cues. 14

15 In confining the processes of persuasion to just these possibilities, the ELM provides a simplifying and organizing framework that may be applied to many of the traditionally studied source, message, recipient, and context variables. However, one aspect that complicates the ELM, is that some variables have multiple effects on information processing (Petty and Cacioppo 1986). In addition, some variables may affect information processing under certain conditions, but serve as peripheral cues in other contexts. Understanding the processes by which variables can produce persuasion is important because one variable can produce different persuasion outcomes. Thus, the ELM helps understanding the effect the variables have on persuasion in different conditions. It is therefore conceivable that organizational proximity of the source, the variable that is tested in this paper, can produce persuasion under different circumstances in accordance with the ELM. Organizational proximity of the source could serve as a cue, affecting the peripheral route to persuasion. In line with the earlier example, research shows that many different source variables can serve as cues under conditions of low elaboration likelihood, or in other words; when the recipient s ability or motivation to process the message is low(petty, Cacioppo, and Goldman 1987, Chaiken 1980). When source factors serve as simple cues, they produce persuasion in the direction of the valence, or the emotional value linked to the object. This means a positive value, for example attractiveness or intelligence, could increase persuasion, while a negative value, for example lack of either attractiveness or intelligence could decrease persuasion. Thus, if organizational proximity of the source were to act as a cue under conditions of low elaboration likelihood, the valence of this source factor as it is perceived by the subject would determine the direction of persuasion. A source with a high organizational proximity could be perceived as having positive valence because of a higher degree of identification with the source and intergroup effects; people perceive the world in-group-out-group terms and use these perceptions as a basis for action and actively favors and discriminates based on this criteria (Reynolds, Turner, and Haslam 2000). It is not unlikely that higher organizational proximity means higher likelihood of an in-group relationship between the source of a message and a recipient. If organizational proximity of the source to was to serve as a cue, a person would accept an advocacy under low thinking conditions simply because it was presented by a peer from the in-group rather than diligently considering the issuerelevant arguments. Organizational proximity of the source could affect the amount of thinking. When elaboration likelihood is not constrained to be high nor low because of other variables, source variables can affect the amount of thinking the recipient does about the message, making them more carefully evaluate the content of the communication. That is, if the motivation or ability to process a message is moderate, as opposed to particularly low or high, the source factor can influence the recipient s motivation or ability to process the message (Briñol and Petty 2009). When people evaluate information more carefully, the impact of the quality of the arguments increases. Enhancing thinking about strong arguments tends to produce more persuasion, while enhancing thinking about weak arguments tends to reduce persuasion. Petty and Cacioppo (1979)found that people think more carefully about a message if it is delivered under moderate elaboration conditions by a source that they perceive to be similar to themselves, presumably because it increases the message s self-relevance. People tend to think more about a message when it is 15

16 presented by a source who shares the message recipient s group membership than when it is delivered by a source who does not share this membership(mackie, Worth, and Asuncion 1990). Thus, if organizational proximity of the source were to affect the amount of thinking, it is likely that it would happen under conditions of moderate elaboration likelihood because of group identification. Organizational proximity of the source can affect the direction of thinking. As have been established, when motivation or ability to elaborate on persuasive content is high, people will be more engaged in careful thought about a proposal, but that thinking can be biased by source variables. Source variables can motivate or enable people to either support or derogate the content of the information provided. Some features of the source can increase the likelihood of positive thoughts coming to mind, while others increase the likelihood of negative thoughts coming to mind. For example, Chaiken and Maheswaran (1994) showed in a study that an expert source had greater impact on attitudes than a non-expert, by affecting the direction of the thoughts generated in response to a proposal, but only when personal importance of the message was high. Personal importance can in this instance be interpreted to motivation. Organizational proximity can serve as an argument. According to the ELM, when the amount of thinking is high, people assess the relevance of all of the information in the context to determine the merits of the attitude object under consideration. Thus, people can examine the source factor in addition to other information from the message and context as possible arguments or reasons for favoring or disfavoring a position. For example, Petty and Cacioppo (1983) found that source attractiveness influenced persuasion by serving as an argument if the attractiveness was related to the central merits of the communication, for example in an advertisement for beauty products. If organizational proximity of the source were to serve as an argument, the content of the message would have to be related to the organizational proximity of the source. This could for example be in a message about local conditions in the organization where high source proximity would be weighted higher than low source proximity, because a high proximity source could be perceived to have higher local knowledge. So far, relatively clear instances of central and peripheral routes to persuasion have been described. Most experiments conducted to test the ELM have attempted to create conditions where the elaboration likelihood is in either of the extremes of the elaboration likelihood continuum. These conditions are useful for testing the theory and in explicating the two different routes to persuasion. However, these conditions rarely occur in people's everyday life. For example, many times people would be uncertain as to the personal relevance of an issue, or have moderate rather than high or low knowledge on a topic. Petty and Cacioppo propose that under moderate conditions, people use source characteristics (1981, 1984) to determine how to think about a message. When personal consequences or prior knowledge on an issue are moderate or unclear, people may not be sure if the message is worth thinking about or if they are able to do so. Under these circumstances, characteristics of the message source can help a person decide if the message warrants (or needs) careful scrutiny. 16

17 In a study by Puckett et al (1983), subjects were given a persuasive message under moderate levels of motivation(personal relevance) to process, and the result was that the arguments were more carefully processed when they were associated with a socially attractive than a socially unattractive source. More specifically, the significant message quality*source attractiveness interaction was due to the joint tendencies for attractiveness to enhance agreement with the proposal when the arguments presented were strong, but for attractiveness to reduce agreement when the arguments presented were weak. The latter effect (an attractive source reducing agreement), of course is opposite to what one normally would expect the effect of attractive sources to be. Practical application of the ELM The studies and academic literature that has been presented so far are based on experimental studies, and offers a theoretical explanation for how persuasion works. However, it offers little practical guidance for how this knowledge can be used by communication practitioners to maximize the persuasive impact of a message. There has been little research on how the ELM can be practically applied, so it leaves a lot of the model up to interpretation. However, Rucker and Petty (2006) suggests some guidance for practical application of the ELM. They outline six steps which can be useful to consider when using the ELM to improve persuasiveness in communication. Step 1: Consider audience elaboration level To illustrate how elaboration level affects information processing, Rucker and Petty (ibid.) consider a PSA about smoking that features a celebrity explaining why smoking is unhealthful. In this situation, some people might carefully attend to and think about the information being presented, whereas others might simply note the celebrity and message position without carefully considering the actual health risks associated with smoking. According to the ELM, where people fall in the elaboration continuum can be determined by considering their motivation and ability to process the available information. Specifically, if both motivation and ability to process a message are present, elaboration is likely to be high; however, as either motivation or ability decreases, elaboration is likely to be low. Recipients motivations can be influenced by several variables, such as the perceived personal relevance of an issue(petty and Cacioppo 1979), general enjoyment of thinking (Cacioppo et al. 1996), and being personally responsible for the message(petty et al. 1980). Several factors can influence a person s ability to process a message, such as his or her level of actual or perceived knowledge(burton, Biswas, and Netemeyer 1994), the amount of distraction in the environment(petty, Wells, and Brock 1976), intelligence(rhodes and Wood 1992) and the number of message repetitions(cacioppo, Cacioppo, and Petty 1979). Rucker and Petty(2006) argue that to make practical use of the ELM, the first step is to make a rough estimate of the likely elaboration level of the audience. The point of this step, Rucker and Petty points out, is not to make an empirically correct representation of the audience elaboration level, but to make an educated guess that creates a rough estimate starting point. Whether the predicted elaboration level of the audience is correct is something that can be examined empirically, as is explained in Step 5. 17

18 For the particular case company of this paper, it is feasible to think that the elaboration level among Yara employees towards health and safety communication is relatively high. Personal relevance can be considered particularly applicable factor that affects the motivation to elaborate on the messages. On the production sites of the company there is a relatively higher risk of health and safety incidents than in everyday life. Big and small accidents happen occasionally throughout the company, and are communicated through the intranet as a reminder. In other words, health and safety issues are real and are affecting employees in a very real way which could affect their motivation to pay extra attention to the messages. Furthermore, the Yara employees should have a relatively high ability to process information regarding health and safety. As mentioned earlier, health and safety is considered a cornerstone in Yara s license to operate. On the Yara intranet, it is stated that: HESQ is of particular importance in our production, so Yara has placed a relentless focus on HESQ at the core of its strategy, with the key principle that all accidents are preventable (Intranet 2014). This statement exemplifies Yara s commitment to channel large amounts of resources into the HESQ department: employees undergo extensive training, information is communicated in all available multiple channels, through intranet, peer-to-peer, seminars, workshops, and so on. In line with the research on perceived personal relevance, personal responsibility, actual and perceived knowledge and number of message repetitions, it is fair to assume that the motivation and ability to process information regarding health and safety issues is relatively high. Step 2: Design and evaluate message characteristics The next step in Rucker and Petty s guide is to consider what information will be conveyed in the message and whether this information will be processed as strong arguments, powerful peripheral cues, or both. They exemplify this with a warning label placed on a cigarette package: It may feature a prominent source (e.g. the surgeon general) and information about the hazards of smoking (i.e., risk of cancer). If elaboration is high, people are inclined to participate in central route processing. When taking the central route, people scrutinize all the information presented in an attempt to uncover all the reasons in support of the proposal and the essential qualities of these reasons. When this occurs, people s attitudes following exposure to a message are determined primarily by people s cognitive responses to or thoughts about the information presented. Specifically, people think about the available information, whether it is part of the message, the source or their internal state, and assess whether the information provides cogent support for the proposal. If people generate predominantly positive issue-relevant thoughts as a result of examining the available information, a positive attitude will follow; if people generate predominantly negative thoughts, a negative attitude will result; and if people generate a mix of positive and negative thoughts, a moderate attitude will result. Furthermore, the more confidence people have in the thoughts generated under central route processing, the more these thoughts will determine their attitudes(briñol, Petty, and Tormala 2004). Often people lack the motivation or ability to process information. If either of these are lacking, this leads to low elaboration, and if people are influenced at all, it will be by the peripheral route. In the peripheral route, participant s attitudes are informed primarily by the use of simple cues or heuristics. For example, participants might agree with a message on the basis of whether the source of the 18