Question

a. Distinguish between attitudes and beliefs

b. Explain three sources of attitudes

c. Describe the central and peripheral routes to persuasion and give examples

Answer 1

A belief is an internal feeling about something that either it is true or false.Believe may be unproven and irrational. Attitude is an enduring response disposition with affective, behavioural and cognitive components.Attitudes are based on beliefs. Thus attitudes come from the beliefs.Beliefs may not necesserily logical,it might be illogical and these ideas shape our behaviour.

Thus there are many sources of attitude-

1. Learming - This approach assumes that a person's attitudes are based on principles of reinforcement,association,imitation and punishment.People learn information and facts about different objects and they also learn the feelings and values associated with those facts.Thus the attitude forms.
2. Personal experience - People face with different objects in their everyday life.Among them some may be familier with them and others may be new objects.Thus we reevaluate our old ideas with the familier objects and the new objects are newly evaluated.
3. Influence of others - Attitude can be formed and changed through personal contact with influential persons such as respected friends,relatives,parents and experts.

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is a dual process theory.This theory was develped by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1986.It describes the changes of attitude formation.This theory explains two major routes to persuation, The central route and The peripheral route.

The central route is used when the recipient of the message has the ability to think about the message and also has the motivation. When people process information centrally, the cognitive responses, or elaborations, will be much more relevant to the information.If the listener doesn’t care about the topic of the persuasive message, he or she will almost certainly lack the motivation to do central processing.

The peripheral route is opposite to central route. It is used when the message recipient has little or no interest in the subject or has a lesser ability to process the message.

For example, if a person want to buy a cheap but a good mobile phone and he is not foccusing on the features, he might be using the peripheral route.