Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 162. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and the me.

Oh, and the me., the field of attitude change and persuasion was, to put it lightly, a mess.

Going back to the earliest days of psychology, the study of advertising and marketing,

persuasion and propaganda of influence itself was a major feature of psychological research but after

World War II with the whole world asking how it could be that the Nazis rose to

power how people could participate in genocide,

influence research became the central focus of psychology.

It was such an important topic that so many people doing research,

that that's what sort of led to the collapse.

That is legendary psychologist Richard Petty.

Richard Petty and I'm a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

Petty along with fellow psychologist John Cassiopo, who recently passed away,

developed what many consider to be the best model of how humans make sense of and are persuaded by messages that intend to change their minds.

It's called the elaboration likelihood model, and they developed it not so much to change the

course of psychology psychology though it did

but to make sense of their own textbooks so they could pass their classes in college

when you read the textbooks at the time that they really were confusing because you'd get this well a credible source in this study did this but in this study it led to less persuasion but in this study it had no effect and in this study it interacted with this other

variable and it was just a series of findings and it was really hard to and all you

could do to pass a test it would be to try to memorize every individual study

and what it found.

There wasn't any conceptual coherence that helps you try to pull it all together.

And so it was kind of frustrating.

...