BIO
Richard E. Petty (North Carolina, United States) received his BA in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1973, then went on to complete a PhD in Social Psychology at the Ohio State University in 1977. After a time as assistant professor at the University of Missouri, he returned to Ohio State, where he has held the title of University Distinguished Professor since 1998, as well as heading the Psychology Department on two occasions (1997-2002 and 2008-2015). His work has resulted in nine books and over 450 journal articles and chapters. In all, his research has been cited over 190,000 times and has been funded largely by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), among other sources. Petty has served as president of the Midwestern Psychological Association (2002), the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2009), and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology (2017-2018), and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010), among other learned societies.
CONTRIBUTION
Persuasion: attitudes as a route to behavior change
The relationship between attitudes and behavior can also be studied through the lens of persuasion (understood as a process of social influence over the individual), given its power to alter a person’s attitudes and therefore their behavior. The main persuasion theory proposes two paths to achieve this: the central route, that of more elaboration, using characteristics that demand greater thought on the part of the individual, such that any attitude change will depend on the strength of the argument; and the peripheral route, which asks the recipient to be guided by simple cues without actually analyzing the message. Known as the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), it owes its existence to Richard Petty, working with the late John Cacioppo. “What’s probably the most unique thing about our theory is that it says that the very same variable – whether it’s how much you like the source or how many arguments a source presents – can lead to more influence or less influence depending on the situation; whether the recipient is motivated and able to think about what the source is saying or not. It’s important to understand if someone is going to think a lot or not very much about something to determine how a variable impacts their attitude,” explains Petty, Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University.
In their book Communication and Persuasion, published in 1986, Petty and Cacioppo focus on the situational and individual factors that drive changes in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, providing insights into biases, consumer choices, political and legal decision-making and health-related conducts. The ELM, in effect, delves into the basic processes underlying the effectiveness of persuasive messages, identifying the two above routes, along with the diverse antecedents (like personal relevance or the need for cognition) and consequences (attitude stability or behavioral prediction, for example) that favor or result from each. “We discovered that if thinking is responsible for a person’s change, really carefully scrutinizing the information that they receive as opposed to just relying on how much they like the source or how many arguments they are given, the change that’s produced lasts longer and is likelier to impact that person’s behavior.”
The committee says of Richard Petty that “he developed theories regarding how people process persuasive messages and how such processing can lead them to change their attitudes.” The importance of this work is that it helps us understand the role of metacognitive factors, like certainty, and implicit, automatic or unconscious factors in driving attitudinal and behavior extremism and resistance to change, along with the effects of racial and ethnic prejudices, self-validation processes, specific emotions and morality in judgment and social behavior. An understanding that is vital, for, as Petty says “the very same factors that lead people to adopt a moderate opinion might lead them to adopt a more extreme opinion.”
In recent research on the factors conducive to a belief in conspiracy theories, Petty has found that feeling threatened about a particular attitude leads a person to adopt even more extreme positions as a way of reaffirming the strength of their conviction. “Being judged by others, especially if I think those others are looking down on me, is a threat to my view. And so to defend my view or to compensate for that threat, I might adopt a position that’s even more extreme or even favor more extreme behavior.”
