Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change

Richard E. Petty · John T. Cacioppo

Dec 2012 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

It has been over 10 years since we initiated work on our first series of collaborative experiments. As graduate students, we had great fun planning, conducting, and writing this research (Petty & Cacioppo, 1977). We enjoyed arguing with each other at our initial meeting in 1973 and have sub sequently become best friends, but neither of us suspected at the time that we would or could actively maintain a research collaboration over the next decade, or that we would now find ourselves in a position to write this monograph. As we note in Chapter 1, we began our studies of persuasion at a time when social psychology was in "crisis," and interest in research on attitude change in particular was declining. As we write this, we are aware of six new volumes on persuasion that are in press or in preparation and that should appear over the next few years. In retrospect, it is not so surprising that research on attitudes and persuasion would reemerge as a central concern of social psychology. We believe that human feelings, beliefs, and behaviors, whether in the domain of interpersonal relations (e. g. , marriage, aggression), politics (e. g. , voting, revolution), health (e. g. , following a medical regimen), or economics (e. g. , consumer purchases) are greatly influenced by the evaluations people have of other people, objects, and issues. Furthermore, evaluations (attitudes) are influenced by affect, cognition, and behavior.

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About the author

John Terrence Cacioppo was born in Marshall, Texas on June 12, 1951. He received a bachelor of science degree in economics in 1973 from the University of Missouri and a doctorate in social psychology at Ohio State University in 1977. He taught at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, and the University of Chicago. In the early 1990s, he and Gary Berntson were the founding fathers of social neuroscience, which bridged biology and psychology. Cacioppo was a neuroscientist with an expertise in loneliness. He wrote hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books including Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connections written with William Patrick. In 2015, Cacioppo developed salivary gland cancer. At his death, he was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, director of the university's Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and chairman of the Social Psychology Program. He died on March 5, 2018 at the age of 66.