Credibility, revisited

It's me again...

Remember our working definition of credibility: the image of a source in a communicative situation.

Credibility emanates from people, places, institutions - is the Electoral College credible? How about the Catholic Church?

There is a gap between real and perceived credibility.

OK, then - an even better definition: credibility is the INTERACTION between SOURCE-RELATED ATTRIBUTES and PERCEIVED ATTRIBUTES held by the receiver of a message.

Remember the three key dimensions of credibility: AUTHORITATIVENESS, TRUSTWORTHINESS, DYNAMISM

Some folks experience lasting credibility (Bob Hope - although I'm not sure why) or never can shake the "untrustworthy" label.

It's also a scary thing: we'll comply with a request from a credible source even when we know what they've asked to do is unpleasant, or illegal - this is how cults are born, and how big brothers and sisters keep blackmailing their younger siblings.

Credibility also changes our attitudes about people; if you play identical versions of a speech for people, but with two speakers - one high cred, one low cred - we will dig the high-cred source.

It's not automatic, or constant, and it may not last - it's not a linear thing.

The intervening factors:

Is the speaker's view the same or different than yours on an issue? Let's say the speaker's views are radically different than yours - if credibility and this difference don't interact, credibility would go up and cause your attitude to change, regardless of the discrepancy...

but the opposite happens - credibility and discrepancy are not independent influences; they act together to create influence.

Bottom line - credibility interacts with other variables when the audience feels COERCED or is UNDER PRESSUE to comply with what the speaker argues for.

In 1965, a communicator tried to convince army reservists to eat objectionable food.

Here, cred didn't affect compliance, but the attitude change was less pronounced when the audience thought the source was a NICE GUY than when the source was seen as cold and bossy.

ONE LAST THING: remember that RELEVANCE plays a key role in our judgments of credibility. If an issue is relevant to us (high tuition, parking, Ashlee Simpson), we'll pay more attention to it, become more motivated to think about it.

When we are motivated and able to pay attention, we take a logical, conscious thinking, central route to decision-making. This may permanently change our attitude as we adopt and elaborate upon the speaker’s arguments.

In other cases, we take a peripheral route. Here we do not pay attention to persuasive arguments but are swayed instead by surface characteristics such as whether we like the speaker. In this case although we do change, it is only temporary. We may be more susceptible to further change, though.

This is part of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion advance by Petty and Cacioppo (1986; www.changingminds.org).

More on this next week - have a great weekend.