John Cacioppo

Who they are: John T. Cacioppo (1951–2018) was a psychologist at the University of Chicago, where he was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor. He is regarded as a founder of social neuroscience and was widely known for his research on loneliness.

The concept HaELM draws from: with Richard Petty, Cacioppo developed the Elaboration Likelihood Model, set out in full in Communication and Persuasion (1986). It holds that how deeply people think about a message depends on their motivation and their ability to process it. With both, they weigh the argument itself (the central route). Without them, they lean on simple cues such as a logo, a colour or a familiar face (the peripheral route). Decode uses the model to ask whether an ad still works for someone who is rushed, distracted or missing the background needed to decode it.

Decode articles where their thinking appears: Ramp Made Receipts Funny. I Saw It on My Way Out of O’Hare.

Source: University of Chicago News, “John T. Cacioppo, pioneer and founder of the field of social neuroscience, 1951–2018”; Petty and Cacioppo (1986), Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (Springer).