Richard Petty

Who they are: Richard E. Petty is a professor of social psychology at The Ohio State University. His research looks at how beliefs, attitudes and behaviour change, with a particular focus on persuasion.

The concept HaELM draws from: with John Cacioppo, Petty 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: The Ohio State University, Department of Psychology faculty profile, “Dr. Richard Petty”; Petty and Cacioppo (1986), Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change (Springer).