Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Cognitive Processes in Audience Decision Making 105

Most of the basic steps of the model have been proposed previously by other students of deci-

sion making. For example, one team of cognitive scientists proposes a cognitive process model of

decision making that includes four basic steps:

(l) the perception of data;

(2) the activation of relevant knowledge in long-term memory;

(3) the making of inferences about the data based on the activated knowledge; and

(4) a search for more data.^3

The four steps in their model correspond to the processes of perception, schema activation,

information integration, and information acquisition in the model presented in this text.

Figure 3.2 depicts a cognitive process model of audience decision making that Andrew

Mitchell, an authority in the field of consumer research, developed to represent consumers

reading advertisements.^4 The model highlights the role experts’ schemata play in making

purchasing decisions. In the model, schema activation depends on the consumer’s level of

expertise and involvement. The model predicts that expert consumers who are involved in

the decision-making task will activate a decision schema specific to the product category

of the advertised brand and use it to compare the values of the advertised brand against the

values of other brands in the product category. It predicts that novice consumers—those who

lack the appropriate schema and do not know which attributes (i.e., decision criteria) to

use to evaluate a brand—will weight most heavily whatever attributes are prominent in the

advertisement.^5

Like the two models of decision making just described, the model of audience decision

making presented in Chapter 3 , and most of the research cited in explanation of it, takes an

information-processing approach to the analysis of decision making. One of the hallmarks

of the information-processing approach is that it explains tasks by fi rst breaking them into

elementary cognitive processes.^6 The information-processing approach is most forcefully articu-

lated by computer scientist Allen Newell and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in their seminal

text, Human Problem Solving.^7 Despite the challenges put forward by competing theories, the

information-processing approach “has become dominant in cognitive psychology.”^8 The infor-

mation-processing approach has also become dominant in fi elds outside cognitive psychology that

investigate the decision making of professionals, including the study of decision making in the

fi eld of accounting.^9

The information-processing approach is now the leading theory for explaining group as well

as individual decision making. Groups can be understood as information-processing systems that

encode, store, and retrieve information much like individuals.^10 Information processing at the

GOALS -> INVOLVEMENT -> ACTIVATED SCHEMA

STIMULUS => ATTENTION => PROCESSING => ATTITUDES

FIGURE 3.2 A Cognitive Process Model of Consumers Reading Ads

Source: Adapted from Mitchell (1981)