The Persuasiveness of Source Credibility: A Critical Review of Five Decades' Evidence

Abstract

This paper reviews the empirical evidence of the effect of credibility of the message source on persuasion over a span of 5 decades, primarily to come up with recommendations for practitioners as to when to use a high-or a low-credibility source and secondarily to identify areas for future research. The main effect studies of source credibility on persuasion seem to indicate the superiority of a high-credibility source over a low-credibility one. Interaction effect studies, however, show source credibility to be a liability under certain conditions. The variables found to interact with source credibility are categorized into 5 categories: source, message, channel, receiver, and destination variables. The most heavily researched variables have been the message and receiver variables. Implications for marketerdadvertisers and suggestions for future research are discussed.Most studies that attempt to determine how to effectively persuade consumers are guided mainly by theories and empirical findings about attitude change or persuasion in social psychology. McGuire (1 978) identified five components of persuasive communication: source, message, channel, receiver, and destination variables. The source variables comprise three main aspects; namely, credibility, attractiveness, and power.For decades, marketers, advertisers, politicians, professionals of various areas, and researchers in many fields have tried to find out whether a high-or a low-credibility source will be more effective or will have no different effects in changing beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors of the audience. The objective of this paper is to review primarily published empirical evidence since 1950 from consumer behavior, social psychology, and related disciplines regarding source credibility effects on persuasion.First, the paper reviews past evidence of the main effects of source credibility. Next, it reviews the interactions between source credibility and other variables, which are categorized into five components: source variables, message variables, 244 CHANTHIKA PORNPITAKPAN channel variables, receiver variables, and destination variables. Following that, it suggests implications for marketerdadvertisers.By consolidating the findings from studies conducted over the past five decades, this paper puts forward many interesting ideas and implications for marketers/advertisers. In particular, the paper discusses when it would be optimal to employ a high-credibility source over a low-credibility source and vice versa, and what marketers should do to strengthen the persuasive impact of the advertisement once a high-credibility or a low-credibility source is selected. Finally, it identifies several gaps in the literature and suggests areas for future research.The dimensions of source credibility have been commonly identified to consist of expertise and trustworthiness. Expertise refers to the extent to which a speaker is perceived to be capable of making correct assertions, and trustworthiness refers to the degree to which an audience perceives the as...

Tapping the grapevine: A closer look at word-of-mouth as a recruitment source.

“…Extending this previous research, we further found that time spent receiving word-of-mouth explained incremental variance in perceived attractiveness and actual application decisions beyond potential applicants' exposure to recruitment adver- Step 1 Step 2 Step 1 Step tising, the recruitment website, recruitment events, and publicity. This further corroborates the accessibility-diagnosticity model, which posits that word-of-mouth's unique characteristics as a company-independent experiential recruitment source increase its accessibility and diagnosticity, allowing it to influence potential applicants' perceptions and decisions beyond company-dependent and informational sources (Bone, 1995;Cable & Turban, 2001;Herr et al, 1991;Pornpitakpan, 2004). Whereas the current field study found that time spent receiving negative word-of-mouth early in the recruitment process did not significantly predict potential applicants' perceived organizational attractiveness and application decisions, Van Hoye and Lievens (2007) observed a large negative impact on students' perceptions of organizational attractiveness in their lab study.…”

“…According to the accessibility-diagnosticity model, company-independent sources such as word-of-mouth are more credible and therefore more diagnostic than company-dependent sources such as advertising (Pornpitakpan, 2004;Van Hoye & Lievens, 2007). In addition, the framework suggests that personal sources such as word-of-mouth are more accessible than impersonal sources such as mass media publicity (Herr et al, 1991;Van Hoye & Lievens, 2005).…”

Influencing Inhalant Intentions by Changing Socio-Personal Expectations

“…A multitude of source features affect message acceptance (Hovland et al 1953;Pornpitakpan 2004). If a source is perceived as expert and trustworthy, resistance to its message is reduced and the likelihood of acceptance increases (Tormala and Petty 2004).…”

On the persuadability of memory: Is changing people's memories no more than changing their minds?

“…Indeed, as Leding (2012) noted, whereas persuasion tactics are not necessary to cause memory distortions or 'false memories', they do invariably seem to make such distortions more likely to happen. Both attitudes and memories, for instance, are changed more readily by credible messengers than by non-credible messengers (Dodd & Bradshaw, 1980;French, Garry, & Mori, 2011;Hovland & Weiss, 1951;Pornpitakpan, 2004), yet these effects diminish over time as memory for the message becomes stronger than memory for its 5 source (Hovland & Weiss, 1951;Underwood & Pezdek, 1998). Both attitudes and memories are often bolstered against change when a warning is provided in advance of an attempt to influence (Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997;Landau & von Glahn, 2004;Petty & Cacioppo, 1977), but are typically less so when the warning is instead provided afterwards (Gerrie & Garry, 2011;Greene, Flynn, & Loftus, 1982;Kiesler & Kiesler, 1964).…”