Type of information sought or considered

by way of two routes: central and peripheral. The former involves careful scrutiny of argument content, while the latter influences decision making process through external and irrelevant cues or mental shortcuts. When individuals have both the ability and motivation to evaluate message content thoroughly, they are more likely to follow the central route. In contrast, when individuals lack sufficient knowledge or motivation to scrutinize messages carefully, they tend to take the peripheral route. The authors believe that a high NFC person is prone to engage in deeper thinking, and are thus more likely to pay more attention to message arguments, which is part of the central route of information processing. On the other hand, a low NFC person avoids

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extensive thinking, which makes adopting heuristics appealing to them; therefore, the peripheral route of information processing in ELM is more likely to be favored by low NFC individuals. To test their predictions, Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris (1983) examined the effect of argument quality on message evaluations and source impressions between individuals high and low in NFC. Participants were told to evaluate editorials written by journalism students. During the experiment participants were presented with either an editorial with a strong or a weak argument. Results showed that participants with high NFC were better at discriminating strong from weak arguments than participants with low NFC, which suggested message quality had a greater impact on individuals with high NFC. Self-report data also showed that participants scoring high in NFC expended more effort in thinking and also recalled more arguments in the editorials than participants scoring low in NFC, indicating that individuals high and low in NFC processed messages to different extents.

In contrast to Cacioppo et al. (1983), Chaiken, Axsom, Hicks, Yates, and Wilson (cited in Chaiken, 1987) investigated how peripheral information cues rather than argument quality

affected message effectiveness when NFC varied. Two audio tapes which contained the same speech were played to participants except that in one of them the speaker started by stating he would discuss two points while in the other version the same speaker stated that ten points would be discussed. Low NFC participants agreed more when ten instead of two arguments were claimed to be presented, whereas no significant difference was found among high NFC participants. The finding suggested that high NFC participants tended to pay more attention to the arguments, while low NFC participants relied on peripheral cues such as number of

arguments to evaluate persuasive messages, which corresponded to the findings in Cacioppo et al. (1983).

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Haugtvedt, Petty, and Cacioppo (1992) conducted a study similar to Cacioppo et al. (1983) and Chaiken et al. (1987) in an advertisement context. In one experiment, participants with high and low NFC were presented with strong and weak advertisements for the same product. While both groups expressed more favorable attitudes towards the product when the arguments were strong rather than weak, low NFC participants performed worse than high NFC participants in discriminating strong from weak advertisements. In another experiment,

advertisement quality was held constant while advertisement attractiveness was manipulated by assigning an attractive endorsement to one condition and an unattractive endorsement to another condition. Consistent with Chaiken et al. (1987), the findings again showed that peripheral cues such as endorsement attractiveness affected low NFC participants more than high NFC

participants.

See, Petty, & Evans (2009) built on the hypothesis that individuals with low NFC tend to be affected more by peripheral cues, namely, cues requiring minimal processing effort than individuals with high NFC, and tested whether messages corresponding to one’s NFC level motivated individuals to process messages to a greater extent than messages inconsistent with one’s NFC level. It was shown that individuals with high NFC were more motivated to process messages that were labeled as complex rather than simple, while individuals with low NFC were motivated to process messages that were labeled as simple rather than complex, even though the content did not differ in complexity.

Lin, Lee, and Horng (2011) also examined the choice of routes between high and low NFC consumers when they were simultaneously exposed to both the central and peripheral routes: the peripheral route was operationalized by manipulating online review quantity while the central route differed by message quality. While review quantity and review quality both had a

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significant main effect on purchase intention, there was also an interaction effect. Participants high in NFC expressed more positive attitudes after exposure to the strong argument quality version than after exposure to the weak argument quality version but participants low in NFC did not differ from one version to another. Participants low in NFC expressed more positive attitudes after exposure to large quantity condition than after exposure to the small quantity condition, yet no difference was found for high NFC participants. Lin and Wu (2006) further compared the likelihood of accepting online recommendations between high and low NFC participants and found low NFC participants were more likely to accept recommended alternatives, which provided additional support for the finding that peripheral cues such as heuristics are more influential on those with low NFC.

2.3.1.2 Extent of information processing. Differences in the amount of information