Now our third type of processing, the heuristic processing among the people who are in the middle audience segments who don't really care about climate change and are engaging in heuristic peripheral message processing. The heuristics are cognitive shortcuts, and decisions are based less on the strength of the information than on who the source is and on superficial characteristics like the number of arguments that are presented. If I go on and on and on and list a whole number of reasons, we should act on climate change with a less engaged audience, that's likely to be more effective than if I list just a few reasons to act on climate change, even if the reasons I'm presenting aren't very good. The more of them they are, that's a signal to the audience that there are lots of reasons for this. I want to point to Al Gore here as a source. He acts as a heuristic for the audiences in two different ways of course. If I am a climate skeptic, I see him, I say whatever he says isn't true. If I am one of the people who recognizes climate change, I look at him and say what he's saying is true. So in either case, I'm not really paying attention to what he says, but simply who he is. The list of heuristic cues is long, but here are some of the most important ones, and the majority of them deal with who the source is. Is this the source who I trust? Is this the source who I believe is credible? Is this source attractive, similar to me, someone I like? Then there are characteristics about the message also. One is the number of arguments as we just mentioned. Another is message repetition. If I don't really care about this message, if I here it once, I forget it, I hear it once I again I forget it, I hear it the third time I forget it. Long about number of repetitions, many repetitions into this, eventually it will stick at least some and that's what we're aiming for. Humor is really important for engaging the audience and increasing likeability and that can act as a heuristic cue and so is music that the audience engages with and likes. So the example that I had for you here, the little video of Less Energy, More beer, I love this little video. David Suzuki is a very well-known environmentalist in Canada so he is a figure known to the audience there. This was part of a campaign called Powerwise to encourage people to reduce their energy consumption. This guy, with his interest in beer, the humor in it and the way he responds to what Suzuki says, it makes it funny. We have a source though who we trust and I think it's very funny that he's carrying a sitar into the basement when he comes across Suzuki. He seems like an unlikely sitar player. That's an example of a heuristic message that uses several of the techniques that we've been talking about here. A more serious example, the Lung Association. This image of a child with an inhaler is likely to really reach into people's hearts quite quickly. It's automatically very easily processed, and the message is very simple, very clear, and we have this very trusted source; the American Lung Association arguing in favor of not weakening the Clean Air Act. This poster, I think it's quite beautiful. I would not use this with a general audience. I would use it if the target audience is front-line communities. Notice that these are not white folks in the audience. If your target audiences is mostly comprised of whites, this might not be the most effective message. It's not people who look like them. They're activists. I'm not an activist. I'm not like them. However, if you are trying to draw in other communities which we really want to do. We know that some of these communities are really engaged particularly Native Americans. If we want to draw more people of color into this campaign or into your campaign I should say, then this kind of a poster so beautiful could really be an effective way of connecting with them. So summary here, that content targeting the middle segments, that's the cautious and the disengaged, some of the concerned, some of the doubtful, is best distributed through mass media channels, where the exposure is going to occur regardless of the audience and its members, prior beliefs or interest in climate change. So if you're watching something, you're watching a movie on TV and the ad comes up, you see it. That's accidental exposure. That's a good way of reaching people who are not going to be reading about climate change in the newspaper or going to any of the websites that cover it. That's unlikely to foster lasting attitude or behavior change, but it's really important in terms of agenda setting. The research on what gets attention in messaging through the Internet, through newspapers, through television, what people see if they see an issue over and over again, it won't change their minds about the issue, but it will make them understand that the issue is important. So we can get people to be aware of the issue, some of them when they hear the message repeated often enough the key beliefs, that can influence them and then we're going to rely very heavily on interpersonal communication to really persuade them and really get them on board. The content, the effects of it are short lived, can have a cumulative effect, resulting in greater openness to persuasion, can change the salience of the issue. We also have a body of research. This is interesting that people come to believe things that they have heard repeatedly. So message repetition increases familiarity, and more familiar content is perceived to be more true. There are a number of studies showing this that if you repeat a lie often enough, people come to think it's true because it's familiar to them, so it must be true. Something else to remember about this content is that when it's placed, it is going to be reaching not only the middle segments, but it's likely if it's in a general media channel, that it's going to reach all segments of the public and hence because we know that are alarmed and concerned are going to be part of that public, we want to talk about solutions as well as the threat.
