We're going to talk about information processing theories, and message design to help you design messages for your target audiences that are sticky, that stay with them. In this lecture we're going to talk about first the information processing theories. First of all automatic versus effortful processing, and second heuristic versus systematic processing. That's a little bit of effort or a lot of effort invested in understanding the message. The implications of these differences in information processing styles for message design, they are extremely important. If we don't design the message properly in terms of the amount of effort it takes and the strategies that it uses, we are less likely to reach our audience. Then we want to talk about creating sticky messages and we'll go through a course summary and review after we've done that. So there are three important things that I want you to keep in mind when you get to actually designing the messages. First is that, less than 20 percent of the American public can read and understand a science news article in The New York Times. The research that identified this level of science literacy was done by John Miller a little over a decade ago. He asked a whole series of questions about scientific research to see if people understood things like randomization. I thought this was particularly impressive. He asked people whether you needed a control group, as well as a treatment group, or you could just go with a treatment group. Among the people who said oh you need both a treatment and a control group, a large number of them, the reason that they thought you should have a control group is that if you're testing a medicine fewer people will die because they're in the control group. So huge misperception. So we want to remember that the American public doesn't have high science literacy. Second, that we communicators suffer from the curse of knowledge. That is, we know a lot about what we want to communicate and it's hard for us to imagine how messages are going to be understood by audiences that don't already know the things that we know. For this reason, it is very important to pre-test your messages with members of your target audience, find the people, have focus groups with them, talk about the messages, figure out what they know and they don't know, so that you can address their informational needs and not speak from your high knowledge of the content that you want to get across to them. Third is in terms of choosing channels. Understand that targeted content can reach narrow audiences and have deep impacts. Widely distributed general contact can reach many more people with shallow impacts and we want to try to balance those in our communication strategies to influence the audience that we target the the highly involved with content that is effortful, that they can really learn from. But we don't try to do that with a general audience, with a general audience, we are just going to have very simple messages that we're going to repeat often. So let's go to the information processing theories. This first part of the research that we're going to talk about comes to us from Tversky and Kahneman, system one and system two. I'm going to show you two pictures and I just want you to note your own reaction to them, what you think or how you respond as soon as you see these pictures. First one, second one. All right. System one is what we employ in processing the picture of the bear. Instantaneously you go, "Oh!" You recognize it's a threatening image. The threat is right in front of your face. No one needs to tell you. This is a bear and the bear is ferocious and approaching you. Anyone who is exposed to that understands it. It's processed automatically. This applies not only to things like this bear, but it applies to content that we are extremely, things we have learned that we are extremely familiar with. So if I ask you what 1 plus 2 equals. You don't have to think at all, it just automatically you know that response. That wouldn't be the case if you were talking to someone who had not gone to school. But for all of us who have gone through public school and completed high school. It's like that. In contrast, this content requires a lot of cognitive effort to understand it and we know we've spoken about this previously. Only people who care about the issue are going to expend the effort necessary to understand that content. So we want as much as possible to engage with the automatic processing. Here, with this image, it takes very, very little cognitive effort to see, oh you see it automatically. These two differ, and you don't need anyone to explain it to you. Using the bear, you might infer from that that I want you to scare people and I don't, I just think it's such a surprising image and we respond to it so automatically that it's a good example of what automatic processing looks like.
