Route Selection

Route Selection Two-track distinction be- tween the central and peripheral routes, it is easy to understand why the persuasion process seems so logical on some occasions yet so illogical on others—why voters may select candidates according to issues or images, why juries may base their ver- dicts on evidence or a defendant’s appearance, and why consumers may base their purchases on marketing reports or on product images. The process that is engaged depends on whether the recipients of a persuasive message have the ability and the motivation to take the central route or whether they rely on peripheral cues instead.

To understand the conditions that lead people to process information on one route or the other, it’s helpful to view persuasive communication as the outcome of three factors: a source (who), a message (says what and in what context), and an audience (to whom). Each of these factors steers a recipient’s approach to the communication. If a source speaks clearly, if the message is important, or if there is a bright, captive, and involved audience that cares deeply about the issue and has time to absorb the information, then audience members will be willing and able to take the effortful cen- tral route. But if the source speaks at a rate too fast to comprehend, if the message is trivial or too complex to process, or if audience members are distracted, pressed for time, or uninterested, then the less strenuous peripheral route is taken.