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Self-originated elaboration account of acceptance without comprehension

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Evidence · no claims cited

Description

The article's preferred formulation is a cognitive response account in which acceptance rests on the recipient's own thoughts rather than on message meaning. It reports that "a meaningless message could Suffice to instigate sufficient own thoughts for confident reporting of differential message acceptance," and concludes that "the locus of meaning... was not anywhere in the message but in the self-otigin_ted elaborations of the message recipient." This account is offered against comprehension-based persuasion models.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

  • A measure of the recipient's own cognitive responses (thought listings) to capture the elaborations on which acceptance is based

Constraints

  • The authors note cognitive elaboration being abetted by unintelligibility appears to undermine a key assumption of central-versus-peripheral routes theories

Target Learners

  • university students

Target Learning Objectives

  • attitude change and persuasion processing

Claims

Examples

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Key Sources

  • Padgett, Vernon R. & Brock, Timothy C. (1986). Persuasion with Unintelligible Messages: A Cognitive Response Analysis. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED282138
Page metadata
Field Value
type theory
title Self-originated elaboration account of acceptance without comprehension
description The article's preferred formulation is a cognitive response account in which acceptance rests on the recipient's own thoughts rather than on message meaning.
status review
canonical True
generated by claude/unspecified on 2026-09-25
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — padgett-1986

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