to be using all examples of advertising. I am doing this for two reasons. One is because

they're good illustrations of the content. But two, again, I want to continue with the message

that social psychology is everywhere and it is certainly present in advertising that always

need and we absolutely see advertising all the time in our life. So now, whenever you

are seeing advertising, I also want you to think about social psychology and how you

can use social psychology to understand your daily lives.

This is the elaboration likelihood model. The elaboration likelihood model says that

persuasion occurs through one of two routes, the central route or the peripheral route.

The central route uses facts to persuade people and the peripheral route uses feelings. So,

here is an example of the central route and the peripheral route in an ad. I will give

a moment to look at these and we will talk about them. So you can see the central route

ad is giving a lot of facts about this Mercedes- Benz and it’s giving you things, you know,

concrete things, to think about why you might want to purchase a Mercedes-Benz. If you contrast

it with the peripheral route ad, it’s just a cool-looking ad and it makes you think like

“Woo, the Mercedes-Benz is kind of cool.” There is no facts you are learning about the

Mercedes-Benz but you are having positive feelings towards this Mercedes-Benz. So, these

ads are examples of a central route ad and a peripheral route ad.

Both elements into an ad that’s best and pause the video, and look at this. When you

are ready, un-pause it and we will talk about it. So, in this ad, you have a peripheral

going to have positive feelings towards that baby. It also has central route because there

are facts and the facts are talking about protecting her from these childhood diseases

by giving her a vaccine. In this ad, it’s using both peripheral route and central route to give a message.

About promotion versus prevention focus. A

promotion focus ad or a persuasive argument is going to say “Hey! If you do this, then

good things will happen.” A prevent focus will say “Hey! If you do this, bad things

will happen.” A promotion focus ad is going to be about all the positive things and a

prevention focus ad will talk about the negative things. So what I am going to do is I'm

going to have you click this link below and watch this Subway food ad. After you watch

it, come back to the lecture and, while you are watching it, think about which part of

the ad is promotion focus and which part of the ad is prevention focus. So, go ahead and

click the link. When you are done, come to this lecture.

So, that ad always makes me laugh. The first part of the ad is the prevention focus part

of the ad talking about how you don’t want these things, you don’t want double

blubber or thunder thighs. The promotion part of the ad is the part of the ad that talks

about these are the things that fit into healthy heart diets and you do want to have a healthy

heart. This ad does a great job of illustrating both prevention focus and promotion focus.

That’s why I always use it but I want to take a little bit more time to talk about

the distinction between prevention focus and promotion focus. Prevention focus ads tend

to be far more effective than promotion focus ads because prevention focus is on the basis

of fear. Fear is a very basic emotion. And if you can get somebody by their fear, it’s

really hard to overcome this. I am going to give an example of a persuasive message that

has prevention focus and how, despite the fact that this message is really not correct,

people continue to believe it because it’s framed prevention focus and it makes it hard

for them to evaluate this message. So what we are going to talk about is the

MMR vaccine and autism hoax. Some of you may always know about this. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield

published a paper linking MMR vaccine to autism. First, I should say that there are many many

more vaccines of MMR vaccines. One of the problems is that people are taking this paper

and they are applying it from just MMR vaccines to all vaccines. But we are going to explain

how this paper itself isn’t worth anything. There are serious and major violations in

this study…appalling kinds of violation. So first, the researcher was paid to find

evidence that this vaccine causes autism and had applied patents for an alternative vaccine

so he was paid for and he also had even more financial interest because he wanted to prove

that the vaccine that was being used wasn’t worthwhile so his vaccine would be selected.

So he had a huge financial incentive to find that there was a link between this particular

vaccine and autism. Next, it only had a sample size of 12 people and several of the participants’

parents had financial incentive to report that the vaccine causes autism. So it was

a very small sample size and, even with a small sample size, it’s hard to believe

that a lot of those parents were correctly reporting what was going on because they had

a financial reason to say that there was the link. So, this paper in 2010 was fully retracted

and Wakefield was thrown out of the medical profession. There are some people who said

that this is the most dangerous medical hoax within the last hundred years. The rise of

measles, mumps, and rubella is a serious thing and there are a lot of doctors who are very

concerned about it. None of that would have happened if this guy hadn’t been trying

to make money. That is sort of the information why the study is totally false. Further, signs

of autism tend to manifest around the age as when children are receiving vaccines. Now,

we are all very good critical thinkers and we are all psychologists here and we know

that correlation does not equal to causation. So even if your child receives a vaccine and

later on develops signs of autism, that doesn’t mean the vaccine caused autism because age

is a confound. Age is happening both to determine when your child should be getting vaccines

and when signs of autism might manifest. As psychologists and people who understand research,

you understand that you cannot make a causal claim with just correlational data. Lastly,

there is overwhelming evidence that vaccines don’t cause autism. There was a meta-analysis

of 1.2 million children, which is pretty much too big to even wrap your head around, by

Taylor, Swerdferger, and Eslick (2014). They found that vaccines don’t cause autism and,

in fact, children who did not have the vaccine were 16% more likely to have autism than children

who did. So, not only do vaccines not cause autism, but the children who didn’t have

the vaccine were even more likely to have autism. So, why do I present all this information?

Because the point is that, if you tell a parent, this vaccine might cause autism. That is a

prevention focus message saying “Don’t get this vaccine because, if you do, this

bad thing is going to happen, your child might have autism.” Despite all of this evidence

that you can see right now on your screen that there is no reason to believe that this

vaccine causes autism, many parent cannot overcome that prevention focus message and

take this information into consideration and realize that vaccines actually should be given

to their children. Because prevention focus message is so incredibly strong and people

find it very difficult to overcome them, they are very very effective. In this case, it’s

actually causing a huge problem, a lot of children are getting sick and there is a lot

of doctors who are very concerned. This prevention focus message is having sort of a disastrous

effect. Even with all of this evidence that you can give to parents, they cannot overcome

this prevention focus message. So, this is meant to explain to you how strong prevention

focus messages can be.