Beauty and the Beholder: Toward an Integrative Model of Communication Source Effects

We present a framework applicable to market communications that prominently feature the message source, with little or no argumentation. Based on dual-process theories and the recent literatures on resource matching and bias correction, we argue that source effects occur through one or more of the following three processes: peripheral/heuristic processing of source as a cue, central/systematic processing of source as product arguments, and correction of source biases. This three-process model sets boundary conditions for the existing source models (i.e., main-effect models and source-by-product interaction models) and explains negative source effects.