Reducing AIDS Risk Behavior: The Combined Efficacy of Protection Motivation Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model

Educational campaigns designed to facilitate preventive health behaviors have fallen short by ignoring the cognitive processes involved in undertaking such behaviors. Participants low and high in protection motivation (PM) read a persuasive communication that, based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986a, 1 986b), manipulated a central (quality of the arguments presented) and a peripheral (gender of the communicator) cue. As predicted, high PM participants, for whom the communications were more personally relevant, engaged in more elaborative processing of the message arguments than low PM individuals, for whom the communications were less personally relevant. Additional attitudinal change as a function of the peripheral cue of gender for high PM participants suggests that there may be a layering effect of persuasive cues.