Christopher Carpenter

Western Illinois University | WIU · Department of Communication

A strong message recall-attitude relationship was predicted when participants were induced to use memory-based processing to form their attitudes but not when induced to use on-line processing after exposure to a persuasive message. The recall-attitude correlation in the memory-based conditions was expected to be positive when the arguments were st...

Several hypotheses were derived from the self-expansion model (Aron & Aron, 1986) concerning romantic relationships and social networking sites (SNSs). A sample of 276 participants responded to questions about their relationship history and SNS uses and a subset of those (N = 149) responded to additional questions about a current romantic partner....

Boster et al.'s (2006) dimensions of diffusion ability were used to determine if the argumentation of superdiffusers of health information (those who are well-connected, persuasive, and knowledgeable about healthy lifestyles) is different from those who are not. In Study 1, 164 undergraduates completed the measures of diffusion ability. They were t...

A survey (N = 292) was conducted that measured self-promoting Facebook behaviors (e.g. posting status updates and photos of oneself, updating profile information) and several anti-social behaviors (e.g. seeking social support more than one provides it, getting angry when people do not comment on one's status updates, retaliating against negative co...

The Health Belief Model (HBM; Rosenstock, 196621. Rosenstock , I. M. 1966. Why people use health services. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 44: 94–127. [CrossRef], [PubMed]View all references) was constructed to explain which beliefs should be targeted in communication campaigns to cause positive health behaviors. The model specifies that if indiv...

The superdiffuser model predicts that the diffusion of a new behavior can be accelerated if superdiffusers (people who are connectors, persuaders, and mavens) are recruited to promote the behavior. We propose an expanded model where the importance of these traits varies by network structure and other network member characteristics. We assessed the...

The superdiffuser model predicts that the diffusion of a new behavior can be accelerated if superdiffusers (people who are connectors, persuaders, and mavens) are recruited to promote the behavior. We propose an expanded model where the importance of these traits varies by network structure and other network member characteristics. We assessed the...

Developing effective messages to promote climate action requires an understanding of how these messages are processed by different groups. Though the influence of partisan identity on this processing is well established, much less is known about the role of preexisting climate beliefs. Furthermore, scholars have recently raised the possibility that...

Novel, public behaviors, such as masking, should be susceptible to normative influence. This paper advances the theory of normative social behavior by considering a new set of moderators of normative influence - superdiffuser traits - and by clarifying the antecedents and consequences of exposure to collective norms. We use data from a two-wave sur...

The self-concept approach explains motivated reasoning in terms of self-concept defense. To test that prediction, a study with a quasi-experimental design was conducted (N= 356). Participants were exposed to a short meme-style message attacking either the American Democratic or Republican Party. Party affiliation of participants predicted reactions...

Opinion leaders are people who can informally influence others to adopt, among other things, healthier behaviors. This entry distinguishes between polymorphic opinion leaders, who are able to influence people on any topic, and monomorphic opinion leaders, who are usually only able to influence people on a particular topic, as well as approaches ble...

A survey was conducted (N = 632) to determine which of the Big Five personality traits tended to be related to each of the three traits specified in the superdiffuser model of diffusion and influence (connector, persuader, maven). The purpose of the study was to better understand the traits that form the core of the superdiffuser model of opinion l...

The three superdiffuser traits (health maven, connector, persuader) are identified using a self-report measure. The construct validity of the health maven measure requires that the health maven’s social network perceive the health maven to be a health maven. To test this validity hypothesis, a sample of 98 pairs of people who knew each other was dr...

Building support for fighting climate change via public policy requires overcoming motivated resistance based on political identities. One solution is for sources, congenial to the audience's political orientation, to advocate such policies. This study explores explanations suggested by the self-concept model of cognitive dissonance and the extent...

The hyperperception model was used to derive hypotheses concerning the processes by which people experience romantic jealousy because of their observation of their romantic partners on Facebook. Issues concerning active versus passive observation, personally unknown versus known potential rivals, and relational uncertainty variables were considered...

The hyperperception model was used to derive hypotheses concerning the processes by which people experience romantic jealousy because of their observation of their romantic partners on social network sites. The main focus was on the receiver component of the model that specifies that when observation of others' interactions is constrained to social...

Much of our Social Network Site (SNS) and associated mobile application use involves observing and interpreting other people’s online presentations and interactions. This paper proposes an extension of the hyperpersonal model (Walther, 1996), called the hyperperception model, which can be used to explain and predict the potential psychological and...

In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of findings. Communication research is subject to many of the same challenges that have caused low re...

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is a dual‐process model of persuasion. The ELM distinguishes between cognitive responses to persuasive messages that show high levels of cognitive elaboration (central processing) of the message arguments and those that show minimal cognitive elaboration (peripheral processing). Those using the latter type rel...

Publication bias occurs when studies are conducted but do not enter the scientific record in the form of academic journal articles or other publications that other researchers can access. It is unclear how often this problem occurs in media psychology. Several methods have been proposed to detect publication bias in a research literature when condu...

This study tests the predictive power of part of the recently proposed hyperperception model. The model’s components posit that aspects of an observer of other’s SNS interactions as well as aspects of the SNS environment may cause the observer’s perceptions of others’ interactional and relational intimacy to be heightened. This study describes pote...

Three models for the effect of source expertise on attitude change, the heuristic cue model, the evidence model, and the moderator model, were identified and tested. To test predictions based on those models, the effect of source expertise on attitude change and on perceived message-effectiveness were examined with different numbers of supporting a...

Communicating relational maintenance through social network sites such can be an important strategy for first-year students to build university-affiliated social networks. In this longitudinal network analysis, ninety-four beginning first-year students completed the Facebook Relational Maintenance Measure (FRMM). Emerging network data collected ove...

The hyperperception model was used to identify the importance of Facebook users knowing their romantic partner's Facebook friends in predicting romantic jealousy. A cross-sectional survey (N = 615) found that surveillance of romantic partners, knowing fewer of the partner's Facebook friends, and frequent interactions between the partner and unknown...

This essay attempts to describe the apples and oranges problem in meta-analyses. Essentially, some meta-analyses combine original studies of various variables that are not the same pairs of variables. Metaphorically, they meta-analyze the effects of fruit when they should conduct separate meta-analyses of apples and oranges. This practice is incons...

Social network sites such as Facebook offer opinion leaders an unprecedented ability to attempt to persuade people about politics. This survey (N = 295) sought to explore opinion leader types of and motives for producing political messages aimed at persuading others on Facebook. The results indicated that mavens, a type of opinion leader, were more...

Although scholars have argued that people actively shape and reshape their social networks (e.g., Parks, 2016), this aspect of relational development has received little attention. This study sought to determine if people’s self-perceptions of interpersonal communication skills translated into behavior that led to relationship formation in a new ne...

The functional theory of attitudes (Katz, 1960) proposes that if persuasive messages target the reason why the audience possesses an attitude on that subject (the attitude’s function), such messages will be more persuasive than if they target a different function. The “functional matching” effect was tested by meta-analyzing 16 articles, which repo...

From 54 articles, 172 effect sizes were meta-analyzed to determine whether men and women are differentially distressed by emotional versus sexual infidelity. Predictions were derived and tested from an evolutionary psychology (EP) perspective, a social–cognitive perspective, and the double-shot perspective. The data were not consistent with the EP...

In some romantic relationships, one partner has more power over joint decisions than the other. This study examines relative commitment as a key predictor of which partner has more power and developed a model based on classic interdependence theory. A survey was conducted (N = 324) using new measures of the key variables to test the model. When des...

Two studies assessed the construct validity of the value-relevant involvement scale (Cho & Boster, 2005), (N = 308 and N = 285). Study 1 assessed the extent to which VRI was related to attitude structure and self-reports of behavior about a topic. Study 2 tested the extent to which VRI can predict reactions to counter-attitudinal messages. The data...

The Health Belief Model (Rosenstock, 1966) was constructed to explain which beliefs should be targeted in communication campaigns to cause positive health behaviors. The model specifies that if individuals perceives a negative health outcome to be severe, perceives themselves to be susceptible to it, perceives the benefits to behaviors which reduce...

A meta-analysis of the speech disfluency literature suggested that the relationship between speaker disfluencies and competence judgments may be mediated. The theory of elaborative resistance production (TERP; Turner & Banas, 2007) was then applied to the effects of disfluencies on speaker persuasiveness. An experiment was conducted such that 240 u...

Publication bias can occur when a study is not published in an academic journal because the study did not find a statistically significant result. It can bias meta-analytic estimates upwards because the meta-analyses are missing studies that provide small estimates of the effect size under study. This paper describes the trim and fill technique of...

One of the enduring topics for persuasion research is motivated reasoning, when people respond to persuasive messages in ways other than seeking to form an accurate attitude. This essay advances the position that the existing research can be synthesized using the self-concept approach to cognitive dissonance with ego-involvement added as the key ex...

One of the enduring topics for persuasion research is motivated reasoning, when people respond to persuasive messages in ways other than seeking to form an accurate attitude. This essay advances the position that the existing research can be synthesized using the self-concept approach to cognitive dissonance with ego-involvement added as the key ex...

The modern media ecology has changed drastically over the last decade yet scholarly theoretical perspectives lag behind lay theories regarding news diffusion making it difficult to fully articulate and understand the processes driving dissemination of information and persuasion across networks and media contexts. The proposed theoretical framework...

Two studies assessed the construct validity of the value-relevant involvement scale (Cho & Boster, 2005), (N = 308 and N = 285). Study 1 assessed the extent to which VRI was related to attitude structure and self-reports of behavior about a topic. Study 2 tested the extent to which VRI can predict reactions to counterattitudinal messages. The data...

Replications are an important part of the research process because they allow for greater confidence in the findings of communication research. However, engaging in replications is often undervalued, replication studies can be difficult to publish, and thus it is difficult for individual scholars to devote their resources toward replication. This e...

The relationship between message recall and the perceived likelihood of claims made in the message can be understood by applying Spinozan processing theory. An experiment was conducted by varying evidence type, measuring need to evaluate, and message recall with N = 210 and found evidence consistent with a predicted 3-way interaction. With memory-b...

It was hypothesized that the enhanced compliance rate associated with the use of the “evoking-freedom” technique of compliance gaining may be explained by a causal model in which the use of the technique causes the target to perceive the requester as friendlier, which increases the target’s likelihood of compliance. A research question explored the...

Purpose This article provides a re‐analysis of Vrij et al .'s (2017, Leg. Crim. Psychol . 22, 1) meta‐analysis of the cognitive approach to lie detection. Vrij et al .'s analyses confounded dependent variables, capitalized on aberrant controls, and used unreliable data to inflate support. Methods Meta‐analysis was used to reanalyse Vrij et al .'s...

This study explored how people argue on social-networking sites. Specifically, participants (N = 170) responded to open and closed-ended questions about the most recent argument they had engaged in on Facebook. Results of a content analysis of participants’ answers revealed individuals tended to argue mostly about public issues, in somewhat complex...

This research examined the relational maintenance versus termination of online friendships in Facebook. Guided by Rusbult's [33] investment model (IM), the study constructed a model to examine 55 matched pairs of Facebook friends consisting of one "primary user" and one "annoyer." Results indicated that primary users' judgments of relational satisf...

Personal communication, in which one person persuades another to engage in a particular behavior, is one means through which behaviors spread. To better understand how personal communication spreads behavior, we investigated adults’ (N = 228) likelihood of persuading others in a fictitious social network to buy antibiotic-free food, and who they at...

In some romantic relationships, one partner has more power over joint decisions than the other. This study examines relative commitment as a key predictor of which partner has more power and developed a model based on classic interdependence theory. A survey was conducted (N = 324) using new measures of the key variables to test the model. When des...

Introduction The low-ball (Cialdini et al., 1978) is a compliance gaining technique consisting of making an attractive initial offer to get a person to agree to the request and then making the terms less favorable (target request). Objective and methods The effectiveness of this technique was evaluated in a meta-analysis using 17 references, 23 st...

Introduction: The low-ball (Cialdini et al., 1978) is a compliance gaining technique consisting of making an attractive initial offer to get a person to agree to the request and then making the terms less favorable (target request). Objective and methods: The effectiveness of this technique was evaluated in a meta-analysis using 17 references, 23 s...

Introduction: The low-ball (Cialdini et al., 1978) is a compliance-gaining technique consisting of making an attractive initial offer to get a person to agree to the request and then making the terms less favorable (target request). Objective and methods: The effectiveness of this technique was evaluated in a meta-analysis using 17 references, 23 s...

Assessing the impact of an individual’s social network on an individual is difficult without administering a large number of surveys. Online social networks with built-in data collection circumvent this problem. The data collected by an exercise-focused social media website and mobile app allowed the estimation of the effect of both the behavior of...

Warranting theory has been used extensively to explain how people evaluate information across a variety of online settings. However, no validated measurement instrument exists to assess the construct of warranting value that is at the core of the theory. Two studies were conducted to develop and validate a general warranting value scale and three s...

Dating apps on smartphones have brought speed dating on the Internet to a new level. This exploratory investigation sought to determine what kinds of people use these apps, what their motivations are, and what precautions they take before meeting someone. One hundred and seventy-three non-users and 57 current users of dating apps were surveyed. The...

Two studies were conducted to assess whether reactance or politeness offers a better explanation of the effectiveness of the “but you are free” (BYAF) technique of gaining compliance. The first was conducted with an online survey in the US (N = 131) and found that the BYAF was associated with lower perceived freedom threat than a control or polite...

This article uses White and Mullen's jealousy model as a basis to derive hypotheses about the causes and effects of Facebook-related romantic jealousy. A cross-sectional survey was conducted to test these hypotheses (N = 196). General Facebook use by the user or the romantic partner were not substantially related to user jealousy. Reports of a vari...

The purpose of this study is to identify the politics of Chinese netizens' racism toward Africans on the website, ChinaSMACK. Critical and grounded theory analysis reveals that racism on ChinaSMACK (a) is triggered by perceived threats to identity, economic stability, and State fidelity; (b) exists in a paradoxical relationship with globalization;...

The “but you are free” (BYAF) technique is a verbal compliance procedure which solicits people to comply with a request by telling them that they are free to accept or to refuse the request. This technique is based on the semantic evocation of freedom. In two studies, we explored another operationalization of this paradigm: the word “liberty” or a...

One of the key characteristics of effective opinion leaders is that they are highly connected; they know many people and have numerous weak-tie relationships. Two studies were conducted that found evidence consistent with construct validity. The first (N = 35 and N = 57) found that connectors knew more people from a randomly selected list of names....

Background. The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) is invoked frequently when social science scholars examine messages, affect, cognition, and action. Nevertheless, the fact that the TRA is a cross-sectional model limits its utility as an explanatory mechanism for those who study relationships among these variables as they change over time. This essay...

One of the key dual-process model predictions is that audiences will be more persuaded by strong persuasive arguments than weak and that this difference in persuasiveness will be larger when they are processing centrally rather than peripherally. A series of meta-analyses were conducted (k = 134) to assess this claim and explore moderators. The dat...

Boster et al. (2011) proposed that to be highly influential (a superdiffuser) one must be highly expert in a domain (a maven), highly connected, and highly persuasive. Two studies are presented testing the construct validity of the maven scale they developed. The first (n = 131) found that political mavens are more politically active and knowledgea...

A new compliance-gaining technique is introduced called the “just-one-more” (JOM) technique that increases compliance rates by including the phrase “I just need one more person to help.” Two studies are reported (N = 160 in each). The first established the effectiveness of the technique as compared to a direct request. The second tested the hypothe...

This study proposed a path model of the effects of message comprehensibility on attitude change with the measured cognitive mediators suggested by dual-process models of persuasion. An experiment was conducted using a 2 (strong arguments vs. weak arguments) × 2 (easy vs. difficult to understand arguments) fully crossed independent-groups design wit...

Cheng (2011) identified the comments and discussions on Chinese blogs and news websites as the location of a new kind of cyber-racism focusing on black people that is emerging from Chinese netizens. This paper seeks to explore the way black people are discussed in these websites by examining the content and comments on translated blogs and news web...

This research examines question effects in deception detection. A first set of participants (N = 104) were given the opportunity to cheat to obtain a cash prize, and were then interviewed with accusatory, non-accusatory, bait, or false evidence questioning. A second set of participants (N = 157) watched videotapes of the interviews and made honesty...

Several hypotheses were derived from the self-expansion model (Aron & Aron, 1986) concerning romantic relationships and social networking sites (SNSs). A sample of 276 participants responded to questions about their relationshi p history and SNS uses and a subset of those (N = 149) responded to additional questions about a current romantic partner....

The “but you are free” (BYAF) compliance-gaining technique operates by telling the target that he or she is free to refuse the request. A meta-analysis of 42 studies of the effectiveness of that technique indicated that it was an effective means of increasing compliance rates in most contexts. It was effective regardless of type of request, but eff...

The functional theory of attitudes (Katz, 196026. Katz , D. ( 1960 ). The functional approach to the study of attitudes . Public Opinion Quarterly , 24 , 163 – 204 . [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) proposes that if persuasive messages target the reason why the audience possesses an attitude on that subject (the attitude's functi...

A meta-analysis of the speech disfluency literature suggested that the relationship between speaker disfluencies and competence judgments may be mediated. The theory of elaborative resistance production (TERP; Turner & Banas, 200725. Turner , M. M. , & Banas , J. ( 2007 , November ). The other side of persuasion: Toward a theory of elaborative re...

From 54 articles, 172 effect sizes were meta-analyzed to determine whether men and women are differentially distressed by emotional versus sexual infidelity. Predictions were derived and tested from an evolutionary psychology (EP) perspective, a social–cognitive perspective, and the double-shot perspective. The data were not consistent with the EP...

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Boster, Kotowski, Andrews, and Serota (20113. Boster , F. J. , Kotowski , M. R. , Andrews , K. R. and Serota , K. 2011. Identifying influence: Development and validation of the connectivity, persuasiveness, and maven scales. Journal of Communication, 61: 178–197. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) proposed that superdiffusers ar...

Different types of verb voice in a sentence were examined as a possible simple cue within the unimodel of persuasion (Kruglanski & Thompson, 19994. Kruglanski , A. W. , & Thompson , E. P. ( 1999 ). Persuasion by a single route: A view from the unimodel . Psychological Inquiry , 10 , 83 – 109 . [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®]View all...

Academic dishonesty is a problem in academia and cheating is a problem in society at large. Sensation-seeking was proposed as a personality trait that is positively related to one’s likelihood to cheat. A sample of 105 undergraduates participated in a research activity for course credit where cheating on a trivia game to win a cash prize by taking...

The disrupt-then-reframe compliance gaining technique (DTR; Davis & Knowles, 19995. Davis , B. P. , & Knowles , E. S. ( 1999 ). A disrupt-then-reframe technique of social influence . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 76 , 192 – 199 . [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) uses confusing language and then follows it with a...

Meta-analysis involves cumulating effects across studies in order to qualitatively summarize existing literatures. A recent finding suggests that the effect sizes reported in meta-analyses may be negatively correlated with study sample sizes. This prediction was tested with a sample of 51 published meta-analyses summarizing the results of 3,602 ind...

The ability to provide adequate comforting is valued in close relationships. As a valued commodity, the quality of the comforting that a person provides may be used to maintain equitable relationships or to balance rewards and costs in close relationships. We examined whether perceptions of equity in dating relationships predicts the quality of com...

A meta-analysis was conducted on the legitimization of paltry favors (LPF) effect (Cialdini & Schroeder, 1976). A total of 19 studies met the inclusion criteria, with a combined sample of 2,730 subjects. Excluding studies in which the LPF request was deliv-ered via mail and those studies that accepted pledges as the dependent variable resulted in a...

"The names used to refer to nuclear weapons are theorized to affect attitudes toward them. Pet names like "Peacekeeper" are thought to causes [sic] the audience to support nuclear weapons more than functional names like "Silo-Launched Guided Missiles." The current study had 61 participants (31 female, 30 male). This study found that the effect of t...