Persuasion below the waterline. Research on the heuristic route in media

Abstract

This article presents the state of the art of research on dual process models in persuasion and explains the development of the area in the last three decades, focusing on works on the heuristic processing route and the media. To center the issue it reviews the fundamentals of Petty and Cacioppo’s Elaboration Likelihood Model and Chaiken and Eagly’s Heuristic–Systematic Model, and discusses the two different cognitive processing routes they propose: the central or systematic processing route, and the peripheral or heuristic processing route. The article explains what are the heuristic patterns and looks at research done on the heuristic processing route and the media. Finally, it proposes an interdisciplinary framework to identify and analyze the heuristic rules used in digital newspaper’s sports texts, in particular in those about Fútbol Club Barcelona. This interdisciplinary framework includes elements from cognitive linguistics,frames theory and storytelling.