Chapter 10 summarizes the book’s principles and discusses future research directions.

Chapter 1 presents the objectives of the book, which blends a traditional monograph with topics of contemporary interest and an analysis of attitude and behavior change in real and virtual contexts. Definitions and a overview of the theory are presented.

Chapter 8 describes how prior attitudes shape the processing of persuasive messages and behavioral interventions in fundamental ways. First, people select messages and interventions in ways that minimize their likely impact. They seek pro-violence messages when they already espouse pro-violence beliefs and healthy eating messages when they already follow healthy diets. These decisions, of course, decrease the probability of changing attitudes and behaviors that have negative social and health effects, which has led to my research on finding methods to decrease selective exposure biases. For example, because selective exposure is often tied to a low sense of one’s ability to self-defend if one’s attitudes or behaviors come under attack, reassuring an audience that they will only change if they want to is often sufficient to increase exposure to messages and enrollment in behavioral interventions. In addition, understanding attitude and behavior change requires understanding activation of prior attitudes and other information contained in the message. For example, easy-to-access prior attitudes generally decrease change in response to new information but may also increase change when they facilitate comparison with new information. Furthermore, when people who are called to report an attitude retrieve the initial basis for their attitude, the structure of that information in memory drives the degree of attitude change in that situation. Different sleeper effects illustrate such effects of the initial representations of the information contained in a persuasive message.

Chapter 9 discusses how messages designed with the intent of influencing behavior and behavioral interventions are successful when they influence factors in the person and the situation that ultimately make those programs actionable. Actionability is the probability that the message or intervention communicates or enables performance of behavioral recommendations . First, a message or behavioral intervention can stimulate the cognitive, motivational, or behavioral processes that ultimately make the individual perform the recommended behavior. Second, it can promote behavioral recommendations that fit within the world in which potential actors live. These factors and relevant data are discussed.