The Return of the One-Track Mind

In their thoughtful and carefully argued target article, Kruglanski and Thompson challenge the central assumption of dual-process theories “that a qualitative difference in the persuasion process hinges on whether persuasion is accomplished by the processing of message arguments versus the processing of information exogenous to the message; that is, by cues or heuristics.” I found their arguments very convincing. They persuaded me that on a theoretical level their rejection of the central assumption of dual-process frameworks is justified. Furthermore, I expect that by freeing information processing theories of persuasion from a number of apparently superfluous assumptions, their theoretical analysis is likely to stimulate new areas of persuasion research. On a practical level, however, I think that their analysis will have less of an impact. I suspect that heuristic cues, such as communicator expertise, serve as convenient indicators of message validity because they are both less complex and precede the message in most real-life communication settings.