Cognitive Modeling of Attitude Change Process Through Persuasion

Social psychology has not yet examined the attitude change process in a situation where someone is persuaded in multiple directions from different sources. To examine the process in such a situation, Nakamura and Miura (2019) conducted an experiment that manipulated the cognitive resources of the participants and showed the applicability of the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), which is known as a model of the attitude change process in unidirectional situations. In this study, we propose a cognitive model that can not only tests the applicability of the HSM in such a situation but also quantifies the quality of the stimuli and manipulations used in the experiment from the data. In addition, we fitted the data from Nakamura and Miura’s study (2019) to the cognitive model and estimated the parameters in a Bayesian way. As a result of the posterior predictive check and the model comparison by the Bayes factor, it was shown that the HSM is applicable in such a situation; however, some evidence against the HSM was also obtained from the posterior predictive check. Moreover, parameter estimates indicated that the quality of some stimuli and manipulations was not as intended by the experimenter.