Briana Anderson - Cornell University

CHAPTER THREE
EXPECTATIONS
Past research on the effectiveness and credibility of physically attractive
endorsers has been conducted in terms of selling a commercial product. The results of
these studies support the ‘match-up’ hypothesis and/or Social Adaptation theory as
related to attractiveness in advertising products, which posits that physical
attractiveness of endorser is relevant for beauty-related products as opposed to every-
day products.
Interpersonal and social psychological research has demonstrated that physical
attractiveness often leads people to make positive personality attributions to physically
attractive communicators, including perceptions of source credibility (Patzer, 1983).
Furthermore, attribution theory supports the claim that people seek to make sense of
their lives, and often make attributions about people with very little information.
The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty et al., 1983) posits that when
a person has a higher degree of involvement in a subject matter, he or she will spend
more time actively considering information related to making decisions or judgments
about that subject. This line of research would suggest those participants that are
highly involved, i.e. concerned, with certain social issues – in this case breast cancer -
will be less likely to rely on heuristics such as physical attractiveness to make
judgments about the credibility of the organization and credibility of the endorser.
According to the ELM, those individuals with high involvement should be more likely
to actively process the information and weigh many factors.
In the setting of this study where a CSR advertisement is the message, the only
information that a person will have about an endorser (other than the fictitious
17