McGuire suggested that the impact of persuasive communications could be understood in terms of three information-processing phases: a) attention to the message, b) comprehension of its contents, and c) acceptance of its conclusions.

In 1960, McGuire used these three phases as a basis for proposing that “the persuasive impact of messages could be viewed as the multiplicative product of six information-processing steps (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993).”

These six steps were:

1. Presentation: the message recipient must first be presented with the persuasive message

2. Attention: the recipient must pay attention to the message in order for it to produce attitude change

3. Comprehension: the overall position the message advocates and the arguments provided to support the position must be comprehended

4. Yielding: the recipient must yield to, or agree with, the message content that has been comprehended if any attitude change is to be detectable

5. Retention: the recipient must retain, or store in memory, his changed attitude if this change is to persist over a period of time

6. Behavior: the recipient must behave on the basis of their changed mind

McGuire’s six-steps give a good overview of the attitude change process, reminding us that it involves a number of components. Any independent variable in the communication situation can have an affect on any one of more of the six steps.

“The failure of any of these information-processing steps to occur causes the sequence of processes to be broken, with the consequence that subsequent steps do not occur. (Eagly, et al., 1993).”

Postulates:

In addition to the model, one “shall adopt some simplifications that facilitate exposition and experimentation without being intrinsic shortcomings in the formulation (McGuire, 1968).” We will call these simplifications “postulates.”

Postulate 1: Any personality characteristic (any independent variable in the communication situation) can affect attitude change by having an impact on any one or more of the steps.

Postulate 2: Any personality characteristic that has a positive relationship to reception, tends to be negatively related to yielding and vice versa.

Postulate 3: According to this postulate, the situational weighting principle, the relative importance of reception and yielding varies with the nature of the persuasion contexts.

Other Models:

Over the years, McGuire has applied different labels to his six original information-processing steps and has explored both shorter and longer models of information processing.

One of the most noteworthy is his two-step model of Reception-Yielding. This model is most often used to illustrate the theory and to test its ability to predict the effects of independent variables on persuasion. The immediate attitude change is the multiplicative product of reception and yielding to what one has received or comprehended. Use of this theory involves predicting how any independent variable in the communication situation will be related to attitude change by analyzing that variable’s likely impact on learning the message contents.

“The model’s key assumption is that distal persuasion variables such as recipient intelligence, fear arousal, and communication modality can influence attitude change through their effect on the reception of the message content as well as on yielding, or message acceptance (Eagly et al., 1993).”

In 1976 McGuire took his information-processing theory to eight steps:

1. Exposure

2. Perception

3. Comprehension

4. Agreement

5. Retention

6. Retrieval

7. Decision making

8. Action

Since McGuire’s theory tended to deal almost exclusively with the dependent variable in the persuasion process, in 1989 McGuire presented twelve steps in the dependent variable side:

1. Exposure to the Communication

2. Attending to the Communication

3. Liking or Becoming Interested in the Communication

4. Comprehending the Communication (learning what)

5. Skill Acquisition (learning how)

6. Yielding to the Communication (attitude change)

7. Memory Storage of Content and/or Agreement

8. Information Search and Retrieval

9. Deciding on the Basis of Retrieval

10. Behaving in Accord with Decision

11. Reinforcement of Desired Acts

12. Post-Behavioral Consolidating

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