In theories and studies of persuasion, people's personal knowledge about persuasion agents' goals and tactics, and about how to skillfully cope with these, has been ignored. We present a model of how people develop and use persuasion knowledge to cope with persuasion attempts. We discuss what the model implies about how consumers use marketers' advertising and selling attempts to refine their product attitudes and attitudes toward the marketers themselves. We also explain how this model relates to prior research on consumer behavior and persuasion and what it suggests about the future conduct of consumer research.

Dominant simplifying strategies people use in adapting to different information processing environments were investigated. The hypotheses tested were that judges operating under either time pressure or distraction would tend to systematically place greater weight on negative evidence than would their counterparts under less strainful conditions. Six groups of subjects (210 male undergraduates) were presented five pieces of information to assimilate in evaluating cars as purchase options. Three groups operated under varying time pressure conditions, while three groups operated under varying levels of distraction. Data usage models assuming disproportionately heavy weighting of negative evidence provided best-fits to a significantly higher number of subjects in the high time pressure and moderate distraction conditions. Subjects also attended to fewer data dimensions in these conditions.

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Conceptualizations of children's and adolescents' knowledge about advertising and persuasion have evolved considerably over the past three decades. However, empirical research on this topic has been scarce in the past two decades. The authors review the early and current models of children's marketplace persuasion knowledge for insights into the conceptual limits of prior empirical research and opportunities for research grounded in richer models of advertising knowledge. They discuss goals and directions for the next generation of research programs so that such research will yield more complete insights into children's and adolescents' advertising knowledge and provide a basis for future policy decisions.

Does the perceived expense of a new product's advertising campaign influence expectations about the product's quality? This article conceptualizes the process by which perceived advertising expense acts as a cue to quality. Results from six experiments indicate that under some conditions, knowledge of cost-related campaign elements can evoke advertising expense inferences that influence quality predictions, and these inferences may be spontaneous.T he perceived expense of a new product's advertising campaign can influence consumers' expectations about the product's quality. In judging product quality, consumers use intrinsic cues-information about quality-related product features-as well as extrinsic cues, such as price or brand name (Olson 1977). We explore the notion that perceived advertising expense operates as an extrinsic quality cue under some conditions.The process by which perceived advertising expense affects quality expectations involves two information processing activities. A consumer must first encode information that conveys perceived advertising expense directly or by association; this belief about advertising expense must, in turn, evoke a tentative product quality association or inference. These activities may involve conscious reasoning or, like other familiar cognitive activities, may have become automatized over time. The impact of perceived advertising expense should be strongest when other cues are unavailable, cursorily processed, ambiguous, or irrelevant (Olson 1977;Zeithaml 1988). Its impact should be weakest when people deeply process relevant information about a new product's features.Basic questions that arise regarding the process by which perceived advertising expense influences quality expectations concern why and when people might use perceived expense as a cue to a new product's quality. We identify several possible explanations: