ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to persuasion that focuses on the role of information in changing peoples' attitudes and on how people combine the information they receive into an overall impression. It emphasizes the interrelationships among a person's beliefs and how the change in one belief could lead to a change in others. In many respects the combinatory approaches are the most direct descendents of Hovland's message-learning approach. The theory of reasoned action specifies how the different salient beliefs are combined to arrive at an overall evaluation of the behavior under consideration. Norman Anderson has proposed a general combinatory theory of human judgment and decision called information integration theory, which has considerable relevance to the study of attitudes and persuasion. The theory of reasoned action makes it clear that any influence attempt— whether the goal is to change an attitude, norm, intention, or behavior—must always be directed at one or more of the individual's beliefs.
