Share your thoughts after you read Ch8. Word count: At least 200 words. The textbook explores several examples of peripheral processing in real life. What are some other examples? appreciate the model, you begin to find all sorts of examples of how it is employed in everyday life. Four examples of peripheral processing follow, with an application to online persuasion offered in Box 8.2. 222 BOX 8.2 Online Bamboozling Your older brother's 21st birthday is a week away and you haven't bought him a gift. It is not the first time you have procrastinated. He is a computer geek, a nerd's nerd, and a devotee of the old television program, The Big Bang Theory, because he would fit right in. You never know what to get him. You could not be more different: You are an extrovert, a people person who loves the art of conversation, So here you are cruising the Web and a variety of apps on your smartphone-well, careening would be a more apt description, given the speed at which your fingers are moving. How do you decide what it to purchase? What factors convince you to choose one laptop or tablet over another? An engaging stody by Miriam . Metzger, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Ryan B. Meddlers (2010) offers some clues. The study is important because it demonstrates that the ELM has intriguing implications for self-persuasion via the Internet, thereby enlarging its explanatory scope (see Figure 8,6). In ELM terms, you are a computer-searching shopper who is low in computer ability (at least compared with Einstein, your older sib). The ELM predicts that under conditions of low ability, consumers will base their product decisions on peripheral cues, relying on trusted heuristics to help them decide which products to purchase. In their study of 109 focus group participants from across the United States, Metzger, Flanagin, and Medders (2010) found that individuals relied on several key heuristics when seeking product information online. Notice that each of these represents reasonable, quite rational strategies for making a choice. At the same time, as we will see, they are short-circuited rules of thumb that leave people vulnerable to commercial manipulation. The key heuristics included the reputation of a website and endorsements. Participants trust Internet sources that were recommended by others and garnered a great deal of favorable feedback. The catch is this: As you know, just because a site has a strong reputation, ringing endorsements, or is consistent with other sites does not mean the information it contains is true or valid. People can be fooled by the patina of credibility and illusion of social proof (Cialdini, 2009). Conniving entrepreneurs regularly sell five-star reviews to companies. "For $5, I will submit two great reviews for your business," one poster wrote on a help-for-hire site (Streitfeld, 2011, p. A1). "Do not make the false reviews) sound like an advertisement," another faker advised. Still another, one of many who faked ratings on social media sites, spoke of outfoxing Facebook (Streitfeld, 2013, p. A17). With companies from Penney's to Altbob increasingly attuned to their online ratings, these digital manipulation devices can produce hefty dividends. One company, Sunday Riley Skincare, gamed the system for years, until the Federal Trade Commission discovered it had long been posting fake reviews of its water creams and night oils on Sephora's website. But the FTC declined to impose a financial penalty, doing little to discourage the practice (Maheshwari, 2019). There may be a silver lining. As with all advertising techniques, consumers and regulators finally get wise. For instance, people now place less faith in online, user-generated restaurant reviews the more they believe that the restaurant can keep tabs on the dissemination of these reviews and the more they suspect actual consumers didn't write the reviews (DeAndrea et al., 2018). So, if you're wise to these online reviews, which you probably are, you won't be fooled. But if you are in low-involvement, make-a-quick-decision mode, relying on heuristics, you might be duped by the misleading peripheral cues of online persuasion