The president awakens one morning to headlines announcing that research
using laboratory animals has proven that a popular food additive causes cancer.
Realizing that he will be questioned about the issue, the president quickly calls
a breakfast meeting of his cabinet. At breakfast, he admits that he personally
enjoys many of the foods that contain the additive and that, due to habit, his
initial reaction is to support the continued use of the additive in foods.

The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services immediately
suggests that the president reconsider his position. The secretary argues that the
food additive be banned immediately for reasons of public safety. Citing statistics
from the study reported in the newspaper, the secretary offers many reasons for
this recommendation. The secretary ends by stating that the president would do
best politically and morally to ban the additive.

The president attends carefully to the secretary's presentation, trying to com-
prehend and remember the secretary's advocacy and arguments. From the pres-
ident's expression, the secretary's appeal about the political benefits of the
recommendation is weighing heavily in his decision. The president pauses, thinks
of the issue, his old attitude toward it, and the new attitude and arguments that
have been offered. As the president rehearses and learns the new attitude and
arguments, the issue becomes more powerfully linked to them than to his old
attitude. The president has been persuaded. The food additive is banned.

This scenario of communication and attitude change exemplifies the message-
learning approach championed by Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale
University in the 1950s ( Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953). In this chapter, we
discuss the influence of the Yale Communication and Attitude Change Program
and their message-learning approach to the study of attitudes and persuasion.

The Yale group never proposed a formal "theory" of attitude change, but
rather they were guided by "working assumptions." These assumptions were
loosely translated from principles of how people learn verbal and motor skills.

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