Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger in 1957, explains the tendency among individuals to seek out and maintain stability between their attitudes and behavior. When, there are signs of instability, usually caused by a contradiction of their ideals, something must be done to reduce the dissonance that has been caused by the inconsistency. Two factors that influence the strength of dissonance is the importance of the belief and the number of dissonant beliefs. Psychological consistency allows a person affected by dissonance to lessen their mental stress by changing with or justifying against something.
Consider someone who is very environmentally aware buys a car that is marketed as being fuel-efficient. The car runs amazingly and all of their friends are giving them compliments. But then they discover that the company has been lying to them and everyone else that bought that make of car and that it’s the least environmentally sound car on the road, with fuel emissions at 40x more than the average car. Dissonance now exists between their belief that they’re environmentally aware and that they were getting all those nice compliments. Dissonance can be reduced by deciding that you weren’t going to drive it a lot so you’re still helping the environment, here you are eliminating the importance of the dissonant belief or focusing on the strengths of the car; instead, here you are adding more consonant beliefs.
The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion was created by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in 1980. The model explains the separate ways that we process information, their outcomes on attitude change and why they are used. Two major routes of processing to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route. The central route, information is careful, considerately, and cognitively processed. This route is high-involvement because they attend to the strength and logic of the persuasive message. They bring applicable information of their own— experiences, images—-to the evaluation process. The route of high-level thinking might lead to a change in attitude or might not but regardless of the attention given to sifting through the evidence and persuasive arguments will leave create some change. The peripheral route, the least attended to route, from product placement in the background of your favorite show to an action-adventure movie about a tsunami that wipes out an entire civilization, these easy-to-process, superficial messages that slip in undetected. With the peripheral route, the target audience is relying on simple heuristics in how to process or respond to the persuasive message.
In, public relations it’s our job to provide information to the target audience. When the information is contradictory to the person's beliefs or behavior, it is public relations that reinforce a persuasive message whether that is reducing their dissonance or to control the process information to ensure a change of attitude. A current event that can be applied to cognitive dissonance theory and the ELM model to persuade their audience is the Volkswagen “clean engine” scandal.
In 2006, Volkswagen’s market share was incredibly low in the U.S. and had goals to become the biggest car company in the world. But that involved creating the fuel-efficient car, which their competitor, Toyota, has already done with the Prius. Ideas surrounding building a fuel-efficient diesel engine started to be thrown around but there was one issue. Engineers realized that the emissions emitted from the “clean” engine wouldn’t meet the U.S. emission standards.
At the VW headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, they decided to install an illegal auxiliary emissions control device called AECDs or more specifically, a defeat device. According to an article in The New York Times, the software in the devices “senses when the car was being tested and then activated equipment that reduced emissions…But the software turned the equipment down during regular driving, increasing emissions far above legal limits, most likely to save fuel or to improve the car’s torque and acceleration…car’s computer could save fuel by allowing more pollutants to pass through the exhaust system. Saving fuel is one potential reason that Volkswagen’s software could have been altered to make cars pollute more..releasing nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that can cause respiratory diseases.” (Gates, et al.).
In 2008, they started marking the new VW “Clean Diesel Engine” TDI in the United States. Presenting it as an alternative to Toyota’s Prius Hybrid as an environmentally friendly diesel substitute. A quote from the Federal Trade Commission, an article titled, “FTC Charges Volkswagen Deceived Consumers with Its “Clean Diesel” Campaign” says, “Volkswagen promotional materials repeatedly claimed that its “Clean Diesel” vehicles have low emissions, including that they reduce nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions by 90 percent and have fewer such emissions than gasoline cars” (FTC Charges Volkswagen Deceived Consumers with Its "Clean Diesel" Campaign). The VW “Clean Diesel” was a massive hit and hundreds of thousands were sold across the country. But it all came crumbling down when a research team from West Virginia University published a study, testing three different kinds of diesel cars: a VW Jetta and Passat and a BMW X5. The study revealed that the two VW’s were emitting almost 40x the amount of nitrogen oxides that the BMW was emitting. The study was then brought to the attention of The California Air Resources Board (C.A.R.B), who then started to investigate Volkswagen.
In the aftermath, VW took too much time to make an initial statement and then they decided to release a video of former CEO Martin Winterkorn, who acknowledged dishonesty once and completely avoided the topic of cheating. VW’s future looked bleak, on top of the mass amounts of fines and prosecutions their approval rate was at an all-time low. For VW’s target audience that was affected by their scandal, dissonance to be reduced VW needed to re-establish the stability between their attitudes and behavior and the only way to do that was to use informative and persuasive language from a credible source and to get rid of any. In 2015, Volkswagen spent $388 million on media e.g., one of the adverts, used emotional non-diegetic music and took us through VW’s history, featured a young boy growing up. It was nostalgic and re-reminded the audience that Volkswagen’s are family cars. VW’s use of the peripheral route of persuasion with easy-to-process, superficial ads. Both cognitive dissonance and the ELM model were used to help VW rebrand themselves, move away from the past and towards the future.