3. What role does credibility play in affecting consumer attitudes based on cognitions? When consumers’ MAO to engage in a behavior or to process a message is high, consumers tend to devote considerable effort to forming their attitudes and to message processing. An attitude is a relatively global and enduring evaluation about an offering, issue, activity, person, or event. Attitudes can be described in terms of their favorability, accessibility, confidence, persistence, and resistance. Consumers’ thoughts and feelings in response to this situation can affect their attitudes, through either a cognitive or an affective route to persuasion.

Five types of cognitive models show how thoughts relate to attitudes in high-consumer-effort situations: (1) direct or imagined experience, (2) reasoning by analogy or category, (3)

values-driven attitudes, (4) social identity-based attitude generation, and (5) analytical processes of attitude construction, including expectancy-value models such as the TORA and the theory of planned behavior.