Systematic and Heuristic Persuasion (a) Systematic persuasion. When students were motivated to analyze arguments because they would be personally affected by them, their attitudes were influenced by the strength of the arguments (strong arguments were more persuasive than weak arguments), but not by the status of the communicator (the Princeton professor was not more persuasive than the high school student). (b) Heuristic persuasion. When students were not motivated to analyze arguments because they would not be personally affected by them, their attitudes were influenced by the status of the communicator (the Princeton professor was more persuasive than the high school student), but not by the strength of the arguments (strong arguments were no more persuasive than weak arguments; Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981).