Under the Elaboration Likelihood Model, an audience affected by a policy next year is persuaded by argument strength, while an audience affected in ten years is persuaded by the speaker's credentials. Why does the same message work through different features for the two groups?

A. Because personal relevance determines motivation to think carefully.

The route is chosen by the listener rather than the speaker: an audience affected next year has reason to think it through, so argument quality dominates and weak arguments backfire. What matters is the difference in what each produces, centrally processed attitudes are durable and predict behaviour, peripheral change is easily reversed by the next confident-sounding source.