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Attitude

A message is worth least without a source
An Attitude is a mixture of belief and emotion that predisposes a person to respond to other people, object, or institutions in a positive or negative way (Mitterer& Coon, 2007,p.632). Attitudes summarize our evaluation of objects (Oskamp & Schultz, 2005).Put another way, evaluation of objects come before an attitude formation. Understanding how an attitude is formed is prerequisite for examining how do sources play a prominent role in forming a new attitude to substitute the audience current attitude.
In communication perspective, a communication process is comprised of 4 elements, i.e. source, message, receiver, and feedback (Dominick, 2002, p.4). The attitudinal change among audiences is evident when we scrutinize the feedback of the audience as the audience feedback could be either a positive feedback (attitude) or a negative feedback (attitude) towards the message that originated from source. Thus, how an attitude changes or how a new attitude substitutes the current attitude is depending on how the audience (receiver) evaluate particular message from particular source/sources.
This further reinforces the notion of attitudinal changes can be traced to the sources that presented the message. Imagine that you are in a situation where your lecturer and your course mate told you that there will have no essay questions in your final exam next week, both of them are telling you the same message but which one of them can make you feel more positive or relief towards your final exam? This scenario shows that a same message from different sources can have different impact on a same individual and it also implies that the source has dominant role over the message. How would anyone evaluate a message without knowing its source? In short, a message is worth least without a source.

What makes the source persuasive?
Most of the scholars, if not all, who wrote...