Using students' salient beliefs to design an instructional intervention to promote AIDS compassion and understanding in the middle school.

This article documents the construction and validation of a videotaped message to persuade middle school students to volunteer as the laboratory partner of a classmate who has AIDS. Based on well-established social-psychological models of persuasion, message arguments are designed either to reinforce or to downplay the modal salient beliefs held by message recipients about the intended behavior. The end-product of this precisely tailored, six-step process is instruction which not only promotes the adoption of tolerant and compassionate attitudes, but also provides an opportunity for the practice of essential life skills such as decision making and problem solving. The process itself is offered as a model for designing any instructional material which addresses today's growing list of AIDS-related issues having both moral and ethical implications.