Final answer:
The salesperson was not persuasive, which impacted the purchase decision. Effective central route persuasion requires an analytical and motivated audience, and in the Asch experiment, conformity happened due to normative pressures.
Step-by-step explanation:
The salesperson at the store was definitely not persuasive, and as a result, we did not buy any of the ice cream that they were selling today. The correct adjective to fill in the blank is persuasive because it directly relates to the outcome of the salesperson's interaction with the customers, which is that they did not succeed in convincing the customers to make a purchase.
For the central route to persuasion to be effective, the audience must be analytical and motivated (option a). This means that for a message to be persuasive using the central route, the audience needs to be willing to process the information deeply and think critically about the arguments being presented.
In the Asch experiment, participants conformed due to normative pressures (option b). This type of conformity occurs because individuals want to fit in with the group and avoid feeling like an outlier.