50 miliseconds decisions

When we are browsing the web we have a lot of decisions to make. Are we going to invest time (and cognitive effort) in a comprehending a website? How do we evaluate if a site going to give a reliable answer to the thing we are looking for?

I’m intrigued by how these decisions take place. According to research of Lindgaard the first impression of a website is created in 50 miliseconds. This first 50 miliseconds can color subsequent judgments of perceived credibility, usability, and ultimately influence our purchasing decisions. A study of Tractinsky N, Katz A.S, Ikar D. (2000) called “What is beautiful is usable” showed that if an interactive product is beautiful, users may perceive it as usable even though in reality the usability has been sabotaged. Decisions about clicking on a search result are usually made in a blink of an eye. What happens in this “blink”? Malcom Gladwell has written a book about rapid cognition called “Blink”. He believes really big decision we reach “are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.”
For persuasive messages, attitude formation has been extensively studied. All day long we form attitudes about lot’s of subjects. Some of the attitudes are created by thinking extensively about a subject, some are are created without much thought. For instance the attitude about the new Dutch government can be formed by extensively studying their policies. But it might also be formed on the basis of your opinion about one person (”they’ve got Plasterk so it must be good”). According to the Elaboration Likelihood Model, information can be processed in two distinct ways. The central route, and the peripheral route. The central route is taken when a person is motivated and able to interpret a message. The peripheral route is taken when the person is not motivated or not able to think about a message. This route is used most of the time. If we would have to think about every decision we take, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing. In the peripheral route cues play a role. A cue can be something like  “If something is beautiful, it must be trustworthy”. “Big = strong”, “this person looks like me, so he must be wright”. This route could be interesting to explain the first 50 ms.
But is the ELM applicable to search result evaluation? What other approaches are there for analysing the 50 milisecs?

I’m planning to study this for my master in applied communication science. I will keep you posted.