Evaluating the message or the messenger?: implications for self-validation in persuasion
Entity
UAM. Departamento de Psicología Social y MetodologíaPublisher
Sage Publications, Inc.Date
2013-08-22Citation
10.1177/0146167213499238
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39.12 (2013): 1571–1584
ISSN
0146-1672 (print); 1552-7433 (online)DOI
10.1177/0146167213499238Funded by
This research was supported in part by the following grants: National Science Foundation (NSF) grant No. 1226417 awarded to the first author, NSF grant No. 0847834 awarded to the fourth author, and Spanish grant No. PSI2011-26212 from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion awarded to the fifth author.Project
Gobierno de España. PSI2011-26212Editor's Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167213499238Subjects
Attitude change; Metacognition; Persuasion; Self-validation; Source credibility; PsicologíaNote
When posting or re-using the article, you should provide a link/URL from the article posted to the SAGE Journals Online site where the article is published: http://online.sagepub.com and please make the following acknowledgment: "The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in <journal>, Vol/Issue, Month/Year by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © [The Author(s)]"Rights
© 2013 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, IncAbstract
Characteristics of persuasive message sources have been extensively studied. However, little attention has been paid to situations when people are motivated to form an evaluation of the communicator rather than the communicated issue. We postulated that these different foci can affect how a source validates message-related cognitions. Participants focused on the source (Studies 1 and 2) or the issue (Study 2) while reading weak or strong message arguments. Later, the communicator was described as low or high in credibility. When focused on the source, highly motivated participants were more confident and their attitudes were more reflective of thoughts when argument quality matched (e.g., weak arguments-low credibility) rather than mismatched (e.g., weak arguments-high credibility) source credibility. Conversely, when participants were
focused on the issue, self-validation was greater when credibility was high rather than low—regardless of argument quality. Implications of these findings for the study and practice of persuasion are discussed.
Files in this item
Google Scholar:Clark, Jason K.
-
Wegener, Duane T.
-
Sawicki, Vanessa
-
Petty, Richard E.
-
Briñol Turnes, Pablo Antonio
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.