Personality and persuasion: Need for cognition moderates the persistence and resistance of attitude changes.

Abstract

Hypotheses about the persistence and resistance of attitudes and beliefs formed by individuals scoring high or low in Need for Cognition (NC; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were derived from the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In Study 1, both high-NC and low-NC individuals formed evaluatively similar attitudes toward an unfamiliar attitude object (a new product) after exposure to a persuasive message (an advertisement). The newly formed attitudes of high-NC individuals decayed less than the newly formed attitudes of low-NC individuals over a 2-day period. In Study 2, both high-NC and low-NC individuals were persuaded by an initial message that a food additive was unsafe. However, when immediately exposed to a second countermessage arguing that the product was safe, the initial experimentally created beliefs of high-NC individuals were shown to be more resistant to change than the experimentally created beliefs of low-NC individuals. Understanding the role of individual difference factors in persuasion is of longstanding interest among personality and social psychologists. One of the earliest systematic efforts in the study of personality and persuasion was undertaken by Hovland and his colleagues at Yale in the 1940s and 1950s. Efforts of this group culminated in the publication of the book Personality and Persuasion (Hovland & Janis, 1959). A stated long-range goal of research by the Yale group was the development of general formulae could be used to predict, within a very narrow range of error, the degree to which any given person will be influenced by any given communication (Janis & Hovland, 1959, p. 14). Self-report measures of influenceability, personality (e.g., self-esteem), and intellectual ability were all examined for their relationships to opinion change. Although the Yale group's goal of finding general factors associated with persuasibility was quite ambitious, the outcome was generally unsuccessful. Nevertheless, their efforts did lead to the consideration of a general theoretical structure in which individual attributes and persuasion were hypothesized to be linked (Hovland & Janis. 1959). Research on the role of personality factors in persuasion continued in several different directions after the publication of Personality and Persuasion. About 10 years ago, Eagly (1981) reviewed research in the area and outlined three general strategies for understanding the effects of individual differences in persuasion that had developed. In the personality strategy, a personality theory was used to identify traits that could affect

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