The present research will test aspects of a unimodal theory of persuasion that emphasizes the epistemic similarities between processing message-related and non-message-related (e.g., speaker expertise) information. Previous research has demonstrated that increasing the accessibility of a heuristic cue such as """"""""length implies strength"""""""" increases the degree to which people who are uninvolved in a topic use such a cue in a persuasion setting. The current research will attempt to demonstrate that making the premises of message-based information more accessible can also result in increased use of this information for uninvolved message recipients. These findings could have important theoretical and empirical implications. Theoretically, they would demonstrate that heuristic and message-based information are identically affected by accessibility. Specifically, both types of information would benefit from increased accessibility more under low versus high involvement on the message recipients' part. On an applied front, the findings of this research could have implications for public campaigns advocating healthier behavior and obtaining compliance on the part of individuals seeking treatment in personalized settings. Specifically, this research would suggest that making either cue or argument premises more accessible would induce greater compliance on the part of the typically uninvolved targets of such campaigns. For example, priming targets early in a broadcast advertisement with the values """"""""living a long, healthy life"""""""" or """"""""being a good parent for my children"""""""" might increase the effectiveness of arguments against smoking and alcohol abuse respectively.
| Chun, Woo Young; Spiegel, Scott; Kruglanski, Arie W (2002) Assimilative behavior identification can also be resource dependent: the unimodel perspective on personal-attribution phases. J Pers Soc Psychol 83:542-55 |
