Personal involvement and the robustness of perceptual salience effects.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the generalizability of perceptual salience effects. Previous research in social cognition established that "top of the head" processing is a robust inferential bias even in involving task situations. It was expected, however, that perceivers who were personally involved in an issue would be more motivated than less-involved perceivers to shift attention from salient cues to attitudinally congruent but nonsalient message cues. In both experiments, salience was manipulated by varying the visual prominence of discussants in a two-person conversation. In Experiment 1, involvement was experimentally manipulated by varying whether perceivers would be personally affected by an issue. In Experiment 2, involvement was operationalized as a subject variable. The results suggest that personal involvement indeed constitutes a boundary condition for salience effects. As expected, ratings of highly involved perceivers reflected more systematic processing of message arguments, regardless of which discussant was visually salient, whereas ratings of less-involved perceivers reflected "top of the head" processing. The analogous influence of personal involvement in persuasion research and the role of individual difference variables in research on inferential biases is discussed.

Exploring the Latent Structure of Strength‐related Attitude Attributes

“…When setting out to gauge attitude "intensity," some researchers measured certainty (Brim, 1955;Guttman & Suchman, 1947;Katz, 1944;McDill, 1959;Suchman, 1950), whereas others measured extremity (McDill, 1959;Tannenbaum, 1956). To measure "involvement," some researchers assessed importance (Apsler & Sears, 1968;Borgida & Howard-Pitney, 1983;Gorn, 1975; Howard-Pitney, Borgida, & Omoto, 1986), others have assessed knowledge (Stember & Hyman, 1949-1950, and still others measured elaboration (Bishop, 1990;Petty & Cacioppo, 1979). And whereas attitude "salience" has sometimes been measured by indices of importance (Hoelter, 1985;Jackson & Marcus, 1975;Lemon, 1968;Powell, 1977;Tedin, 1980), it has also been gauged by measuring elaboration (Brown, 1974).…”

The impact of attitude strength on the acceptance of green services

“…Likewise, substantial variability exists in both the conceptualizations and operationalizations of strength, which has lead to an extensive array of attitude attributes which have been demonstrated to be consequential for behavior (Krosnick et al, 1993;Chaiken et al, 1995). For instance, investigators have identified attitude importance as a form of strength and shown that this is associated with greater selective perception of information (Krosnick, 1988(Krosnick, , 1990, resistance to social influence (Borgida and Howard-Pitney, 1983) and actual behavior (Jaccard and Becker, 1985). Similarly, other aspects of attitude strength such as certainty (Marks and Kamins, 1988), extremity (Petersen and Dutton, 1975), intensity (Schuman and Presser, 1981) and affectivecognitive consistency have been related to one or more of aforementioned consequences.…”

“…Extremity or the degree one's ''attitude deviates from the midpoint of favorable and unfavorable toward an issue'' (Krosnick et al, 1993(Krosnick et al, , p. 1132, also has been used frequently to define attitude strength (e.g., Ewing, 1942;Fazio and Zanna, 1978 a, b;Osgood and Tannenbaum, 1955;Peterson and Dutton, 1975). Importance, defined as ''the extent to which an individual cares deeply about and is personally invested in an attitude'' (Krosnick et al, 1993(Krosnick et al, , p. 1133, has been the focus in several studies (e.g., Borgida and Howard-Pitney, 1983;Jaccard and Becker, 1985;Krosnick, 1988Krosnick, , 1990. Ego involvement measures the centrality of one's attitude towards one's self concept and value systems and has been investigated in various studies (e.g., Ostrom and Brock, 1968;Sherif et al, 1973;Spiro and Sherif, 1975).…”

“I Want to Slay That Dragon!” - Influencing Choice in Interactive Storytelling

“…As like source expertise, source attractiveness [29] and the visual prominence [3] have been shown to effectively affect the perception of the message in low elaboration conditions.…”