Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4867

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Publication type: Journal Article

Darke PR, Chaiken S.
The pursuit of self-interest: self-interest bias in attitude judgment and persuasion.
J Pers Soc Psychol 2005 Dec; 89:(6):864-83
http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/89/6/864

Abstract:

Self-interest affected the direction of attitudes in 4 studies exploring attitude judgment and persuasion. Experiment 1 showed that both self-interest and symbolic concerns predicted attitudes. The biasing role of self-interest in producing the well-known persuasion effects of personal relevance and argument strength was examined by disentangling the competing effects of personal costs and benefits. Experiment 2 used a standard personal relevance manipulation in the absence of supportive arguments and showed that perceptions of personal costs associated with the advocated policy partially mediated its negative effects on attitudes. Experiments 3 and 4 independently manipulated the onset of personal costs associated with an issue and the onset of issue-related benefits conveyed by supportive arguments. Postmessage attitudes were an additive function of personal costs and argument-specified benefits, and perceived costs and benefits biased information processing in a self-interested manner. A revised conception of personal relevance and argument strength is discussed. Copyright 2006 APA, all rights reserved.

Keywords:
Attitude* Female Humans Judgment* Male Persuasive Communication* Questionnaires Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't