The pursuit of self-interest: self-interest bias in attitude judgment and persuasion.
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.
Darke
Peter R
PR
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. peter.darke@sauder.ubc.ca
Chaiken
Shelly
S
D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010565:Persuasive Communication; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires