participants’ favorite meats. The affect that is appropriate to the propagandistic pictures is dislike or disgust, but this kind of affect is prevented from occurring by the dominant liking for meat. Similar effects have been reported (Brehm et al., 1999) for responses to gift certificates when the dominant affect is sadness:
Positive affect regarding gift certificates occurred only when the gift certificate was large enough to do away with sadness. It is therefore perfectly plausible that the checks on the manipulations in the present research failed to show differences while the ratings of enjoyment of eating meat did.
not already have, this increase cannot be attributed to reactance. Results from Study 4 suggest that reactance is more likely when a cherished value is directly threatened, i.e., when the deterrent is connected with the issue. We believe that the reason enjoyment of eating beef among beef lovers showed a cubic trend was because participants’ freedom to eat beef was not directly threatened by pictures of chicken slaughter. By contrast, beef and chicken lovers’ enjoyment of eating chicken revealed a trend more indicative of reactance: increased liking of chicken with increasingly vivid pictures of chicken slaughter, until the viv-idness of the slaughter overwhelmed liking. Together, these studies suggest that reactance is likely when a deterrent directly challenges a cherished value.
This research has important implications for the nature of persuasion. Persons wishing to persuade others have typically employed messages from credible sources replete with facts and strong arguments. The implication was that more information was better than less and that strong arguments were more effective than weak arguments (e.g., Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
The research presented here may prompt a reinterpretation of this reasoning.
Our theory makes the seemingly paradoxical prediction that fewer, weaker ar-guments will be more effective in reducing resistance to persuasion than many stronger arguments. It is argued that the most effective way to reduce an indi-vidual’s affectively based resistance to persuasion is to provide a weak deterrent that does not directly threaten a cherished value. We do not believe that resis-tance to change is indicative of the strength of an attitude (see Wegner, Petty, Smoak, & Fabrigar, this volume). Even strongly held attitudes (evidenced by extreme negativity) may change significantly in the face of a weak endorsement of a counter-attitudinal proposal.
To conclude, extraordinary conflicts such as those between Israelis and Pa-lestinians and Indians and Pakistanis may be ameliorated by less than extraor-dinary means. While we certainly recognize that these conflicts reflect deep historical and religious differences, we believe the principles we have outlined here regarding resistance to persuasion may be applied to a variety of situations in which negative attitudes are intense. If we wish to subdue conflict between nations, a small deterrent that does not directly threaten a cherished value may be effective in reducing the negative attitudes nations hold toward one another.
REFERENCES
Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1997). Attitude-behavior relations: A theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. Psychological Bulletin, 84, 888–918.
Biner, P. M., & Hua, D. M. (1995). Determinants of the magnitude of goal valence: The interactive effects of need, instrumentality, and the difficulty of goal attainment. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 16, 53–74.
Brehm, J. W. (1999). The intensity of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 2–22.
Brehm, J. W., Brummett, B. H., & Harvey, L. (1999). Paradoxical sadness. Motivation and Emotion, 23, 31–44.
Brehm, J. W., & Miller, K. (2000). The effect of unpleasant news on the good taste of chocolate.
Unpublished manuscript, University of Kansas.
Brehm, J. W., & Self, E. (1989). The intensity of motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 40, 109–131.
Brummett, B. H. (1996). The intensity of anger. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas.
D’Anello, S. C. (1997). Paradoxical effects of losing money and experiencing a health threat on happiness intensity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas.
Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of attitudes. Fort Worth TX: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Festinger, L. (1964). Behavioral support for opinion change. Public Opinion Quarterly, 28, 404–
417.
Frijda, N. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
LaPiere, R. T. (1934). Attitudes vs. actions. Social Forces, 13, 230–237.
Lazarus, R. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, K. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 723–739.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion. In L.
Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19, pp. 123–205). New York:
Academic Press.
Price, E. (2001). Graphic images as deterrents to the desire to eat meat. Unpublished Honors Thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.
Silvia, P. J., & Brehm, J. W. (2001). Exploring alternative deterrents to emotional intensity: Antic-ipated happiness, distraction, and sadness. Cognition and Emotion, 15, 575–592.
Wicker, A. W. (1969). Attitudes versus actions: The relationship of verbal and overt behavioral responses to attitude objects. Journal of Social Issues, 25, 41–78.
Wright, R. A. (1996). Brehm’s model of motivation as a model of effort and cardiovascular re-sponse. In P. M. Gollwitzer, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action (pp. 424–453). New York: Guilford.
Wright, R. A., Contrada, R. J., & Patane, M. J. (1986). Task difficulty, cardiovascular response, and the magnitude of goal valence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 837–843.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151–175.
Zajonc, R. B. (1984). On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist, 39, 117–124.
65
4
Resisting Persuasion and Attitude Certainty:
A Meta-Cognitive Analysis
Zakary L. Tormala
Indiana University
Richard E. Petty
The Ohio State University
Imagine a typical political campaign battle in which two candidates are running against each other and hold opposing positions on most major issues. Now imagine that Eddie, an avid opponent of abortion rights, is exposed to a per-suasive appeal from one of the candidates in which the candidate argues in favor of the woman’s right to choose. Because this message is incongruent with Eddie’s attitude, he generates counterarguments against it and thus resists atti-tude change. The present chapter asks whether when Eddie resists the advocacy, his initial attitude against abortion rights might still be impacted in other, subtle ways. Our specific interest is in the possibility that when Eddie resists persua-sion, he might under specifiable conditions become more or less convinced of the validity of his own attitude. In other words, when people resist persuasive attacks, are there any implications for the certainty with which their original attitudes are held?
Over the years, attitude change researchers have been most concerned with mak-ing persuasion successful. Beginnmak-ing with the seminal work on persuasion by Hovland, Janis, and Kelley (1953), considerable attention has been focused on developing models that predict the conditions under which persuasive commu-nications will produce attitude change (see also Greenwald, 1968; McGuire, 1968; Petty, Ostrom, & Brock, 1981). The basic assumption underlying much
of this work has been that if a persuasive message does not change the target attitude in terms of valence or extremity (i.e., the message has been resisted), it has simply failed. Even researchers interested in resistance to persuasion as a topic worthy of study in its own right (e.g., McGuire, 1964) appear to assume that once someone resists a persuasive message, the initial attitude has not been impacted.
In the present chapter, we argue against this view of resistance. We propose that when people resist persuasive attacks, their initial attitudes can change in terms of the certainty with which they are held. We argue that depending on the meta-cognitive inferences people form about their attitudes after a persuasive message is resisted, they can either gain or lose confidence in these attitudes.