Personality and Persuasion: Need for Cognition Moderates the Persistence and Resistance of Attitude Changes

Hypotheses about the persistence and resistance of attitudes and beliefs formed by individuals scoring high or low in Need for Cognition (NC; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were derived from the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). In Study 1, both high-NC and low-NC individuals formed evaluatively similar attitudes toward an unfamiliar attitude object (a new product) after exposure to a persuasive message (an advertisement). The newly formed attitudes of high-NC individuals decayed less than the newly formed attitudes of low-NC individuals over a 2-day period. In Study 2, both high-NC and low-NC individuals were persuaded by an initial message that a food additive was unsafe. However, when immediately exposed to a second countermessage arguing that the product was safe, the initial experimentally created beliefs of high-NC individuals were shown to be more resistant to change than the experimentally created beliefs of low-NC individuals.