Attitude involvement and the effect of vested interest and perceived risk in persuasion

Abstract

In the present study, it is argued that personal relevance and personal involvement are not synonyms, as currently treated in the research literature, and have distinct implications for message processing in a persuasion paradigm. Specifically, this investigation seeks to determine how personal involvement, defined here in terms of Crano's (in press) model of vested interest, affects message processing under different conditions of personal relevance, defined here as perceived risk of misfortune. It is suggested that personal relevance and personal involvement may interact and produce unique affects on message processing. In this investigation, participants were randomly assigned to read either a strong or weak message regarding the chosen misfortune and to complete a variety of questionnaires assessing their attitudes toward the topic. Under conditions of high levels of personal relevance, high personal involvement subjects proved more susceptible to a weak message than low personal involvement individuals. Specifically, high risk/high vested interest people appeared to be engaged in danger control processing because they were willing to accept a message that advocated prevention of a misfortune (i.e., an adaptive response to a threat) , even though the basis of the arguments were weak and specious. High risk/low vested interest individuals, on the other hand, appeared to be engaged in fear control processing because they were not willing to accept a weak and specious message that advocated prevention of a misfortune (i.e., a defensive response to deny a threat). The danger and fear control processing found in the high personal relevance condition was not evident among low personal relevance individuals who received weak messages. That is, people of low risk/high vested interest did not scrutinize a weak message more than low risk/low vested interest subjects. This suggests that the lower personal relevance of the low risk condition attenuates the effects of personal involvement (i.e., vested interest). These results suggest that only under conditions of high personal relevance does personal involvement (i.e., vested interest) influence message processing.