Warning, personal involvement, and attitude change.

Abstract

To test the hypothesis that forewarning would facilitate attitude change under conditions of high personal involvement and inhibit change under low involvement, an experiment was conducted in which hoth forewarning and personal involvement were manipulated in a 2 X 2 design. The interaction was significant and in the expected direction. Unanticipated incidental findings suggested additional complexities with the variable of personal involvement. The effects of forewarning on attitude change have been investigated recently in several studies. The term "forewarning " de-scribes two rather different kinds of prior warnings to subjects. One involves forewarn-ing the subject of the specific position which the communicator is about to advocate