Primacy and Recency in Communication and Self-Persuasion: How Successive Audiences and Multiple Encodings Influence Subsequent Evaluative Judgments

Abstract

In this study we examined the impact of multiple communication contexts on subjects' encoding of information about a target person and on their subsequent impressions of and attitudes toward that person. Eighty male subjects were given the task of communicating their impressions of a target person they had read about to successive audiences in face-to-face interactions. Both audiences were described as either liking or disliking the target person the subjects were communicating about. Subjects produced two messages separated by either a brief or a long intermessage delay. Subjects in the Brief Intermessage Delay condition modified their messages for both audiences. In contrast, subjects in the Long Intermessage Delay condition modified their messages only for their first audience, and these initial messages then influenced the content of their second messages. Subjects' message modification involved producing descriptions of the target person that were evaluatively consistent with their audience's attitude toward the target person. In addition, subjects' subsequent impressions of and attitudes toward the target person were influenced by their verbal encoding of the target person information. Brief InterMessage Delay subjects evidenced a recency effect, whereas Long InterMessage Delay subjects exhibited a primacy effect. The implications of these results for traditional research on audience-tuning effects and on primacy-recency are discussed.