Facilitative and Inhibiting Effects of Distraction on Attitude Change

Abstract

In a situation in which subjects listened to a persuasive communication while working on a task, they were told either to attend primarily to the communication (message set) or to the task (task set). There was, in addition, a message-only condition. Relative to the message-only condition, message set increased attitude change and communicationfavorable thoughts, and decreased number of counterarguments and recall. Relative to the message-set and message-only conditions, task set decreased attitude change, recall and effort attending to the communication. On the basis of these results it was argued that different mediational models are operating for message-set distraction and task-set distraction. Specifically, it was proposed that message set produces a causal chain running from an increase in communication-favorable thoughts to a decrease in counterarguments to an increase in attitude change. On the other hand, it was proposed that task set decreases attitude change partially through a consistency-achieving devaluation of the interfering communication, and partially through a large decrement in recall. Application of Blalock's method of testing causal hypotheses with correlational data was used to illustrate the theoretical models.