Effects of involvement on persuasion: A meta-analysis.

Abstract

Defines involvement as a motivational state induced by an association between an activated attitude and the self-concept. Integration of the available research su~ests that the effects of involvement on attitude change depended on the aspect of message recipients' self-concept that was activated to create involvement: (a) their enduring values (value-relevant involvement), (b) their ability to attain desirable outcomes (outcome-relevant involvement), or (e) the impression they make on others (impression-relevant involvement). Findings showed that (a) with value-relevant involvement, high-involvement subjects were less persuaded than low-involvement subjects; (b) with outcome-relevant involvement, high-involvement subjects were more persuaded than low-involvement subjects by strong arguments and (somewhat inconsistently) less persuaded by weak arguments; and (c) with impression-relevant involvement, high-involvement subjects were slightly less persuaded than lowinvolvement subjects. To understand the conditions under which people are persuaded by others, researchers often invoked the concept of involvement. Although this construct was popular prior to M. Sherifand Cantril's (1947) work (see A. G. Greenwald's, 1982, review), their proposal that highly involving attitudes be regarded as components of the self-concept or was seminal to theory about involvement's impact on attitude change. According to M. Sherif and Cantril (1947), such attitudes have the characteristic of belonging to me, as being part of me, as psychologically experienced (p. 93). M. Sherif, C. W. Sherif, and their colleagues developed the implications of involvement (which they often called ego involvement) for persuasion by giving it a major role in their social judgment-involvement approach, a theory of attitude change developed in the 1950s and early 1960s (Hovland, Harvey, & Sherif, 1957; C. W. Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965; M. Sherif & Hovland, 1961). During this same period, Zimbardo (1960) introduced the concept of response involvement in order to predict attitude change in a social influence setting. In more