Effects of Preexisting Beliefs and Repeated Readings on Belief Change, Comprehension, and Recall of Persuasive Text

Abstract

This experiment examined how people′s preexisting beliefs about AIDS transmission interacted with repeated reading of a persuasive text to influence the nature of information encoded from text, the amount and type of information recalled, and self-reported belief change. Following assessment of 61 undergraduates′ beliefs about AIDS transmission, all subjects read a text that presented several explanations concerning why AIDS cannot be transmitted through casual contact or mosquitos. Twenty-seven subjects read the text once; 34 subjects read the text twice, under spaced conditions. One week after their last contact with the text, subjects completed measures of text comprehension, recall, and beliefs about AIDS transmission. Results indicated that preexisting beliefs influenced retrieval processes, but not encoding processes. In addition, results replicated previous findings that a persuasive text can produce belief change. Surprisingly, the number of times the text was read did not influence performance on any of the dependent variables.