Hedonic vs. epistemic goals in processing persuasive communications: Revisiting the role of personal involvement

Abstract

Practitioners and researchers interested in designing wise interventions often recommend increasing personal involvement to be successful. Early research demonstrated that personal involvement increases elaboration leading to more persuasion for strong arguments, but to reduced persuasion if the arguments presented are specious. In most prior work, message recipients were plausibly motivated by their desire for knowledge. In the current research, we compare this epistemic goal to another goal in which people aim to process information to be entertained or have fun. Results showed that when people processed to gain knowledge (epistemic goal), they elaborated more in high personal involvement conditions, replicating the classic finding. However, high personal involvement decreased elaboration for people in hedonic conditions, reversing the classic interaction, and introducing a novel finding that is consistent with recent research suggesting that “thinking for pleasure” can be difficult.