The influence of physical attractiveness on attitude confidence and resistance to change

Abstract

It is well established that the physical attractiveness of the source of a message can influence recipients' attitudes about the message proposal. The current research is the first to examine if attractiveness is also capable of affecting attitude confidence and resistance to change. Experiment 1 revealed that an attractive source decreased recipients' attitude confidence, even when it did not affect attitudes. Experiment 2 replicated this novel finding and identified a critical condition under which this effect is more likely to occur. Specifically, attractiveness only reduced attitude confidence when it was unrelated to the merits of the persuasive proposal. This moderation by message relevance suggests that people can correct the confidence in their judgment for inappropriate sources of bias. Experiment 3 specified the conditions under which correction is more likely to take place on attitudes and on attitude confidence. Specifically, correction for source attractiveness on attitudes required an explicit correction instruction but correction on attitude confidence occurred regardless of the instruction. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that the effect of attractiveness in reducing attitude confidence is consequential by making attitudes less resistant to change when facing counter-attitudinal information. Taken together, the present research demonstrated that attractiveness can reduce attitude confidence as well as undermine subsequent resistance to counter-attitudinal messages, but only when attractiveness was viewed as an unwanted biasing factor (i.e., the message topic was unrelated to attractiveness).