Lowering the barriers to change: Can processing-related self-affirmations overcome resistance?

Abstract

People often close themselves off to novel ideas without giving them adequate consideration. By doing so, they possibly miss out on important advantages these ideas may bring. One strategy that appears to effectively reduce such resistance involves self-affirming techniques, which aim to bolster one's self-concept by focusing on values of the self which are unrelated to the persuasion topic. The current study focuses on a new aspect that may be essential to increase its effectiveness, so-called “processing-related self-affirmations” which are related to how a person processes a message. We investigated the effect of processing-related self-affirmations on resistance to persuasion. Nonvegetarian participants were asked to apply a processing-related self-affirmation, an unrelated self-affirmation, or no self-affirmation before reading a scientific report about the merits of vegetarianism. Results showed participants were, depending on the weekly amount of meat consumed, more favorable toward the report after being affirmed on an unrelated value compared with participants who were not self-affirmed, but no similar effect was found for processing-related self-affirmations. We cautiously show that relatedness and compatibility with the persuasion domain may not be the only factors influencing this effect, and include relatedness of self-affirmations to the processing of the persuasive message as a possible new factor.