Multiple Roles for Source Credibility Under High Elaboration: It's all in the Timing

Past research suggests that under high elaboration conditions, source credibility can play more than one role in persuasion. In particular, source credibility can affect the valence of people's thoughts generated in response to persuasive messages or it can affect the confidence with which people hold those thoughts. In the present research, two experiments explore the conditions under which these conceptually distinct effects occur. It is demonstrated that the effect of source credibility on thought confidence is dominant when source information follows, rather than precedes, a persuasive message. When source information precedes a message, it affects the valence of issue–relevant thinking.