Self-Awareness and Attitude Change: Seeing Oneself on the Central Route to Persuasion

On the basis of the elaboration likelihood model and self-awareness theory, it was reasoned that self-awareness should stimulate thoughtful resistance to attacks on personally important attitudes. In Experiment 1, mirror-induced self-awareness increased resistance to a message that was counterattitudinal, personally important, and based on direct experience, but it failed to increase resistance to a message that lacked those qualities. In Experiment 2, self-aware subjects showed greater resistance to weak persuasive arguments than to strong arguments, unlike subjects who were not made self-aware. These results support the view of self-awareness as a cause of biased central route processing and (hence) of selective, judicious resistance to persuasion.