Personal Involvement: An Examination of Processing Differences

This investigation examined differences in cognitive responding to a debate by individuals who were either personally involved or less involved in a legislative proposal to change the state drinking age. Previous research has suggested that greater personal involvement is associated with increased motivation to engage in careful and extensive processing. The present study examined whether high-involvement subjects were also more likely to process information congruent with their partisan interests than low-involvement individuals. “Personal involvement” was operationalized as both the extent to which the debated issue was important and the degree to which the issue was perceived to have significant consequences for subjects' lives. In addition, a peripheral cue in the form of perceptual salience was manipulated to assess its impact on mode of processing. Results indicated that high-involvement subjects processed pertinent message cues in a more systematic and partisan way than did low-involvement subjects. Low-involvement subjects had proportionally more thoughts tangentially related to the debate presentation. Implications of these processing differences for research on motivated social cognition are discussed.