Modifying the impact of persuasive communications with external distraction.

Engaging in an irrelevant, distracting activity while simultaneously processing a persuasive communication has a salutary effect upon attitude change if the audience is set to attend primarily to the message, but the opposite effect if they are set toward the distracting activity. The conditions necessary for demonstrating this relationship are sensitive to operational details which were not sufficiently well controlled in previous research (nor in the first two of three studies reported here). Additional results seriously challenge the adequacy of earlier conceptual and empirical treatments of mediators of attitude change, including attention, effort, learning, and counterarguing. (Author)