Value Activation and Processing of Persuasive Messages

Basing attitudes on one’s core values has long been thought to result in strong, consequential attitudes. Recent research suggests a less direct route for values to influence attitude strength—by influencing the extent to which people process attitude-relevant information. That research induced research participants to explicitly consider important or unimportant values in relation to the persuasive message. In contrast, the current research examined whether mere activation of important values before encountering a persuasive message could enhance message processing. Normatively important or unimportant values were subtly activated by simply presenting values (Experiment 1) including the values in a previous “unrelated” study (Experiment 2) or rating the importance of values in a questionnaire prior to the persuasive message. Experiment 3 suggested that important values are not equivalent to any other important constructs. Activation of important values increased information processing but activation of equally important alternative attitudes did not.