Motivation-informed persuasion literacy: latent profiles and their relationship to visual attention and behavioral engagement with native advertisements

Social media users are increasingly exposed to native advertising, raising questions about whether persuasion literacy shapes how sponsored content is attended to and engaged with during everyday browsing. This study integrates persuasion knowledge and social-media use motivations to identify motivation-informed persuasion-literacy profiles and examine whether these profiles differ in attention and engagement. Using latent class analysis, three distinct profiles emerged, reflecting different configurations of persuasion knowledge and use motivations. Classification-error-corrected distal analysis revealed no significant differences in visual attention, scrolling behavior, or engagement toward sponsored content. Robustness checks in the fully exposed subsample produced the same pattern. These findings indicate that motivation-informed persuasion-literacy profiles capture meaningful psychological heterogeneity but do not necessarily translate into observable attentional or behavioral differences in this naturalistic, low-involvement browsing environment. The study contributes to persuasion-literacy research by identifying an important boundary condition of persuasion literacy during social-media use.