Salience of a Communicator's Physical Attractiveness and Persuasion: A Heuristic Versus Systematic Processing Interpretation

Abstract

To test the hypothesis that the salience of a communicator's attractiveness influences whether a persuasive communication is processed heuristically or systematically, female undergraduates read a strong or weak version of a persuasive communication that was accompanied by a vivid color photograph of an attractive male communicator (high-salience conditions) or by a degraded Xerox copy of the photograph (low-salience conditions). The interaction obtained on the opinion measure indicated that the strong version of the persuasive communication elicited greater agreement than the weak version did when the communicator's attractiveness was not salient, but that message quality had no effect on the degree of agreement when the communicator's attractiveness was highly salient. Consistent with the argument that the communication was processed systematically in the low-salience conditions and heuristically in the high-salience conditions, the number of negative message-oriented thoughts generated was negatively correlated with agreement in the low-salience conditions and uncorrelated with agreement in the high-salience conditions.