Commitment to exposure as a determinant of... : Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (original) (raw)

Commitment to exposure as a determinant of information receptivity

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

2

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19

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July 1965

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College males, 82 regular smokers and 90 nonsmokers, indicated their interest in reading an article which denied or asserted a relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Degree of commitment to exposure affected information receptivity but, even when smokers expected immediate self-exposure to the information, they did not avoid the message linking cancer to smoking, thus stringently reproducing a result from prior studies by Feather. Dissonance theory's core assumption, that persons actively avoid information which would likely increase dissonance, was reappraised and a modification was proposed. (36 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)