The effect of public commitment on resistance to persuasion: The influence of attitude certainty, issue importance, susceptibility to normative influence, preference for consistency and source proximity
Section snippets
Public commitment
There has been considerable interest in public commitment for quite some time. The earliest work on public commitment includes Kiesler and Corbin (1965), Kiesler, Zanna, and Desalvo (1966), Kiesler, Roth, and Pallak (1974), and Cialdini, Cacioppo, Bassett, and Miller (1978). Public commitment has received more recent attention in behavioral literature (Cialdini & Trost, 1998), and in fact, it has been shown to increase customer compliance behavior (Dellande and Nyer, 2006, Nyer and Dellande, in
Preference for consistency
Individuals have a need for consistency that arises from an “inborn preference for things that are predictable, familiar, stable and uncertainty reducing” (Swan, Stein-Seroussi, & Giesler, 1992: 6). In Western society, people who are perceived as holding consistent opinions are evaluated positively (Suh, 2002). Those who unwaveringly uphold their beliefs and resist external and social pressures to change are often idealized, while those who vacillate are given negative trait ascriptions, such
Susceptibility to normative influence
Susceptibility to normative influence (SNI) is defined as the need to identify with others and/or enhance one's image with products or brands or the willingness to conform to other's expectations regarding purchase decisions (Alden et al., 2006, Bearden et al., 1989, Wooten and Reed, 2004). The influence of SNI on consumption behavior is significant in situations of conspicuous consumption (Bourne, 1957, Wooten and Reed, 2004). This need for protective self-presentation and the need to identify
Source proximity
Proximity of the source group refers to how close – physically, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise – a participant feels to the source of information (Davis et al., 1998, Wasieleski and Hayibor, 2008). Social impact theory and signaling theory offer theoretical explanations for the influence of proximity. Social impact theory (Latane, 1982, Latane and Bourgeois, 2001) suggests that consumers consider the impact of sources within a social space, and those located within the same social
Study 1
An experiment2 was conducted using 227 undergraduate student participants enrolled in an introductory business course at a private university in the Western United States. Students participated in an exercise administered in computer laboratories to earn course credit. Each participant was seated before a computer and began the exercise by answering a survey
Study 2
The data for this study was collected approximately four months after Study 1. The survey topic chosen for the second study involved a new grading policy for undergraduate business courses. Pilot testing of ten issues was conducted with the target population to identify an issue that had three characteristics: a) an issue to which the participants are generally opposed, b) an issue that was important to them and, c) an issue that they had not spent too much time and effort thinking about
General discussion and future research
While the effects of persuasion on attitude change have been a topic of research for many years, the concept of commitment in the context of attitude change has received attention only recently (Ahluwalia et al., 2000). Our work extends prior research in this area by investigating the effect of public commitment on resistance to attitude change. More specifically, we study the psychological processes that influence resistance to attitude change as a result of public commitment by focusing on
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