Marketing Papers

Document Type

Technical Report

Date of this Version

4-2002

Publication Source

Journal of Applied Social Psychology

Volume

32

Issue

4

Start Page

803

Last Page

830

DOI

10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002.tb00243.x

Abstract

Health messages are directed at those who are at risk of incurring adverse consequences. However, previous experiments have found that people process personally relevant health messages in a biased, defensive manner. We examine the role of elaboration as a mechanism to encourage less biased processing of personally relevant health appeals. Results demonstrate that high‐relevance consumers freeze on the threatening information, leading to lower change appraisal (perceived severity, self‐efficacy, and response efficacy) and decreased message persuasion. For these individuals, renewed elaboration on the consequences of caffeine (Experiment 1) and olestra (Experiment 2) consumption reduces defensive processing. This elaboration “unfreezes” message processing, leading to greater change appraisal and increased persuasion. These experiments provide guidelines for practitioners to design more effective messages.

Copyright/Permission Statement

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: [Block, L.G. & Williams P. (2002). Undoing the Effects of Seizing and Freezing: Decreasing Defensive Processing of Personally Relevant Messages. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 32, no. 4: pp. 803-830], which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002.tb00243.x.

This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.

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Date Posted: 15 June 2018

This document has been peer reviewed.