Role of Familiarity in Mediating the Impact of Positive Affect on Persuasive Processing

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People who are in positive moods deal with information less critically and in less depth than do those who are not in a positive mood. For this reason, happy people can sometimes be more easily persuaded by weak and specious arguments. Although the finding itself is well established, the explanation for it is not. Another well-established finding is that the recognition of an object, event, or situation as familiar triggers both a positive mood and non-analytic thinking. Feeling positive is a cue to familiarity. Putting these two sets of findings together, it is suggested that positive mood triggers non-analytic thinking because being happy usually signals familiarity, and when something is familiar, it can be dealt with superficially.The primary objective of this research is to empirically establish that positive mood triggers non-analytic thinking because positive mood usually signals familiarity, which in turn triggers non-analytic thinking. In this view, people often mistake a mild positive mood induced by all kinds of small environmental events (such as receiving a compliment, being given a small unexpected gift, watching a funny movie) for the positive mood that accompanies the recognition of familiarity. These experiments are designed to show a) that this confusion can take place, b) the conditions under which it does and does not take place, and c) that this confusion is responsible for the typically found association between feeling good and non-analytic processing. Given that positive moods can be triggered quite easily either incidentally (as when people watch a television comedy before listening to a Presidential address) or quite deliberately (as when an advertising agency invokes a humorous context in which to present a product with few valuable attributes), this research has both theoretical and practical implications for understanding when and how people can be more vulnerable, or more resistant to, persuasion.