A study of order effects in interpersonal influence

社会心理学中的秩序效应已经在印象形成、决策制定、问卷调查和说服等领域进行了研究。本研究的目的是揭示说服性信息对目标人反应的顺序效应。信息组块、目标对说服性话题的个人相关性和认知需求被设置为调节因子。数据收集使用问卷和个人电脑安装"Inquisit。结果表明：（a）当正面信息呈现在前时，高认知需要被试的捐赠意愿和大学毕业考试的批准意愿高于低认知需要被试;（B）信息顺序和信息组块的交互效应不存在;（c）在毕业考试的情况下，对说服性信息的认可度高于捐赠的情况，因为捐赠的情况下，首先呈现的是积极的信息;（d）与毕业考试相关性低的个人往往比与毕业考试相关性高的个人更赞成进行考试。在使用“询问”的实验中，说服性信息的顺序没有显著的主效应和交互效应。"在阅读有说服力的信息后，列出想法可能会降低顺序效应。这一点应该在下面的研究中得到揭示。说服中的顺序效应似乎并不稳健。根据本研究的结果，先呈现积极信息似乎比先呈现消极信息更能获得目标人的认可。此外，当说服性信息包含足够数量的强论据时，高认知需求参与者比低认知需求参与者更倾向于认可说服性信息。

Order effects have been studied in areas such as impression formation, decision making, questionnaire survey, and persuasion in social psychology. The purpose of the present study was to reveal order effects of persuasive messages on the responses of the target persons. Message chunking, the targets' personal relevance to persuasive topics and need for cognition were set up as moderators. Data were collected using questionnaires and personal computers installed "Inquisit." Respondents were undergraduate students.The results were as follows : (a) intentions of donating and approval of graduation examinations in university of high need for cognition participants were higher than low need for cognition participants, when positive information was presented first ; (b) the interaction effect for message order and message chunking was not found ; (c) approval of persuasive messages were higher for the case of graduation examinations than the case of donation, when positive information was presented first ; and (d) the low personal relevance to graduation examinations tended to produce more approval of conducting the examinations than the high personal relevance. There were no significant main effects nor interaction effects for orders of persuasive messages in the experiments using "Inquisit." Thought listing after reading persuasive messages may reduce order effects. This point should be revealed in the following research.Order effects in persuasion do not seem to be robust. Following to the results of the present study, presenting positive information first seem to produce more approval of the target persons than presenting negative information first. Furthermore, high need for cognition participants tend to approve of persuasive messages more than low need for cognition participants when the persuasive messages have enough amounts of strong arguments.