A study of order effects in interpersonal influence

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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.