Changing prejudiced attitudes by thinking about persuasive messages: implications for resistance

This research showed that changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups can result from both the simple processes that require little thinking and the traditional elaborative forms of persuasion that require high thinking processes. Importantly, even when the obtained attitude change was equivalent for situations in which there was high and low message elaboration, the changes produced in high thinking conditions were found to be more resistant to further attacks than equivalent changes produced by less thoughtful mechanisms. Not only were those attitudes more resistant as measured objectively (Study 1) but participants also perceived their attitudes to be subjectively more resistant (Study 2). These studies suggest that examining the processes by which prejudice is changed can be important for understanding the consequences and long‐term implications of treatments and campaigns oriented to changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups.