The Influence of Accessibility of Source Likability on Persuasion

Earlier research found that increasing the accessibility of a source's likability from memory results in greater agreement with a message attributed to that source. Three explanations were proposed for that earlier finding. Accessible liking toward the source of a message may result in increased likelihood of (a) biased central processing, (b) using a likability heuristic, or (c) motivated central processing. This experiment demonstrated that when the message is counterattitudinal and included weak arguments, participants were more likely to critically scrutinize the message as the accessibility of the source's likability increased from memory. As a consequence, attributing the message to a likable source reduced the persuasiveness of the message.