Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model of persuasion and Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly `s heuristic-systematic model suggest that for highly involved message recipients, adding weaker arguments to strong arguments could suppress or dilute the overall persuasiveness of a message. The few previous studies addressing this prediction, however, have provided conflicting evidence. In the present study, involvement level, number of weak arguments, and number of strong arguments were varied factorially in a message advocating the institution of senior comprehensive exams. Results provided clear support for the predicted weak-argument suppression of attitude change. Analyses of thought-listing data supported the notion that suppression results from the integration of favorable and unfavorable cognitive responses to the communication. Further research questions regarding the processes by which mixed-quality messages exert theirpersuasive impact are discussed.
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