THE INFLUENCE ON COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS OF EXPLICITLY URGING ACTION AND POLICY CONSEQUENCES.

Will the explicit recommendation of action and policy consequences that people might find undesirable produce a less favorable change in their evaluation of an attitude object to which these consequences are attached and less willingness to accept the consequences than if no mention is made of them. 144 subjects were exposed to a communication on the usefulness of a course in the history of science, or to a communication which had an additional final paragraph containing explicitly stated consequences, or to no communication at all. The results indicated that, among the initially unfavorable subjects, those exposed to the explicit version exhibited greater favorableness toward the idea of such a course than did the other subjects. Acceptance of the explicitly stated consequences was not differentially affected by the communications. But subjects given the non-explicit communication were less likely than the others to reject the possibility of registering for such a course, an action not explicitly mentioned in either version. Author