The Effects of Personal Relevance and Repetition on Persuasive Processing

Past research has suggested that familiarity with a message, brought about by repetition, can increase (Cacioppo & Petty, 1989) or decrease (Garcia–Marques & Mackie, 2001) analytic (systematic) processing of that message. Two experiments attempted to resolve these contradictory findings by examining how personal relevance may moderate the impact of familiarity on processing. Experiment 1 manipulated repetition and personal relevance and found that message repetition increased analytic processing (as reflected by greater persuasion following strong vs. weak arguments) under high relevance conditions and decreased analytic processing when relevance was low. In Experiment 2, both repetition and relevance were manipulated in different ways, but results again showed that repetition reduced analytic processing under low relevance conditions and that perceived familiarity mediated this outcome. Implications of these findings are discussed.