THE ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCREPANCY IN BELIEF CHANGE: TESTING FOUR MODELS WITH A SINGLE MESSAGE

In belief change, message discrepancy is the difference between the belief position advocated in a message and a message receiver’s initial belief position. Psychological discrepancy is the message discrepancy experienced by the receiver. Existing literature had assumed that a high level of psychological discrepancy discounted the weight of a message, which could make the message less effective. However, there were three alternative assumptions about the role of psychological discrepancy. The problem that this dissertation examined was: Does psychological discrepancy affect the weight of a message only, affect the scale value of the message only, affect neither, or affect both? To find out which of these four assumptions was more plausible, this dissertation derived competing hypotheses based on four mathematical models either through an analytic proof alone or a combination of an analytic proof and a computational approximation. This dissertation tested these hypotheses in an experiment with a 3 (high vs. moderate vs. low message scale value) ´ 3 (high vs. moderate vs. low upper bound) between-subjects design (N = 448 Mechanical Turk workers). The results showed that the weight-discounting model had the most supported hypotheses and fit the data the best, which indicated that psychological discrepancy affected the weight of a message only. This dissertation improves the understanding of the mechanism that leads to the outcomes posited by discrepancy models in persuasion research and provides additional empirical evidence for the scale value constancy assumption in information integration theory.

Grantor dc:publisher

Temple University. Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Huang, Luling

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Cai, Deborah A.
• Fink, Edward L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Hardy, Bruce W.
• Kaplowitz, Stan A.

• Communication
• Mass communication
• Psychology, Social
• Belief change
• Mathematical modeling
• Persuasion
• Psychological discrepancy
• Scale value
• Weight

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/543

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/543