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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.
Three times in the same hour, a television commercial commands us to "tune in for 'Friends' on Thursday at 8 pm." Similar debates on two different news programs argue about when the economy will recover. And during the period of a few weeks at the height of campaign season, we hear over and over why one candidate deserves our vote more than another. As these examples illustrate, persuasive messages (like most other types of information) are often repeated and are in some manner familiar to us. Does this suggest that familiar messages are more effective at persuading us? And what impact does familiarity have on the processing of persuasive messages? Is a repeated (familiar) message processed more or less carefully than one that is not repeated? The research to date has yielded conflicting answers to these questions.
FAMILIARITY AND ANALYTIC PROCESSING
Cacioppo and Petty (1989) hypothesized and demonstrated that repeated persuasive messages were processed more analytically than those that were not repeated. Participants were asked to evaluate the sound quality of a message to be broadcast to the university community. The message was an appeal by a fictitious faculty committee stating that all seniors be required to pass a comprehensive exam in their major area of study prior to graduation. Repetition of both strong and weak versions of the message was varied by presenting the message either one or three times in succession. Cacioppo and Petty found that attitudes about comprehensive exams were only marginally more favorable...