| Abstract: |
People encounter persuasion on a daily basis, but often resist persuasion
attempts that clash with their moral intuitions. How do people make these
moral judgments of persuasion? Four studies (N = 1, 103) show that these
judgments depend on metacognitive beliefs about how the persuasion is
processed. If people think persuasion aims at their emotions and intuition -
bypassing deliberative reasoning - they evaluate it as more immoral and
manipulative than persuasion believed to be processed deliberately. This is
because people find System 1 processing (fast and effortless, such as
encountering an emotional appeal ad) more autonomy-threatening than System 2
processing (slow and effortful, such as reading about a product's features).
Since System 2 (vs. System 1) persuasion is considered less immoral, it yields
more positive attitude change than that of System 1 (no matter if the latter
is positively valenced, such as humor, or negatively valenced, such as appeal
to pity). These findings contribute to research on moral judgment, lay
theories of cognitive processing, psychology of autonomy, and resistance to
persuasion. |