Communicator discrepancy, source credibility, and opinion change.

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Abstract
Utilizing an after-only design an experiment was carried out in which Ss were exposed to written communications advocating 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0 hr. sleep per night. Opinion change was found to be linearly related to communicator-communicatee discrepancy for a high credibility source, and curvilinearly related to communicator-communicatee discrepancy for a medium credibility source. Furthermore, the curve trends for the 2 sources interacted significantly. It had originally been expected that, since the discrepancy dimension was being explored completely to the extreme end, opinion change would be curvilinearly related to discrepancy for both high and medium credibility sources. Disparagement of the medium but not the high credibility source and of the communication in both source conditions was linearly related to discrepancy. The pattern of correlations between opinion change and discrepancy was only roughly as expected. These results were taken as giving some qualified support to the dissonance interpretation of the effect of communicator-communicatee discrepancy on opinion change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

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