661
Views
232
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

The Effects of Over Head Movements on Persuasion: Compatibility and Incompatibility of Responses

Pages 219-230
Published online: 07 Jun 2010
 

It was hypothesized that overt movement can either augment or inhibit certain cognitive activities depending on whether the movement has been positively associated with or negatively associated with that cognitive activity in the past. Seventy-two subjects who believed that they were testing headphone sets engaged in either vertical, horizontal, or no-instructed head movements while listening to a simulated radio broadcast. Subjects in the vertical headmovement conditions agreed with the editorial content of the radio broadcast more than did those in the horizontal head-movement conditions. This effect was true for both counterattitudinal and proattitudinal editorial content. A surreptitious behavioral measure indicated that vertical movements in the counterattitudinal message condition and horizontal movements in the proattitudinal message condition were more difficult than vertical movement in the proattitudinal message condition or horizontal movement in the counterattitudinal message condition. The processes involved are compared with context learning wherein: (1) the generation of counterarguments is learned in the context of horizontal head movement with poor transfer to vertical head movement; and (2) the generation of agreement responses is learned in the context of vertical head movement with poor transfer to horizontal head movement.

Reprints and Permissions

Please note: We are unable to provide a copy of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or commercial or derivative permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below.

Permission can also be obtained via Rightslink. For more information please visit our Permissions help page.