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Psychological Bulletin Copyright 1990 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 1990, Vol. 107, No. 3, 367-374 0033-2909/90/$00.75

Involvement and Persuasion: Tradition Versus Integration

R i c h a r d E. Pe t ty a n d J o h n T. C a c i o p p o Ohio State University

In a recent meta-analysis, Johnson and Eagly (1989) questioned our conceptualization of and evidence for the effects of involvement on persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979, 1986). In particular, they concluded that (a) what we had termed issue involvement represented two distinct types of involvement (outcome- versus value-relevant), (b) each type of involvement had unique effects on persuasion, and (c) outcome involvement effects may be obtained only by 1 group of researchers. We argue that although 2 distinct research traditions of involvement have emerged, our original position that the 2 categories of involvement induce similar processes in persuasion situations re- mains viable. Evidence from Johnson and Eagly's meta-anatysis shows that as both types of involvement increase, argument quality becomes a more important determinant of attitudes. The greater message rejection found with involvement in value as compared with outcome studies can be explained in terms of confounding factors. Finally, we note that the outcome involvement effects that we reported initially have been replicated by other investigators, including Johnson and Eagly.

In a recent article in this journal, Johnson and Eagly (1989) reported a meta-analysis of the accumulated research on involvement and persuasion in which they concluded that it was useful to distinguish between value- and outcome-relevant involvement.l In addition, they suggested that although effects for the first type of involvement were robust, effects for the latter type of involvement may be obtained only by one group of researchers. In this article, we question both of these conclusions and provide a brief critique of their meta-analysis.

Utility of the Value Versus Outcome Involvement Distinction

In Johnson and Eagly's (1989) view, value-relevant involvement (VRI) occurs when the topic of a persuasive communication is "linked to important values" (p. 290) such as freedom or equality (Rokeach, 1968), and outcome-relevant involvement (ORI) occurs when the topic of the message is linked to the recipient's "currently important goals or outcomes" (p. 292), such as obtaining a college degree. Johnson and Eagly criticized those who have postulated that the two constructs have similar effects in persuasion contexts (i.e., Petty & Cacioppo, 1979), and they provide two primary arguments for the validity and utility of their distinction. First, they noted that the two kinds of involvement stem from distinct "traditions of experimenta- tion" (p. 293) with "distinct bodies of research that r e f l e c t . . . different ways that researchers have thought about involve-

Preparation of this article was facilitated by National Science Foun- dation Grant BNS 84-18038.

We are grateful to the following people for providing comments on a previous draft of this article: Robert B. Cialdini, Russell Fazio, Anthony Greenwald, Stephen Harkins, Martin Heesacker, Jon Krosnick, Diane Mackie, Thomas Ostrom, Steven J. Sherman, Richard Sorrentino, and Wendy Wood.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rich- ard E. Petty or John T. Cacioppo, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1222.

ment" (p. 310). That is, the VRI research consists largely of studies conducted before 1975 that were inspired by social judgment theory (e.g., Sherif & Hovland, 1961), whereas the ORI research consists largely of studies conducted in the past decade that were instigated by cognitive response theory (Greenwald, 1968; Petty, Ostrom, & Brock, 1981 ) or the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986). Sec- ond, Johnson and Eagly argued that the two research traditions have uncovered "distinctively different effects [of involvement] on persuasion" (p. 290). That is, VRI studies have tended to show that increasing involvement is associated with reduced persuasion (a main effect for involvement as predicted by social judgment theory; Sherif & Sberif, 1967), but ORI studies have tended to show that involvement interacts with argument quality such that a manipulation of argument cogency has a greater impact under high-involvement than low-involvement conditions. In some studies the interaction shows more specifically that increasing involvement is associated with reduced persuasion when the message arguments are weak but with increased persuasion when the arguments are strong (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979).

Integrative View of Involvement

Our view is that Johnson and Eagly's (1989) categorical distinction between outcome and value involvement is premature and that there is a more parsimonious and integrative manner in which to view the effects of involvement on persuasion. Fur- thermore, we argue that the data from their own analysis support this alternative approach. The alternative view (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979, 1986) relies on the notion of "issue involve-

367

Another type of involvement referred to by Johnson and Eagly as "impression-relevant involvement" and by others as "response involvement" (e.g., Chaiken, 1980; Leippe & Elkin, 1987; Petty & Cacioppo, 1979; Zimbardo, 1960) is widely accepted as occurring when the self- presentational consequences of one's attitude are salient (cf. Cialdini, Levy, Herman, Kozlowski, & Petty, 1976) and is not in dispute here.

368 RICHARD E. PETTY AND JOHN T. CACIOPPO

ment," defined as "the extent to which the attitudinal issue under consideration is of personal importance" (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979, p. 1915; italics added. See also Apsler & Sears, 1968; Kiesler, Collins, & Miller, 1969.) According to this view, the topic of a persuasive message can have personal importance because it is related to a variety of self-relevant constructs such as values, goals, people, and objects. In our alternative framework, the most self-relevant or involving message would be one about the self (e.g., about one's intelligence or personality). Also of importance, however, would be messages about other people or objects that are relevant to the message recipient, or outcomes, ideas, values, and end states that are important to the person. As McGuire (1989) noted, the dimension of importance is "transcendental in that all topics can be projected on" it whether they are "relatively concrete (such a s . . . m o t h e r ) . . . or abstractions (such a s . . . justice)" (p. 39). The critical aspect of issue involvement is that the topic of the message is perceived as important to the self. That is, a message perceived as relevant to my value of freedom, mygoal of obtaining an education, my sister, or my car is more involving than a message about your values, goals, siblings, or possessions. 2 Furthermore, the more important the value, goal, sibling, or possession is to the self, the higher the level of involvement with a message on that topic. Is it necessary to have two or more kinds of involvement to account for messages dealing with important values, goals, siblings, possessions, and so forth? We think not.

Instead, we proposed that where the topic of the message falls on the personal importance continuum is more critical for un- derstanding persuasion processes than whether the communication topic is one that deals with important values, goals, people, or objects. In all cases, as the personal importance of the topic increases, recipients are postulated to become more motivated to allocate their limited cognitive resources to processing the message. As a consequence of this, the quality of the arguments in the message becomes a greater determinant of influence when involvement is high rather than low (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979, 1986). Importantly, Johnson and Eagly (1989) tested this hypothesis in their recta-analysis and found it to hold within both the ORI and the VRI studies. The interaction of involvement and argument quality within both categories of studies is predicted by our alternative view but cannot be explained by social judgment theory and is awkward for the Johnson and Eagly view that the two kinds of involvement are categorically different (or induce qualitatively different processes). 3

The challenge for our alternative view is to account for the main effect for involvement that occurs within the VRI studies that does not occur in the ORI set, although this main effect is perhaps less interesting in light of the interaction. Our view is that involvement (personal importance) per se is one of several variables (e.g., personal responsibility, need for cognition) that affect the intensity of information processing, but that the direction of any Processing bias (relatively favorable, unfavorable, or neutral) is determined by other variables. For example, possess- ing much attitude-congruent knowledge or prior experience might enable people to defend their positions more effectively than can people with low knowledge or little experience (cf. Krosnick, 1988; Wood, 1982). This issue-relevant knowledge or experience would be more likely to be accessed and used in processing if the message was self-relevant than if it was not. Similarly, because people prefer their current positions to be

correct, the discrepancy between the message and one's own position may motivate biased information processing (i.e., people prefer their values to be upheld, their desired outcomes to be supported, and their favorite possessions to be praised; cf. Howard-Pitney, Borgida, & Omoto, 1986; Lord, Ross, & Lep- per, 1979). This means, for example, that increasing personal importance will enhance processing in a relatively objective fashion when people have relatively little (or very balanced) knowledge about a topic and a weak or relatively neutral prior opinion, but that the enhanced processing induced by high involvement becomes more negatively biased as people's attitude- congruent knowledge and attitude strength increase (cf. Fazio, 1989). Similarly, as we noted in a previous discussion of involvement,

The joint consideration of personal relevance and m e ~ discrepancy suggests that as a message becomes more counterattitudinal, the message arguments may have to be stronger to produce the same degree of acceptance. Likewise, as a m ~ becomes more proattitudinal, the m ~ arguments may have to be weaker to produce the same degree of rejection. (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986, p. 88)

Figure 1 depicts the expected attitude results when both the intensity of processing and the direction of processing bias are considered along with the quality of the arguments in a message. Each of the three panels shows that as the intensity of processing increases (as induced by the personal importance of a message, for example), the quality of the arguments accounts for more variance in attitudes. The specific form of this Intensity × Argu- ment Quality interaction varies in the three panels, however. In the middle panel, the increased processing is relatively objective, such that more favorable attitudes result when "strong" arguments receive increased scrutiny, but less favorable attitudes result when "weak" arguments are evaluated. In contrast to this relatively objective processing, consider a person who is motivated (e.g., because the message takes a very discrepant position) and able (e.g., because the person possesses consider- able attitude-consistent knowledge) to counterargue the message. This person's task is advanced to the extent that the message provides weak rather than strong arguments in support of its position, resulting in the pattern depicted in the fight panel of Figure 1. Similarly, in the left panel of Figure 1, the expected results of increasing the intensity of processing are shown when conditions foster a favorable bias. Here the person's task is advanced to the extent that the message contains strong rather

2 This view is compatible with Sherif and Cantril's (1947) view of "ego" (1947). They wrote that "the components of the ego include the individual's body and physical characteristics; the things he learns be- long to him, such as his clothes, his t o y s . . , his sweetheart, his chil- dren; together with a whole host of social values he also learns and with which he identifies himself--his country, his politics...." (p. 117; see also Ostrom & Brock, 1968).

3 There are other indications that ORI and VRI produce similar effects. For example, research has shown that whether involvement is defined as in the social judgment theory (VRI) tradition (e.&, by using "latitude of rejection"; Fazio & Zanna, 1978) or in the cognitive response (ORI) manner (e.g., by examining people whose personal outcomes differ; Sivacek & Crano, 1982), increasing involvement is associated with enhanced attitude-behavior consistency (see review by Ajzen, 1987).

INVOLVEMENT AND PERSUASION 369

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than weak arguments. In sum, our point is that one must consider not only the fact that the personal importance of a message increases the extent of information processing activity, but one must also consider how other factors in the persuasion environ- ment (e.g., knowledge, message position, etc.) affect the direction of processing (i.e., do they produce a favorable, unfavorable, or no bias?)

Confoundings in VRI Research

Given these theoretical considerations, it is noteworthy that two types of confounding may have motivated or enabled a bias toward unfavorable processing in the VRI but not in the ORI studies included in the Johnson and Eagly (1989) review. If so, this would explain why their meta-analysis found that ORI studies tended to show the attitude pattern depicted in the middle panel of Figure 1, but VRI studies tended to yield the pattern depicted in the right panel. 4 The two types of confounding that may have induced an unfavorable bias in the VRI relative to the ORI studies are (a) confoundings with the high- versus low-involvement distinction within the value-relevant studies and (b) confoundings with the value-outcome distinction itself.

Regarding the first type of confounding, Johnson and Eagly (1989, p. 306) wrote,

we suspect that involvement was sometimes correlated to some extent with variables that could be considered confounds (e.g., knowledgeability about issues, confidence in own attitudinal position, accessibility of counterarguments), especially in the studies

that varied involvement by classifying subjects or varying the issue of the persuasive message [i.e., the VRI studies].

Although they acknowledge these confoundings, they dismiss them by arguing that "the exact nature of any confounding would have differed across the studies, rendering less plausible any argument that a single confound explains the effects of value-relevant involvement" (p. 306). Despite the fact that no single confounding may account for all of the results, it is critical to note that each of the confoundings that Johnson and Eagly identified are likely to work in the same direction. That is, each of the confoundings in the VRI studies is plausibly tied to increased resistance to persuasion. 5 Furthermore, in some of the VRI studies, the resistance bias in the high-involvement conditions is quite blatant. For example, in the research by Mil- ler (1965) included in the VRI set, subjects in the high-involvement conditions were explicitly instructed to list all of the rea- sons that favored their initial attitudes before receiving the communication and were further told that the sponsors of the study agreed with their position and that much evidence supported it. These aspects of the high-involvement manipulation (absent

4 Johnson and Eagly (1989) were unlikely to uncover the favorable bias pattern depicted in the left panel of Figure 1 because they excluded "studies or conditions within studies in which subjects received proattitudinal messages" (p. 295).

5 The confounds exist in the VRI studies because these studies tend to be correlational, whereas the ORI research uses experimental designs.


under low involvement) appear sufficient to account for the reduced attitude change it engendered without the need to appeal to the concept of value-relevant involvement.

Even if we ignored all confoundings with involvement in the VRI studies, however, there are still confounds between the sets of studies placed in the VRI and ORI categories that can account for the different pattern of results. For example, Johnson and Eagiy (1989) reported that people generally had more knowledge about the topics used in the value than in the outcome studies (p. 297). If high involvement increases access to knowledge in both the value and outcome studies, but subjects in the value studies have available more attitude-consistent knowledge, then involvement would produce a greater resistance to influence in the value than in the outcome studies because of this confound (cf. Wood, 1982). 6 Similarly, Johnson and Eagly reported that VRI studies tended to rely on change scores (e.g., pretest-posttest designs), whereas ORI studies tended to use posttest-only designs (p. 297). In the VRI studies using a pretest, initial attitudes might be more highly accessible and available to bias processing than in the posttest-only ORI studies, especially when motivation to process was high (cf. Fazio, 1989). As a third example, we note that the relatively large difference in the average publication date for the VRI studies (i.e., 1970) versus the ORI studies (i.e., 1984) may pose prob- lems of interpretation, especially for effects involving argument quality. One possible problem is that Johnson and Eagiy's contemporary raters, judging from the perspective of the 1980s, may have overestimated the strength of the arguments used in the older VRI studies. This might occur if arguments that were controversial in past decades regarding various social and politi- cal issues (e.g., birth control) were more acceptable today. For example, the arguments in favor of U.S. policy during the Viet- nam War (Gant, 1970) might have seemed weaker to under- graduates during the turbulent 1960s than they do to today's more politically conservative college students. If the "strong" arguments used in some of the VRI studies were weaker or more controversial for the subjects at the time of the research than they appear to raters today, this could account for the greater apparent rejection of the strong arguments in the VRI than in the ORI studies. 7

Summary

In sum, although we acknowledge the view that two historical traditions of involvement research can be identified, we question Johnson and Eagly's (1989) conclusion that two categories of involvement are needed to account for persuasion effects because it is not clear if the processes relevant to persuasion induced by self-relevance per se in these traditions differ. Instead, the Johnson and Eagly meta-analysis shows that when involvement is high (whether value relevant or outcome relevant), the quality of the arguments in a message accounts for more variance in attitudes than when involvement is low. This, of course, directly supports our view that self-relevance increases the extent of message processing. The increased resistance found in VRI studies as compared with ORI studies can be accounted for completely by the confoundings (e.g., attitude-congruent knowledge, attitude extremity) that are either documented or plausibly present in the VRI research.

Replicability and General i ty o f the O u t c o m e Involvement Effect

Although at some level Johnson and Eagly (1989) apparently accepted the pattern of results for outcome involvement manipulations (as they relied on these results to differentiate outcome from value involvement), they nevertheless question whether the outcome effects are obtained only by "Ohio State researchers." The Ohio State results are defined by papers authored or co-authored by investigators "who obtained the PhD from Ohio State University in the late 1970s" (Johnson & Eagly, 1989, p. 304; e.g., Leippe & Elkin, 1987; Petty, Cacioppo, & Heesacker, 1981). Given the attention that Johnson and Eagly give to the Ohio State group and to possible explanations as to why this group but not others obtained the effect, readers may be surprised to learn that Johnson and Eagly replicated the Ohio State results themselves before final acceptance of their article for Psychological Bulletin.

The Johnson-Eagly and Other Replications

In a 1988 dissertation by Johnson that was supervised by Eagly, two attempts were made to replicate our findings by "re- producing as closely as possible the procedures and materials of the prototypical Petty and Cacioppo involvement and attitude change experiment" (Johnson, 1988, p. 9). Panel I in Figure 2 presents our initial attitude results. The next two panels present the results from the two experiments by Johnson (1988). In his first replication attempt, the Involvement x Argument Quality interaction was not statistically significant; however, consistent with our interaction pattern, individual cell comparisons indi- cated that argument quality had a significant effect on attitudes under high but not low involvement (see Panel II). In Johnson's second replication attempt, the interaction pattern appeared again and this time proved to be statistically significant (see Panel III). s

6 Johnson and Eagly (1989) argued that involvement and knowledge may be confounded in many natural settings (see also Abelson, 1988). We have also noted this (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) but do not feel that this provides a compelling justification against examining the sepa- rate contributions to the persuasion process.

7 Likewise, it is possible that current subjects underestimated the "weakness" of certain arguments as they appeared to subjects in past decades. The important point is that because of the time confounding, it is difficult to directly compare the VRI and ORI studies for effects dependent on the ratings of contemporary judges. Another issue relating to judges' ratings of argument quality in the Johnson and Eagly (1989) review is that their judges were specifically instructed to ignore their own views when rating argument quality, whereas in developing the strong and weak argument manipulations used in our research, we allow subjects to consider their own attitudes when responding. Further- more, in our procedure, subjects do not simply rate the arguments as strong or weak but are asked to provide a cognitive reaction to the argument to ensure that counterargning the strong arguments is unlikely even when the subject considers his or her own position (for further detail on these procedures, see Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).

s We only graph the conditions from Johnson's (1988) second study that were conducted as an explicit replication of our work. In some additional conditions of his experiment, subjects were provided with some background information about the topic before message exposure. The effect of this background information was to increase protx~ng of the message overall so that only a main effect for argument quality was observed.


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Johnson and Eagly (1989) were certainly aware of their suc- cessful replication of the Ohio State results before acceptance of their article, but they chose not to disclose this to readers. It is not clear why Johnson and Eagly would want to leave readers of Psychological Bulletin with the impression that only Ohio State researchers can obtain the effect when they have obtained it themselves. It is also interesting to note that the Method sec- t ion of their report indicates that they stopped searching standard data bases (e.g., Dissertation Abstracts International) in mid-1987 or earlier; however, their analysis includes a 1988 master's thesis and two 1988 dissertations but not Johnson 's 1988 dissertation, previously described.

Although the Johnson (1988) replication may be the most persuasive one possible since it comes from the chief critics of the effect, it is important to note that other studies cited in the Johnson and Eagly (1989) article contain replications of the initial Petty and Cacioppo (1979) result as well (i.e., Huddleston, 1986; Sorrentino, Bobocel, Gitta, Olson, & Hewitt, 1988). 9

9 Johnson and Eagly (1989) eliminated the Huddleston (1986) study from their meta-analysis because he failed to include sufficient information in his text so that they could calculate effect sizes, and they col- lapsed across a critical individual difference variable in the Sorrentino et al. (1988) study, masking the fact that the effect was replicated by one


Nevertheless, why have some investigators attempted to replicate the result and failed? We believe that this has occurred because although many of the studies have modeled the form of our investigations, several have modified (or not included) some critical substantive features. As one example, consider the dissertation by Homer (1987) cited by Johnson and Eagly as a fail- ure to replicate. In this study, Homer modeled her involvement manipulation after one previously used by us. In our study (Petty, Cacioppo, & Schumann, 1983), involvement with a tar- get consumer product was manipulated before exposure to an advertisement for it. Subjects were told that the product would be available in their local area soon (high involvement) or that it would not (low involvement), and that after ad exposure they would be asked to select a gift from among alternative brands of the product (high involvement) or from among brands of a nontarget product category. Homer (1987) manipulated the perceived availability of the product (as we did) but enhanced the manipulation by telling high-involvement subjects that they would be entered in a lottery in which "the grand prize was identified as the product shown in the experimental ad." In the low-involvement conditions, the lottery prize was identified as consisting of "donations from local retail establishments" (p. 30). In Homer's research, then, high-involvement subjects were led to believe that they might actually win the product that appeared in the critical ad (a stereo), whereas our high-involvement subjects were led to believe that they would have to make a decision about which brand among several in the product category (disposable razor) they should select for themselves. Our subjects would presumably be motivated to evaluate the brand featured in the ad so that they could make an informed choice. Homer's subjects, having no influence over which brand they would get, could only hope that the brand featured in the ad (that which they might win) was a good one. As might be expected by the positivity bias set up by this manipulation, high- involvement subjects evaluated the product as more desirable than did low-involvement subjects.~°

The Outcome Involvement Manipulation

Another concern Johnson and Eagly (1989) raised about the ORI research is the "lack of variety of manipulations" used (p. 308). That is, in the accumulated ORI experiments, only three manipulations of involvement have been used, all of which were plausibly tied directly to outcomes that were or were not relevant to the subjects (e.g., instituting comprehensive exams before [high involvement] or after [low involvement] the subjects

personality type ("uncertainty oriented") but not the other ("certainty oriented"). To resolve the inconsistency with past work, Sorrentino et al. speculated and provided some evidence consistent with the idea that the Canadian students in their study were more certainty oriented than the American students used in previous research (p. 368). We also think that it is important to note that, in accord with our view of the effects of involvement, (a) in addition to Johnson ( 1988, Experiment 1), other studies have obtained a statistically significant attitude difference between the strong and weak argument conditions under high but not low (outcome) involvement (e.g., Axsom, Yates, & Chaiken, 1987); and (b) nonpersuasion studies that have used the OR1 manipulation have shown that it is effective in increasing information processing activity (e.g., Brickner, Harkins, & Ostrom, 1986).

graduated from college). If the same effects could be shown for a manipulation that clearly invoked self-relevance but that did not directly manipulate the outcome-relevance of the advo- cated position, then we could be more confident that the effect is not confined to one class of manipulations. Interestingly, a recent study by Burnkrant and Unnava (in press) addressed this issue. In their study, the manipulation of involvement con- cerned whether the pronouns used in the message were chosen to invoke self-referencing (e.g., "when your razor showed signs of rust") and self-reflection ("you may remember f ee l ing . . . " ) or not (e.g., "when one's r a z o r . . . ," "'one might have felt"; italics added). This manipulation was combined with one of argument quality. The attitude results, presented in Panel IV of Figure 2, replicated our initial finding (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979) with a very different manipulation of self-relevance.

Summary

In sum, the ORI effect appears to be obtained by more than the "Ohio State researchers" referred to by Johnson and Eagly ( 1989; e.g., Leippe & Elkin, 1987; Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981). Rather, it is now clear that the effect has been obtained by other investigators (including Johnson at Purdue) and is not limited to just one class of manipulations.

Cri t ique o f Meta-Analysis Procedures

Meta-analyses have been championed for making literature reviews more objective. The Johnson and Eagly (1989) meta- analysis, however, is illustrative of the subjective judgments and decisions that can be involved. For example, although some authors have argued that "commitment" manipulations are relevant to "involvement" (e.g., Pallak, Mueiler, Dollar, & PaUak, 1972), Johnson and Eagly decided to exclude this research from their review because "it is not at all clear that the commitment manipulations used in persuasion studies influenced the extent to which the persuasive message activated subjects' values" (p. 291). Yet studies using "width of the latitude of rejection" as an indication of involvement were included in their analysis even though they report no evidence that latitudes influence the extent of value activation.

A second inconsistency concerns the authors' claim to have eliminated studies with "obviously confounded manipulations" (p. 294). It is not clear what they mean by this. For example, Table 1 in their report reveals that three of the VRI studies

~0 Perhaps the most important aspect of our research that has not been followed closely, we believe, concerns the argument quality manipulation. In our research, the arguments must meet certain criteria in pilot testing before use in the research, and we have had to modify these arguments over time and for subjects at different institutions. For example, the "weak" arguments used in the initial Petty and Cacioppo (1979) study proved insufficiently weak in a subsequent experiment (i.e., they elicited a relatively even mixture of favorable and unfavorable thoughts rather than primarily unfavorable responses). Nevertheless, the creation of a different set of even weaker arguments (labeled very weak) was sufficient to produce the desired effect (Petty, Harkins, & Williams, 1980, see also Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). Other researchers have either used the arguments from one of our studies without examining whether they met the criteria for their populations or have selected arguments according to criteria different from ours.


were explicitly coded into a "knowledge varied with involvement" category, suggesting an "obvious" confound. Also, studies that used different topics for the high- and low-involvement manipulations introduced likely confounds. For example, in the Rhine and Severance (1970) study, students would clearly be more opposed to the high-involvement advocacy (increasing tuition at their school) than to the low-involvement topic (increasing park size in a distant city). Furthermore, it is unlikely that the arguments would have been equated for strength across the two topics. One might also wonder why this study is classified as one of VRI rather than ORI as tuition clearly affects students' outcomes, whereas distant park sizes do not. The authors explain this apparent anomaly by noting that "tuition was being actively discussed by the [community and a] march on the State Capitol had been held to protest suggestions for increased tuition" (p. 296). In our view, this "justification" could easily have been offered to explain the obvious outcome-relevance of the tuition increase and certainly suggests the high level of op- position to this topic as compared with the one on park acreage. Johnson and Eagly (1989) deliberately excluded other studies in which "investigators compared groups differing in their initial stands on issues" (p. 294), and they even eliminated two consumer studies in which "a difference in attitudes toward the products probably existed prior to the experimental session" (p. 295; italics added). Clearly, different standards were used for different studies. Some studies were excluded only when there was "proof from data" (p. 294) of confoundings, but others were not. Some studies were eliminated when confoundings "probably existed" but other studies with probable confoundings were retained in the analysis.~l Although these decisions may not have had a major impact on the overall results of their meta-analysis, our discussion suggests that meta-analyses are not necessarily immune to the subjective factors involved in interpreting individual experiments (Petty, Kasmer, Haugtvedt, & Cacioppo, 1987).

Conclus ions

Our view is that it is premature to differentiate "value" from "outcome" involvement on the basis of the two "traditions" of research that have developed or on the seemingly different pattern of results observed for studies classified into each category. The more remarkable finding in our view is the similarity of the results for the two clusters of studies. That is, in each case as involvement increased, the quality of the arguments presented became a more important determinant of persuasion. This pattern is expected if both traditions of involvement manipulations affect persuasion by influencing the extent of message processing. The increased resistance induced by involvement found in the VRI but not the ORI studies can be attributed to factors confounded with VRI, or factors confounded with the value-outcome categories of research. Of course, we are in agreement with Johnson and Eagly that final settlement of this issue awaits relevant primary research.

t~ Just as it seems clear that some of the studies that Johnson and Eagly (1989) classified as VRI used topics with obvious outcome implications (i.e., restricting teenage driving, draft deferments for college students), it also seems likely that some of the topics of ORI studies related to central values (e.g., the topic of "restricting college dormitory visits" relates to the value of "freedom").

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Received June 10, 1989 Revision received July 9, 1989

Accepted July 14, 1989 •

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