Abstract
Affirmation, confidence and persuasion. Recent research demonstrates that when people affirm themselves they become more vulnerable to persuasion. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon argues that affirming oneself reinforces the self-concept, undermining the need to resist and defend one's attitudes and leading to more openness to change. The present research proposes a new hypothesis based on the idea that affirmation enhances confidence and that confidence decreases the likelihood of systematic information processing. According to this hypothesis, affirming oneself should enhance attitude change only in the case in which the persuasive information is relatively weak. However, affirming oneself should also lead to the opposite effect undermining persuasion when the message is composed by compelling arguments. Results were consistent with this view demonstrating that affirming oneself can either increase or reduce persuasion depending on the quality of the message.
