Abstract
Occasionally people attempt to correct their initial perceptions or judgments because of potentially biasing factors. For example, when people read newspapers or watch television, it is not unusually that a given endorser may endorse many different products or different brands at the same period of time. When such a situation (i.e., multiple endorsement) occurs, people may judge the advertisement differently from when the endorser just endorses one and only one product or brand. The literatures in advertisement research have emphasized on the endorser attributes, attitude toward the advertisement and correspondent strategies for practitioners, rather than on the discussion of information process under the condition when a given endorser is repeatedly exposed to audiences. On the other hand, even though the literatures in psychology have already developed solid evidences for explaining the mechanisms of attitude change, previous studies which examined attitude change and explained bias correction only used prompts to make subjects aware of those biasing factors, referred to as “enforced-correction” in this study. Nonetheless, in reality, people are less likely to perceive prompts in advertisements. That is, people in a regular consumption setting will be less likely to engender “enforced-correction” as studied in literature of social psychology. In contrast, people will be more likely to correct the perceived biases in the regular consumption setting by themselves, referred to as “self-activated-correction” process. It is proposed in this study that the correction patterns resulted form “self-activated-correction” process will be quite different from which resulted from “enforced-correction” process. In this study, a 2x2x2 (positive vs. neutral endorser/high vs. low involvement /enforced vs. self-activated-correction process) experiment will be conducted to investigate direction and degree of correction for perceived bias (i.e., multiple endorsements) in persuasion situations. The students in Sung-Shang Vocation School will be asked to express their attitudes about a product after being exposed to a magazine under condition of either high/low product involvement as well as whether being given an explicit correction instruction or not (i.e., self-activated-correction or enforced-correction). The advertisements will have same arguments for the product and feature either same or different endorser(s). That is, a subject read a persuasive message from a famous endorser (i.e., positive endorser) or unfamiliar endorser (i.e., neutral endorser) who endorses particular product (i.e., Notebook or non-Notebook) in the experiment booklet. This research is meant to find out the different correction processes.