摘要
The impact of need for cognition (NFC) and knowledge on the relationship between conclusion explicitness and attitude formation was examined in this study. A total of 360 undergraduate students participated in the experiment. Results showed that while high-NFC individuals engender more favorable attitudes toward the implicitly concluded message than the explicitly concluded message, low-NFC individuals engender more favorable attitudes toward the explicitly concluded message than the implicitly concluded message. In addition, low-knowledge individuals engender more favorable attitudes toward the implicitly concluded message than the explicitly concluded message; however, conclusion explicitness does not affect the attitudes of high-knowledge individuals. Furthermore, conclusion explicitness does not affect the attitudes of high-NFC individuals with high knowledge toward the incoming message. Contrarily, low-NFC individuals with low knowledge engender more favorable attitudes toward the explicitly concluded message than the implicitly concluded message. © Society for Personality Research (Inc.).