Abstract
People often make "agree or disagree" judgments on arguments in daily life and education settings. Researches have been exploring the communication phenomena relating to this topic and several studies indicated that the position and quality of an argument would influence whether people agree with it (when an argument is compatible with prior beliefs or strong in quality, tendency to agree it is elicited), but very few has examined the conscious/automatic essences of the processing routes this study aimed to examine. Sixty-four high school students were involved in Experiment 1 and it was founded that the influence of argument position on judgments was conscious processing as the participants were aware of such influence, and it could also be corrected by instructions which reminded the participants to monitor the judgments objectively (monitor reminding). However, although the participants were also aware of the influence of argument quality on their judgments, the results did not show facilitating effect of monitor reminding. After revising the procedures of Experiment 1, the Experiment 2 with 73 high school students found that the influences of argument quality and position could be respectively corrected or facilitated by monitor reminding. The results of Experiment 3 with 96 high school participants indicate that both influences of argument position and argument quality were conscious processing inasmuch as the influences were interfered by distraction task and the participants were aware of the influences. Based on the research findings, possible implications for educators and suggestions for future research are provided.