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Updated: Aug 24, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Minority versus majority influence and uncertainty orientation: processing persuasive messages on the basis of
Paul A Shuper1, Richard M Sorrentino
1Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. pshuper@uwo.ca
Abstract:
The authors examined the effects of uncertainty orientation on processing persuasive messages from minority sources versus majority sources. The authors gave participants a proattitudinal or counterattitudinal message that either a numerical majority or a numerical minority endorsed and that contained strong or weak arguments. In support of the hypothesis that was related to message scrutiny, uncertainty-oriented individuals engaged in greater message scrutiny when the Source-Position (i.e., minority/majority-pro/con) pairing was imbalanced (in majority-con, minority-pro conditions) than when it was balanced (in majority-pro, minority-con conditions). Certainty-oriented participants showed the opposite pattern, scrutinizing the message more when the situation was balanced than when the situation was imbalanced. Support for the hypothesis that was related to nonsystematic processing was less clear because the majority appeared to have played a greater role in accounting for the aforementioned interaction than did the minority. Additional analyses supported this interpretation. However, in all cases, individual differences in uncertainty orientation moderated strength and direction of information processing.
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