Scarcity Claims Elicit Extreme Responding to Persuasive Messages: Role of Cognitive Elaboration

Opposing accounts of the persuasiveness of messages accompanied by scarcity information (rarity) were compared: heuristic-reduced thinking versus elaborative-increased thinking. In two experiments, 275 college students identified themselves as having a novel attribute (picture-mindedness [PM]/situationmindedness or situation-mindedness [SM]) that was designated as rare or common and that persuasive messages portrayed as either positive or negative. The results replicated Ditto and Jemmott—rarity led to more extreme attitudes toward the focal attribute. However, thought-listings and path analyses favored elaborative rather than heuristic processing. In further demonstration that extreme attitudinal responding to scarcity information was mediated by thoughtful processing, Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 under low, but not high, cognitive load.