The impact of information processing goals and expertise on candidate information search.

Abstract

This study investigated how individuals' information-processing goals and political expertise affect the processes of information seeking about political candidates and vote decision-making. A typology of four information-processing goals along the dimensions of effortful versus effortless and impression-driven versus non-impression-driven was developed. An experiment was conducted in a computer laboratory to manipulate these four types of exposure goals: impression-driven on-line (effortful/impression-driven) processing, impression-driven shallow (effortless/impression-driven) processing, careful memory-based (effortful/non-impression-driven) processing, and careless memory-based (effortless/non-impression-driven) processing. One hundred and fifty-seven college students participated in this study and were randomly assigned to one of the goal conditions. Their political expertise was post-experimentally measured. The experiment employed a computer program to display a variety of information about three candidates--such as issue positions, background information, and personality--in a format of matrix, and to record the entire information-acquisition process. The depth and patterns of information seeking (e.g., within-candidate or across-candidate), decision-making strategies (compensatory versus non-compensatory), response latencies to report candidate evaluations and vote decisions, and the amount of recall were measured. Experimental results showed that effortful information-processing goals led to a deeper and within-candidate information search, a preference for non-compensatory decision strategies, longer response latencies to report feelings toward the candidates and vote decisions, and better recall. Impression-driven information-processing goals, on the other hand, resulted in a shallower and across-candidate information search, shorter response latencies, and no beneficial effect on recall. While a number of strong effects of information-processing goals were observed, far fewer effects of individual differences in political expertise were obtained. Political experts, as compared with novices, conducted a deeper information search and adopted a non-compensatory decision-rule; but no significant effects of political expertise were observed on search patterns or recall. The findings suggest that motivations play a more important role than cognitive ability in the processes by which people acquire information about political candidates. Implications of the findings for research in mass communication, social cognition, and political science are also addressed.