Practitioners and researchers interested in designing wise interventions often recommend increasing personal involvement to be successful. Early research demonstrated that personal involvement increases elaboration leading to more persuasion for strong arguments, but to reduced persuasion if the arguments presented are specious. In most prior work, message recipients were plausibly motivated by their desire for knowledge. In the current research, we compare this epistemic goal to another goal in which people aim to process information to be entertained or have fun. Results showed that when people processed to gain knowledge (epistemic goal), they elaborated more in high personal involvement conditions, replicating the classic finding. However, high personal involvement decreased elaboration for people in hedonic conditions, reversing the classic interaction, and introducing a novel finding that is consistent with recent research suggesting that “thinking for pleasure” can be difficult.

有兴趣设计明智干预措施的从业人员和研究人员通常建议增加个人参与以取得成功。早期的研究表明，个人参与会增加工作量，从而导致对有力论据的更多说服力，但如果提出的论点是似是而非的，则会减少说服力。在大多数以前的工作中，消息接收者似乎是出于对知识的渴望。在当前的研究中，我们将该认知目标与另一个目标进行比较，在该目标中，人们旨在处理要娱乐或获得乐趣的信息。结果表明，当人们努力获取知识（认识目标）时，他们会在高度个人参与的情况下进行更多阐述，从而复制了经典发现。但是，高度的个人参与减少了享乐状态下人们的繁琐工作，