The Effects of Overt Head Movements on Persuasion: Compatibility and Incompatibility of Responses

It was hypothesized that overt movement can either augment or inhibit certain cognitive activities depending on whether the movement has been positively associated with or negatively associated with that cognitive activity in the past. Seventy-two subjects who believed that they were testing headphone sets engaged in either vertical, horizontal, or no-instructed head movements while listening to a simulated radio broadcast. Subjects in the vertical head-movement conditions agreed with the editorial content of the radio broadcast more than did those in the horizontal head-movement conditions. This effect was true for both counterattitudinal and proattitudinal editorial content. A surreptitious behavioral measure indicated that vertical movements in the counterattitudinal message condition and horizontal movements in the proattitudinal message condition were more difficult than vertical movement in the proattitudinal message condition or horizontal movement in the counterattitudinal message condition. The processes involved are compared with context learning wherein: (1) the generation of counterarguments is learned in the context of horizontal head movement with poor transfer to vertical head movement; and (2) the generation of agreement responses is learned in the context of vertical head movement with poor transfer to horizontal head movement.