1Should Persuasion Be Affective or Cognitive? The Moderating Effects of Need for Affect and Need for Cognition

beverage (i.e., its low caloric intake). This difference in focus illustrates a long-standing distinction between affec-tive attempts at persuasion and cognitive attempts at per-suasion. Despite a tradition of research on this topic, research has not yet tested whether the relative effective-ness of these components in eliciting attitude change varies across people, depending on individual differences in the desire to seek out affective and cognitive information. In this article, we describe three experiments designed to assess whether the effectiveness of affect- and cognition-based messages is dependent on individual differences in need for affect (Maio & Esses, 2001) and need for cogni-tion (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Attitude Content and Persuasion Several experiments have tested the hypothesis that persuasive messages induce more attitude change when their arguments match the affective and cognitive con-tent of the recipient’s attitude toward the issue (see Maio & Haddock, 2007, for a review). This research has pro-ceeded on the assumption that an attitude will be more influenced by an affective or cognitive message as a func-tion of whether the basis of the attitude is affective or Authors ’ Note: Richard Petty served as Action Editor on this article. We wish to thank Ulrich von Hecker and anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Correspondence should be addressed to Geoff Haddock or Greg Maio, School of Psychology