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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 9, No. 2, 209-222 (1983)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167283092004
© 1983 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

The Effects of Recipient Posture on Persuasion

A Cognitive Response Analysis

Richard E. Petty

University of Missouri-Columbia

Gary L. Wells

University of Alberta

Martin Heesacker

Southern Illinois University-Carbondale

Timothy C. Brock

Ohio State University

John T. Cacioppo

University of Iowa

Two experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between the body posture of a message recipient and susceptibility to persuasive influence. In Experiment 1, recipients who were reclining comfortably during exposure to a counterattitudinal message showed more agreement with the message than recipients who were standing during exposure. In Experiment 2, posture (standing or reclining) and the quality of the arguments employed in the counterattitudinal message (cogent or specious) were varied in an effort to assess competing theoretical accounts of the posture effect. An interaction between posture and message quality emerged on the measure of postmessage agreement. Reclining subjects were differentially persuaded by the strong and weak arguments, but standing subjects were not. This pattern of results is consistent with the view that reclining recipients engage in more message-relevant thinking than standing recipients.


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