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On the basis of the elaboration likelihood model and self-awareness theory, it was reasoned that self-awareness should stimulate thoughtful resistance to attacks on personally important attitudes. In Experiment 1, mirror-induced self-awareness increased resistance to a message that was counterattitudinal, personally important, and based on direct experience, but it failed to increase resistance to a message that lacked those qualities. In Experiment 2, self-aware subjects showed greater resistance to weak persuasive arguments than to strong arguments, unlike subjects who were not made self-aware. These results support the view of self-awareness as a cause of biased central route processing and (hence) of selective, judicious resistance to persuasion.

The accessibility of a source's likability from memory was hypothesized to moderate the influence of source likability on persuasion. The accessibility of subjects' liking for the source of a message was manipulated in two experiments. Subjects with more accessible liking for the source exhibited more attitude change in the direction of the source's message than subjects with less accessible evaluations of the source.