Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Ferguson, Melissa

Abstract

How does the schedule of information delivery influence attitude change? While decades of research highlights the cognitive benefits of spaced learning for memory, little is known about whether these same principles extend to the domain of persuasion - particularly for socially meaningful or politically charged attitudes. This dissertation bridges cognitive and social psychological approaches by investigating whether spacing persuasive content over time enhances its ability to revise attitudes. Across three empirical chapters, I test the effects of spaced versus massed presentation of new information on evaluative judgements in three distinct domains: person impressions, social group attitudes, and policy support. In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of spacing on impressions of individuals, showing that spaced exposure to positive information produces greater explicit attitude change than massed exposure, even when impressions are based on known stigmatized identities. Implicit effects are more variable but support a general pattern favoring spacing. Chapter 3 extends this work to group-level attitudes, focusing on anti-transgender bias. Here, spacing modestly enhances explicit warmth toward transgender people, although its impact on moral judgments and policy support is limited. Chapter 4 explores support for a specific social policy—safe consumption services—revealing that while both massed and spaced messaging increase support, only spacing strengthened attitude certainty and perceived importance. Together, these findings challenge the long-standing assumption that persuasive content alone drives belief change. Instead, they underscore the importance of timing - when information is delivered can meaningfully shape not only whether attitudes shift, but also how deeply and durably they do so. Spacing emerges as a promising and scalable strategy for strengthening the impact of interventions in domains such as prejudice reduction, public health, and civic education, especially when long-term change is the goal. While spacing does not always yield uniformly positive effects, this work highlights the need for further research on the boundary conditions of its persuasive power. In sum, this dissertation advances our understanding of attitude malleability by revealing that how we structure exposure over time can be just as important as what we say.

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