This research systematically investigates the sleeper effect, a counterintuitive phenomenon in which attitudes toward a persuasive message increase in favourableness over time despite the presence of discounting information. The sleeper effect has rarely been researched since criticisms in the 1970s and 1980s concerning relevance and difficulty in demonstrating the effect. Shifts in the consumer environment, however, merit a re-examination of the effect. The paucity of research leaves major gaps in establishing the conditions for existence of the sleeper effect, understanding the underlying mechanisms of the effect, the context in which the sleeper effect may flourish, and other factors with the potential to influence the effect. Recent research suggests self-associations at encoding impacts information processing and attitude change. The research reported in this thesis builds on the latter to develop hypotheses to test the relationships between self-associations and attitudes toward positive and negative information over time. The study adopts a quantitative approach to test the hypotheses using a series of three experiments, each building on one another. The first experiment seeks to find the absolute sleeper effect, and accomplishes this aim. The second experiment investigates the role of implicit self-anchoring on attitudes toward positive and negative information over time, showing that self-anchoring influences self/product identity overlap rather than the transfer of meaning through elaborative associations. The third experiment compares implicit self-anchoring and explicit self-referencing on attitudes toward positive and negative information, and shows that explicit self-referencing produces the associations and dissociations necessary to find the sleeper effect. This study significantly contributes to understanding the sleeper effect, not only by providing evidence for its existence, but by clarifying the mechanisms at work in the sleeper effect process. It distinguishes implicit self-anchoring and explicit self-referencing, and defines two processes in which the self and object interact in memory to influence attitudes. From a practical perspective, it situates the research in the contemporary consumer context, in which positive and negative information regarding products and services is accessible to consumers online. This study demonstrates that negative information can be leveraged to produce positive attitudes.

Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur hög precision äldre personer har när de ålderskattar maskerade och omaskerade ansikten. 21 kvinnor och 19 män, totalt 40 deltagare med genomsnittlig ålder på 57,7 år fick skatta åldern på 30 maskerade och 30 omaskerade ansiktsbilder. Samma stimuluspersoner användes med och utan mask. Stimulusbilderna delades upp i grupperna yngre (18-32 år) samt äldre (39-72 år). Resultatet visar att omaskerade ansikten skattas med högre precision än maskerade ansikten och att kvinnor hade en högre precision än män. Inga signifikanta skillnader fanns i deltagarnas förmåga att skatta yngre eller äldre ansikten. Tre interaktionseffekter hittades. (1) Mellan ålder och kön, (2) mellan ålder och maskering och (3) mellan mask, ålder och kön. De systematiska avvikelserna visar att de yngre och omaskerade stimuluspersonernas ålder överskattades samt att de äldre personernas ålder underskattades. Resultatet diskuteras i relation till åldersskattnig och självförankringseffekt. / The purpose of this study was to examine how precise older people can estimate the age of masked and unmasked faces. 21 women and 19 men, 40 participants in total, were shown pictures of 30 masked and 30 unmasked faces, and asked to estimate their age. The same stimulus persons were both masked and unmasked. The pictures were divided into age groups, younger (18-32) and older (39-72). The results showed that unmasked faces were better estimated than masked faces, and that women were more precise than men. There were no significant difference between participants ability to estimate the age of young and old faces. Three interaction effects was found. (1) Between age and sex, (2) between age and mask and (3) between mask, age and sex. The systematic divergences show that the age of the younger and unmasked stimulus persons were overestimated, and that the age of the older persons were underestimated. The results are discussed in relation to age estimation and self-anchoring effects.

Decisions are performatives - or at least, they share important features with performative utterances that can elucidate our theory of what type of thought they are, and what they do. Namely, decisions have an analogous force to that of performatives, where the force of a propositional attitude or utterance is constituted by (i) its point, or purpose, which is mainly a matter of its direction-of-fit, and (ii) its felicity conditions. The force of both decisions and performatives is to bring into being the states of affairs represented in their intentional contents, merely in virtue of the decision or performative’s occurrence and the satisfaction of the felicity conditions they presuppose. The first chapter of the thesis explicates this general framework, and the second and third attempt to show some of the work it can do for a theory of decisions.