White bears can walk long distances: The effects of an instruction to ignore information located in a visually differentiated location on attitude change over time

Works dealing with the Attentional White-Bear theory show that people allocate attention to a location they were told to ignore. However, studies have not examine whether the content presented in the ignored location had an impact on participants’ attitudes. To explore this question we provide a novel demonstration of the joint effects of the Attentional White-Bear and the Sleeper effect, and show that an instruction to ignore a specific predefined location in the visual field generates attention to the content in that location which influences attitudes. In four longitudinal experiments, a Sleeper effect was revealed. However this effect was eliminated when participants were requested to ignore the predefined location of the discounting cue (Experiments 1 and 3), the persuasive message (Experiment 2) and the incongruent background (Experiment 4). The comparative findings for the parallel groups exposed to the same information (both persuasive and discounting) without the ignoring instruction point to the critical role of this instruction as the source of the difference in attitude change. The discussion centers on the implications regarding the strategic buildup of communicating information that can attract audience’s attention in novel unexpected ways. These counterintuitive effects provide an uncommon strategic perspective: paradoxically, in order to generate attention to a message, the target audience should be instructed to ignore its location.