What you expect is (not) what you get: the impact of initial and post-hoc judgments of message characteristics on political information recall

Abstract

How does a political text’s complexity–as a crucial characteristic of a text–uniquely affect readers’ political information processing? Based on a metacognitive response framework and extant discussions based on the Heuristic-Systematic Model vs. the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we tested whether a reader’s initial expectation of a message characteristic and stable individual differences intersect with the metacognitive processing fluency experience. Do people recall more information from the news when presented with articles that are more–or less–complex than they expected, or do they recall more information when expectations of article complexity are met? And for whom is this more likely to occur? Our results provide strong support for the notion that objective complexity is indeed the main driver of metacognitive perceptual processing fluency and information recall, while also rending partial support for the role of (in)congruency in this process. The results also showed that individual differences in processing capabilities play a significant role in shaping information recall. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications.