It's commonly assumed to be difficult to persuade people who know a lot about a topic. This is sometimes--but not always--true. The amount of knowledge that people can access about an issue, called working knowledge, provides the ability to critically evaluate new information. People with high levels of such knowledge can critically evaluate new information and recognize its strengths as well as its weaknesses. They might be especially persuaded by the strong arguments in a message (Wood & Kallgren, 1988; Wood, Kallgren, & Preisler, 1985).

Knowledge alone doesn't motivate people to protect their own views through rejection of new information. Protection arises from emotional reactions (e.g., a personally threatening message) or from other attributes of attitudes, such as a strong public commitment to a particular position (Biek, Wood, & Chaiken, 1996; Wood, Rhodes & Biek, 1995). Thus, working knowledge is an informational component of attitude strength. It represents how much information people have available to them to critically evaluate a persuasive message and other new information.

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Biek, M., Wood, W., & Chaiken, S. (1996). Knowledge, affect, and bias: Objective and motivated processing of persuasive messages. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 547-556.

Wood, W., Rhodes, N. D., & Biek, M. (1995). Working knowledge and attitude strength: An information-processing analysis. In R. Petty & J. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences (pp. 283-313). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [request paper]

Wood, W., & Kallgren, C. A. III. (1988). Communicator attributes and persuasion: A function of access to attitude-relevant information. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 14, 172-182.

Kallgren, C. A., III, & Wood, W. (1986). Access to attitude-relevant information in memory as a determinant of attitude-behavior consistency. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22, 328-338. [request paper]

Wood, W., Kallgren, C., & Preisler, R. M. (1985). Access to attitude-relevant information in memory as a determinant of persuasion: The role of message attributes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 73-85. [request paper]

Wood, W. (1982). The retrieval of attitude-relevant information from memory: Effects on susceptibility to persuasion and on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 798-810. [request paper]