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MENTAL MODEL · M11221

The Sleeper Effect

The Sleeper Effect
BehaviorHigh supportSocial Psychology
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Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-30

CORE DEFINITION

A phenomenon in which, over time, the influence of source credibility on audience attitudes weakens, while the influence of the information content itself gradually emerges.

SCAFFOLDING EFFECT

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The Sleeper Effect, first proposed by American psychologist Carl Iver Hovland, is a psychological phenomenon about attitudes: the influence of the communicator's credibility on attitude change diminishes over time. Generally, the higher the credibility of the source, the greater the persuasion effect; conversely, the lower the credibility, the smaller the effect. However, this source influence is not constant. Over time, the persuasion effect of high-credibility sources decays, while that of low-credibility sources actually increases. The reason is that the brain's forgetting mechanism starts with secondary information; as time passes, the persuasion effect brought by the source weakens, while the influence of the information content itself strengthens. Hovland called this phenomenon the 'Sleeper Effect'.

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The persuasion effect of high-credibility sources is initially strong but decays over time; low-credibility sources have a weak initial effect, but as time passes, the audience gradually forgets the discounting cue that 'the information came from an untrustworthy source,' while retaining the information content itself, so attitude change actually strengthens after a delay. The essence is an asymmetry of memory: 'source forgotten, information retained.'

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Source support: Explicit

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    zh.wikipedia.orghttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9D%A1%E7%9C%A0%E8%80%85%E6%95%88%E5%BA%94ZH · Explicit
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