What are the two factors which influence whether a person is motivated to process a message?

Whether a person is motivated to process the message is influenced by two factors: personal relevance and need for cognition. Personal relevance refers to whether people expect the issue "to have significant consequences for their own lives." The more personally relevant the issue, the more motivated people are to think about the persuasive message at a deep level. Some issues have personal relevance throughout our lives (e.g., the tax structure of the country we live in, the quality of water and air where we live); other issues have personal relevance for a certain period of time (e.g., raising college tuition and the price of textbooks when we are in college); still others have personal relevance only under very transient conditions (e.g., dishwasher ads are personally relevant only when a person is shopping for a dishwasher). The other factor that influences motivation to process the persuasive message is need for cognition. People high in need for cognition like to think and are therefore more likely than people low in need for cognition to think about the persuasive message at a deep level. Recent research shows that messages processed at a deep level are especially resistant to change.