Consumer skepticism and the “waiting room of the mind”: are consumers more likely to believe advertising claims if they are merely comprehended?

Traditional conceptualizations of information processing have held that incoming information is relegated to a sort of "waiting room of the mind," with consumers processing it in a sequential fashion. However, the work of Gilbert and his colleagues poses an altemative Spinozan conceptualization, that consumers initially
believe all incoming information, and in some cases go on to process the veracity of this information. This investigation tests Gilbert's altemative Spinozan model within an advertising context for the first time, and provides support for the findings that it is more difficult to disbelieve than to believe advertising information.