Say you’re trying to convince someone to buy a car. Would saying “I liked the car,” “I bought the car,” or “The car was good, and I bought it” be the most persuasive? And would that change if the item in question was lower in financial value, such as chocolate?
These three sentences are respectively known as attitudinal, behavioral, and combined message statements; the latter can also be conveyed in a single clause such as “I liked buying the car.”
Penn Integrates Knowledge professor Dolores Albarracín, who directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Communication Science division, and psychology Ph.D. student Yubo Zhou tested the relative impact of these types of message statements by having participants read social media messages about different products and then report their attitudes, what they believe most people would think, and their behavioral intentions.
What they found: Across two experiments and an internal meta-analysis, they found that combining attitudinal and behavioral content had the strongest persuasive impact, followed by just attitudinal statements and then just behavioral ones. Their findings are published in Nature Communications.
Their research also found that:
- Combined message statements were the most persuasive because they elicit a mental simulation of behavior. “Information that enables individuals to imagine themselves performing the behavior is more likely to influence their behavioral decisions,” Albarracín says.
- Combined message statements were the most persuasive regardless of whether the product was higher in financial value (a car, house, or laptop) or lower (a bag, chocolate, or mug).
Why this matters: “Even though experimental research on communication and persuasion began during World War II, we lack a clear idea of what makes a message effective,” Zhou says. Most communication design relies on intuition, but “this research tells us what makes behavior-relevant communication persuasive and how to better design persuasive messages.”
These findings can be applied not only to consumer marketing but also to communications on health-promoting behaviors.
What this work builds on: “Work from our lab has shown that actionable communication is key,” Albarracín says, pointing to a study from last year showing that public health agencies were more likely to adopt social media posts that an AI-based system had identified as the most relevant and actionable. The new study “provides the theory and evidence of what actionable contents are more effective and why,” she adds.
What’s next: Albarracín and Zhou are also comparing attitudinal and behavioral information in English- and Chinese-language journals, and they are investigating how the inferences people make from attitudinal and behavioral information affect social influence.
Dolores Albarracín is the Amy Gutmann Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor with joint appointments in the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences, director of the Social Action Lab, director of the Communication Science Division at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Yubo Zhou is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology and the Social Action Lab.
This research was supported by APPC’s Annenberg Communication Science Division Endowment.
This article by Erica Moser was first published by Penn Today.
