Abstract
Across four studies, we show that experts’ efforts to strengthen the persuasiveness of health and civic duty-related appeals actually weakened them. When designing “Top 10” reasons lists to get people to quit smoking, encourage young people to vote, and persuade individuals to engage in fitness, governmental (studies 1–2) and non-profit (study 3) agencies chose to include mildly strong reasons alongside strong ones in their effort to be as persuasive as possible. However, from the target audience’s perspective, those mildly favorable reasons actually decreased the persuasiveness of the message compared to a condition in which fewer but only highly persuasive reasons were used. Building upon the Presenter’s Paradox by Weaver, Garcia & Schwarz (Journal of Consumer Research 39 (3):445–460, 2012), these results demonstrate that averaging in impression formation occurs not only in targets commonly thought of as unified entities such as consumer products and people but also occurs in persuasion contexts where the individual arguments comprising a message are independent of each other.
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Notes
After reading the experimental materials and responding to the key dependent variables, participants rated the seriousness of each of the 10 reasons to quit smoking on seven-point Likert scales (1 = not at all serious, 7 = very serious) one at a time in a random order. As predicted, participants rated the two arguments from our “strong” arguments two reasons condition to be more serious (M Strong_Reasons = 6.61, SD = 1.12) than the eight arguments we had deemed to be less strong (M Weak_Reasons = 5.79, SD = 1.37), t (139) = 9.48, p < .001.
An outside group of observers judged the 10 reasons used in the original top 10 campaign one at a time in a random order on the basis of how important each was in determining whether a person should vote. A paired sample t test confirmed that participants rated the three strong reasons we used in three reasons condition to be more important (M Strong_Reasons = 5.43, SD = 1.91) than the seven reasons we had deemed to be less strong (M Weak_Reasons = 3.20, SD = .98), t (17) = 11.18, p < .001.
An outside group of observers was presented with the 10 reasons from the original top 10 reasons campaign one at a time in a random order and indicated the importance of each reason in determining whether a person should exercise (1 = not at all important, 7 = very important). Results from a paired sample t test again confirmed that the arguments from our three reasons condition were judged to be more important (M Strong_Reasons = 6.15, SD = 0.96) than the arguments that we had categorized to be weaker (M Weak_Reasons = 5.70, SD = 0.82), t (19) = 2.47, p < .03.
An outside group of observers was presented with the 10 reasons one at a time in a random order and indicated the importance of each reason in determining whether a person should attend the University of Michigan (1 = not at all important, 7 = very important). Results from a repeated measures ANOVA confirmed that the argument from our top 1 reason condition was judged to be more important (M Strong_Reasons = 5.94, SD = 1.26) than the arguments that we had categorized to be weaker (M Weak_Reasons = 3.65, SD = 1.21), F (1, 30) = 57.14, p < .001.
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Weaver, K., Hock, S.J. & Garcia, S.M. “Top 10” reasons: When adding persuasive arguments reduces persuasion. Mark Lett 27, 27–38 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-014-9286-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-014-9286-1