“Top 10” reasons: When adding persuasive arguments reduces persuasion

Kimberlee Weaver, Stefan J. Hock, Stephen M. Garcia

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)27-38
Number of pages12
JournalMarketing Letters
Volume27
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2016
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Keywords

  • Averaging and adding
  • Persuasive arguments
  • Presenter’s Paradox
  • Self/other differences

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Business and International Management
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Marketing

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