Can I Influence You? Development of a Scale to Measure Perceived Persuasiveness and Two Studies Showing the Use of the Scale

Abstract

In this paper, we develop and validate a scale to measure the perceived persuasiveness of messages to be used in digital behavior interventions. A literature review is conducted to inspire the initial scale items. The scale is developed using Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the data from a study with 249 ratings of healthy eating messages. The construct validity of the scale is established using ratings of 573 email security messages. Using the data from the two studies, we also show the usefulness of the scale by analyzing the perceived persuasiveness of different message types on the developed scale factors in both the healthy eating and email security domains. The results of our studies also show that the persuasiveness of message types is domain dependent and that when studying the persuasiveness of message types, the finer-grained argumentation schemes need to be considered and not just Cialdini's principles.The reviewer KS declared a past collaboration with one of the authors JM to the handling editor.

Measuring the strength of threats, rewards, and appeals in persuasive negotiation dialogues

“…Thomas et al (2019) present a list of messages and scales to evaluate them, which was collected from several articles. It can be distinguished that some articles measure the susceptibility of participants to some Cialdini's principles 6 (e.g., Kaptein et al 2009), others the persuasive power of messages (e.g., Thomas et al 2019;Allen et al 2000), and others measure the persuasibility of persuasive strategies (e.g., Busch et al 2013). Thus, we can notice that the persuasion is measured by considering only the message or the impact of it on the participants.…”

Presuppositions are more persuasive than assertions if addressees accommodate them: Experimental evidence for philosophical reasoning

“…Participants proceeded by pressing the space bar after reading a sentence. Then, they rated the persuasiveness of the previously read advertisement using four dimensions and questions adopted and translated from Thomas et al (2019) on ascending 7-point scales displayed on separate screens: Effectiveness ( the advertising text motivates me to purchase such a product ), capability ( the advertising text has the potential to influence consumer behavior ), quality ( the advertising text is trustworthy ), and relevance ( the advertising text is relevant for me ). Afterward, participants saw the context-target pair again and rated its acceptability on a semantic differential scale adapted from Tiemann et al (2015): “How reasonable is the advertising message?” with 1 = “very unreasonable” and 4 = “very reasonable.” A trial finished with another 500-ms fixation screen.…”

“…The context and target sentences were displayed centered on separate screens, in 28-point Arial font in black on a white background, the targets in one line. Persuasiveness ratings reflected four dimensions (Thomas et al, 2019) and were tuned to political statements, for example, effectiveness: The statements motivates me to reconsider my attitude toward the topic. The same landscape photo with a central vanishing point served as a 500-ms intertrial fixation screen.…”

Remote control concept for automated trains as a fallback system: needs and preferences of future operators

“…Another section of the survey included a questionnaire for measuring how persuasive and affective the HMIs are. The questionnaire with a 7-point Likert scale (strongly disagree-strongly agree) is adapted from an earlier study (Thomas et al , 2019). Effectiveness, quality and capability of the workstation in terms of persuasion are measured by the following statements in the corresponding order; “ After viewing this system, I will make changes in my attitude towards automated technology .”, “ This system is trustworthy ”, “ This system has the potential to influence user behaviour .”…”