Persuasion at Diff erent Levels of Elaboration: Experimental Effects of Strength, Valence and Ego Depletion

Abstract

People are victims of consumer fraud and scams on a daily basis. However, in most cases, the victims could have detected the fraud if only they had checked for inconsistencies in the scammer's message. What makes some people detect and avoid a scam while others fall prey to it? This article investigates, in two experiments, the eff ects of ego depletion, issue involvement, need for cognition, and strength and valence of arguments on attitudes and attitude change. Experiment 1 tested the hypothesis that, in the case of high ego depletion, the participants' attitudes would be similar in both strong and weak argument conditions, whereas in the case of low ego depletion, their attitudes would be signifi cantly more favorable in strong argument conditions. In Experiment 2, we hypothesized that participants' attitudes would follow the direction of the valence of the persuasive message presented to them. The results corroborated the hypothesis of Experiment 2 alone. Overall, the results indicate a low tendency for the participants to agree with the persuasive messages. Future studies could benefi t from using diff erent manipulations of the elaboration likelihood and from testing the persuasiveness of fraudulent messages.

Differences in decisions affected by cognitive biases: examining human values, need for cognition, and numeracy

“…We measured the need for cognition with a Brazilian ten-item version of the Need for Cognition Scale (α = .84; Cacioppo et al, 1984;Caldas et al, 2019). Responses were on a five-point scale from ( 1) not at all characteristic to (5) totally characteristic.…”

Turning Stocks into Memes: A Dataset for Understanding How Social Communities Can Drive Wall Street

“…research in online marketing focuses on measuring persuasiveness of an argument using self-reported surveys (Caldas et al 2019;Gerlach, Buxmann, and Dinev 2019), or by quantifying how responsive individuals are to tailored arguments in an online survey (Axt, Landau, and Kay 2020;Ormond, Warkentin, and Crossler 2019;Wang et al 2021b). While there have been recent advances in understanding persuasion and attitudes towards products and marketing campaigns (Wang et al 2021a;Pignot, Nicolini, and Thompson 2020)), the studies are not entirely practical (e.g., using executive messaging for interviews (Pignot, Nicolini, and Thompson 2020)) or do not extract direct intentions to purchase (Wang et al 2021a).…”

Turning Stocks into Memes: A Dataset for Understanding How Social Communities Can Drive Wall Street

“…research in online marketing focuses on measuring persuasiveness of an argument using self-reported surveys (Caldas et al 2019;Gerlach, Buxmann, and Dinev 2019), or by quantifying how responsive individuals are to tailored arguments in an online survey (Axt, Landau, and Kay 2020;Ormond, Warkentin, and Crossler 2019;Wang et al 2021b). While there have been recent advances in understanding persuasion and attitudes towards products and marketing campaigns (Wang et al 2021a;Pignot, Nicolini, and Thompson 2020)), the studies are not entirely practical (e.g., using executive messaging for interviews (Pignot, Nicolini, and Thompson 2020)) or do not extract direct intentions to purchase (Wang et al 2021a).…”